Curating a Future Earth

Abstract

In fall 2019, I enrolled in SFU's President’s Dream Colloquium course, Creative Ecologies: Reimagining the World. One of the scholars we read was anthropology professor Dr. Shannon Mattern. My creative response to Mattern’s paper—"The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments”—offered an alternative way to engage with her scholarship. In searching for poetic and concise turns of phrase, I noted how her word choice and image-making related to her essay’s construction. I sought out bits of data from her paper, re-arranged them into a cohesive unit, and from this garnered a deeper meaning of her intent and expertise. I also noted what was absent or lacking, and this deficit of words, specifically toward ‘should we be exploiting the planet for research?’ inspired me to emphasize this in my found poem.