salvaging dives
learning to scuba dive / deep sea dive
SOME THINGS I AM INTERESTED IN
please feel free to contact me if you are interested in these things and want to talk about or collaborate on something with me: gabbymiller@gmail.com
Anna Tsing
Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?
A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.
By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she codirects Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). She is the author of Friction and In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (both Princeton).
Dronies
martin wong
the rainbow body
...the dying person starts to shrink until he or she disappears. Usually fingernails, toenails and hair are left behind. The attainment of the rainbow body is typically accompanied by the appearance of lights and rainbows.
GOOKS / Documentary that features the hospital my dad started in Saigon
The artist created a digital nonsexual human simulator in her own shape for the first time to complete an artwork. Because of the powerful curse in the content of the work, the artist has to apply the spell to herself to avoid harming others. This artwork is all about neurosciences, in which the artist is always interested. She makes use of the principle of the stereotactic system, the deep brain stimulation and RTMS working on the deep limbic system, in order to extend delusions, substitute into religious perspective and fugacious meditation on the material world and produce objective delusions. This work is the artist’s reflection on her creation in the past, at present and in the future. Is consciousness adhere to the brain? Where on earth is consciousness? The artist simulates the delusions of damaging herself and her works over and over again in her work. It can be sure that these delusions will eventually come true. This artwork is the second piece of the artist’s new series of works. The first one is Moving God. The new series of works are still involved with categories such as religion and neuroscience, etc. They are different from the works in the past, using this method to meditate and practice, and constructing delicately through different ways this delusional mandala.
ship breaking
oil rigs / ocean platforms
how can I get on one?
Apocalypse Tourism
particularly in the melting northern passage of the arctic
delusional energy economics
How is energy cost measured? Environmental economists + extreme weather scientists, please help me understand the gross blind spots in terms of the costs of environmental degradation / mass displacement + storage of nuclear waste ?
Salt water / solar powered lights // ENERGY // Fossil Fuel Divestment
salt water powered lamps
SOLAR POWERED (Was is dad's globe?)
Boulanger + Ruthie
Family / Colonial / gold + coal + diamond mining /
As Ever Yours - READ ALL THAT IS NOT WRITTEN
Great-grandmother Sophie on her honeymoon in Egypt - turn of the century
EMPIRE / SPACES OF EMPIRE / THE INTERNET AS A COLONIAL PROJECT
“Historical narratives of empire are especially prone to causality, as empire often seems to be defined as a threshold of acquisition: once a certain power acquired x amount of land/resources/people, empire was established. Thus, accounting for empire becomes synonymous with accounting for the hows and whens of acquisition. Such historicism is the causality of time and sequence, and my intent here is instead to find an archaeology of space and contiguity, an experiential historical account that is fragmentary, dissolute, and decidedly non-teleological.
”
cooling towers /data centers
particularly in the ocean
Extractivism / Mining / Tunnel Boring - Family History + Connection / Counterpoint to deep sea diving
“The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights. ”
TIMMONS - MINING - GOLDMINING / EXTRACTIVISIM / TUNNELS
cryptocurrency in general // is it true that mining one bit-coin uses the same amount of energy as powering a family for a week?
Great Grandfather Percy Robbins watercolors + sketches / engineering work
Do I bear a resemblance?
to my great-grandfather Percy Robbin
DRAWINGS BY GREAT GRANDFATHER - PERCY ROBBINS
TUNNELS / BORING / Infrastructure projects
It's two and a half minutes to midnight
more drawings by PAR from MILLERAMA GOLDMINE
Paternel, great uncle James Robbins invented a tunnel boring system that has been used all over the world.
earthseed - following Octavia Butler
Continuing to think about the POC retreat we organized at salmon creek farm in August 2017...People of The Global Majority Retreat? Utopias + Edens (thinking of Layla Nova). Communes. Capitalist Ruins. Access to Water. Access to Land. Refuges. Bug Out Bags. Melt into the Mountain. Parable of the Sower. Following Octavia.
Bon Baisers Des Colonies
michelin stars
Rubber plantations in Indochina // Guidebooks + arbiters of taste worldwide
Data centers
energy use + storage
Spaces of Empire
Metaphors are not simply an issue of words, emerging in language, but our “ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” Metaphoric language in technology and politics alike is designed and fashioned in order to create and manipulate understanding and meaning (and eventually categories of use and behavior), as opposed to the more naturally “emergent” nature of other metaphors. Though some grounding in that sense of natural emergence must be there in order for the metaphor to be successful, I am paying attention to the strategic, political usages and creations of metaphors, used and created to give understanding to a world under imperial rule.
Taking the imperial processes and practices as found in ancient Rome and deployed in different ways in the British imperial novel, my intention is to argue that the digital world, from early American military projects to the search engines of the mid-1990s and beyond, is founded upon basic imperial principles, metaphorical and concrete, and is in fact a new version of an old idea. - "Spaces of Empire" Layla Nova Forrest White
container spillages
10,000 containers fall into the sea every year. Some wash ashore.
shipwrecks in general
spillages