Text by Zaeya Winter

Remembering animals at the risk of extinction, Signs in the Future sparkle with LED constellations. Signaled as signs in the sky: big bears, small bears, swans, whales, turtles, monoliths, foxes and lions all take shape in these star patterns. Sang Chul Nam discusses how “the ancient people looked at the stars and named them according to familiar animals, objects, and myths. However, the animals built into these constellations are on the verge of disappearing. Can our descendants remember them through constellations when we can no longer see these animals?”

Partnering his work with a powerful writing practice, Nam forms fictional narratives which deepen the works’ speculative nature. These nebulous future stories illuminate a deeper presence within the physical work—embodying a ghostly nature of the ‘now’ and ‘not yet’.

To create possibilities that feel outside the current realm of possibilities, new structures are needed for thinking-with. New appendages we might move with and make with that aid us in getting to or past a desired outcome. We call these unseen appendages forth from outside of the grasp of our physical realities, as ghosts from the past and present, to reassemble in a form of Sympoiesis: meaning more simply ‘making-with’. It reminds us that “nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing”1. As a network of being, we feel how “technocapitalism has exerted devastating pressures on the natural environment and on myriad human social dynamics”2. The work of Hacking the Third Wave is to troubleshoot these frayed outputs of technological progress. Using the appendages of technology to make-with, Sang Chul Nam forms a human-machine alliance to cast sight-lines onto the ghosts of species extinction and ecological change that technocapitalism imposes.

“For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent”3. At the point of injury: species loss and forgotten, broken chains of companion species—there is a phantom limb, a ghost of a previous body—where re-membering begins a regrowth, a new topography. This work posits the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of remembrance—as, “without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think”4. Technological structures are found at this juncture of loss, wired as a new limb, shining with prowess and limitation both monstrous and potent.

The animate, shining, geometric, and crystalline sculptures of D-evolved speak of translation between an organic and artificial entity. Disassembled and reassembled, they are artifacts of digital duplication, monuments of an attempt at preservation—where the machine and the organism slipside into a sort of cyborg portrait. This D-evolved portrait contains vector coordinates, code, and all the printer instructions needed to conjure our friend in three dimensions. Before the sun caused this friend to wither, his days were recorded with a 3D scanner and duplicated several times to be 3D printed. Enmeshed with person-like descriptors and pronouns, the ambiguous nature of who or what this ‘friend’ actually is, casually forms kinship attitudes towards the more-than-human. The friend could be a lichen, flower, microorganism, or a multitude of other sun-bathing, carbon-bodied beings. This wide span casts a morose net over the many forms of life that wither with the changing climate. The friendly life form translated in these 3D printed models, being so technologically transformed, does not break the spell and reveal what that original form was. Rather, in the tension of difference and the creative potency of dust and dirt, it holds the question of reduction: can technology translate the liveliness of organic matter, or what is lost?

“I looked at the variant and wondered if I would continue to accept him as a friend. Is this what my future friends will look like?” Sang Chul asks.

These sorts of technoscientific replications “[change] what we know as matter, [calling] out for new analytic tools”5. They call us to identify and befriend ghosts: “the superpositions of past, present, and future… the multiple stories of landscape effects”5. In this landscape’s sedimentary, layered memory, ghosts remind us of our presence, our weightiness, and our response-ability. An ability for making kin spawns new organic limbs: new friends whose many dirt-bodied, sun-bathing forms are living and dying in our layered local ecologies and call to be re-membered and sustained.

Text by Zaeya Winter

1. Haraway, D. (2016, p.56). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press.
2. Flemmer, K. (2022, p.22). Cyborg reading: transmedial digital poetry and the Cyborg milieu (Master’s thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). https://prism.ucalgary.ca. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/114820
3. Haraway, D. (1991, p.181). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
4. Haraway, D. (2016, p.39). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press.
5. Tsing, A. L., Swanson, H. A., Gan, E., & Bubandt, N. (2017, p.8). Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts of the anthropocene: Monsters of the anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press.