Sonic Acts Press

Ecoes is a periodically printed journal unpacking alternatives to the anthropocentric perspective that regards the Earth and the non-human world as an endless resource. A portmanteau of the words ‘ecology’ and ‘echoes’, the magazine reflects on ‘alterlife’, a term coined by an Indigenous scholar and scientist Michelle Murphy. Alterlife is a new form of life ‘altered by the chemical violence of capitalism and colonialism, and which is affecting both present and future generations.’ Our bodies now, and the ones coming after us, carry deep traces of chemicals and toxicants. Our bodies are the environment. Ecoes tries to eco this in its pages.

All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film is a narrative assemblage of prose and image. At once personal, historical and theoretical, the book continues the authors’ inquiry into the curious presence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science. The word ‘monster’ comes from the Latin monstrare, meaning ‘to show’, ‘to demonstrate’, ‘to reveal’. Picking up on this etymology, the authors explore monsters as prisms for modes of seeing and deciphering the natural world. When treated as a perceptual apparatus, the monster also becomes a means of probing the medium of film and its relationship to indexicality, chance, corporeality, and metamorphosis. This book extends a multimedia project the authors began with their film A Demonstration (2020).

In July 2022, as part of the first FieldARTS residency, two dozen artists and researchers conducted undisciplined and collaborative fieldwork across the logistical flows of the Amsterdam port, the brackish waters of the IJmuiden estuary, and the shifting dunes of Texel Island in dialogue with marine chemists, Marxist theorists, Black feminist thinkers, and benthic ecologists. This research was conducted with the conviction that fieldwork might name an intimacy with the field and those drawn to it, not the variously distilled outcomes that typically follow once the sand bank is translated as a bank of data. Alive to the plural currents, contours and conflicts of the terrains of study – sensitive, in other words, to its milieu-specificity – the FieldARTS Docket details some coordinates for thought and practice as they were encountered in the field. The pocket-sized book contains thirty entries that are provisional, excessive, dialogic, often brackish, only lightly edited and arranged. Consisting of critical orientations drawn into focus during the collaborative residency, these entries present a sustained engagement with a field languishing at the edge of cultural concern while remaining central to the shape of transitions already well underway.