2024
Understanding dust as a material system that blurs the line between ground and atmosphere, I developed a dust machine as a tool for making dust legible at the human scale. While the blurriness of ground is visualized at both particle and planetary scales, at the human scale, it becomes less evident. Drawing from Lisa’s Moffitt’s discussion of “environmental models”—that is, models that don’t merely simulate phenomena but rather produce the underlying force itself—I produced visualizations of how dust, as both a grounded and atmospheric element intertwines ground and weather across scales, through a cyclical process of making and unmaking.1 In my own work, understanding how this material operates at different scales, and visually communicating it, is necessary to begin imagining future design scenarios in dusty landscapes, and to develop alternative narratives which reframe dustiness from a problem to be solved to an unpredictable and generative material system.
I use drawings to pull out processes that aren’t visible in videos or stills. Constructing the drawing is a process of distillation, and is interpretive and reflexive. Learning through the act of drawing itself, my process changed over time. I began with a series of video stills, tracing the way dust is uplifted and redeposited and the way the density of material changes over time, using black and white pointillistic marks. Moving forward, I differentiated particle variations with color, and overlaid stills to create a composite image. In doing so, I visualize a process that doesn’t unfold linearly, but is continuously made and re-made in turbulent cycles. Danika Cooper uses a “filmic” approach in her dust drawings, citing the need for “heightened literacy in representational methods to draw dust as landscape and the storm as landscape process”2. Cooper discusses the filmic in terms of seriality, and while my initial drawings follow suit, I began to think about the filmic as a sort of stickiness. Stickiness, as it relates to both the physical and chemical properties of dust, as well as ground conditions, which dictate how dust moves, adheres, and uplifts. The sticky quality of dust shapes how the surface is formed and dissolved. It is this in-flux surface that I seek to represent in these drawings, as a way of communicating the airiness of ground and the heaviness of air.
This surface is really more of a surfacing–one moment in a cyclical process. Porous and permeable, it is a “space of material exchange”3 where ground becomes air and air becomes ground. Surfacing is not homogenous, but unfolds in uneven and patchy accumulations. Through surfacing, “the structures of many earthly things become visible”.4 By visualizing dust’s spatial qualities, we can begin to see it as more than a diaphanous haze merely floating with the wind. Rather it’s a material that aggregates and takes form, has shape and shapes.
Reading these drawings, I use blurriness as a lens, which, as Vittoria Di Palma argues, suggests “that there is no place from which…objective knowledge could be gained. The dissolution of the surface repositions us as viewers–we are immersed in the work, but without a firm foothold–creating an aesthetics of uncertain and pure effect”.5 Noise and blurriness suggest subjective, situated knowledge. By representing dust as something non-universal, and understanding it as an atmospheric material that is situated, we can begin to read ground differently. As Frederica Zambeletti articulates, we might move from seeing dust as “undesirable to essential” and in doing so, “reframe dust as a disruptive element in our society — one that alerts us to the need for change”.6
↓ Composite drawing