Becoming Geological

The book 'Becoming Geological' (2022) provokes new and ancient imaginaries for the essential relation of the human with the earth and with the cosmos. Edited by Martin Howse it accompanies the eponymous exhibition. Becoming Geological functions as a manual for a new relation of the human with the earth and with the cosmos, invoking becoming metal, becoming earth and becoming cosmic as potential and multiple ways of being and as active philosophies of the earth; a guide for how to live and die within new planetary and cosmic techno-cycles. This divinatory guide has its roots and veins in the lustrous earths and waters of the Tiny Mining community, a mineral exploration collective committed to the open source exploitation of the interior of the human body for rare earth resources.

Design & production: Alice Cannavà

Table of Contents
Martin Howse – Preface: Mining dreams. Becoming metal – Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko – Tiny Mining: Theory of the earth from a sweatshop – on practising becoming cosmic – The dose makes the poison. Interview with Ines Tomašek – Aaron Parkhurst – Coffee and blood: A brief anthropological reading of Tiny Mining on and off- world – Anonymous sweatshop heavy metal test results – Metals: Antimony, arsenic, copper, iron, lead, mercury, silver. Interview with a user Becoming earth – Michael Marder – Geological Dis/Articulations – Elaine Tam and Arthur Gouillart – Filth – Thomas Moynihan – Orienting ourselves within life’s aeonic stream: or, what it means to have been produced by a planet – Patricia MacCormack – From (immoral) Anthropos to ethical geo-stratum Becoming cosmic – Rosemary Lee – Absorption, saturation, toxicity, elimination – Anaïs Tondeur and Marine Legrand – Mourning the infinite – Sissel Marie Tonn – We are all bog bodies – Rosa Whiteley – Pollution-altered allures – Alfonso Borragán – Stomach inside rock stomach – Cecilia Jonsson – Petrified

Martin Howse (b.1969, UK) is occupied with an investigation of the links between the earth (geophysical phenomena), software and the human psyche (psychogeophysics) through the construction of experimental situations (performance, laboratories, walks, and workshops), material art works and texts. From 1998 to 2005 Howse was director of ap, a software performance group working with electronic waste, pioneering an early approach to digital glitch. From 2007 to 2009 he hosted a regular workshop, micro-residency and salon series in Berlin. Howse has worked and collaborated on acclaimed projects and practices such as The Crystal World, Psychogeophysics, Earthboot, Sketches towards an Earth Computer and Dissolutions. For the last ten years he has initiated numerous open-laboratory style projects and performed, published, lectured and exhibited worldwide. He is equally the creator of the ERD modular synthesizer series.