SPURSE Nearly twenty years ago we in SPURSE first sensed that many of us involved in the arts were reconceptualizing art in a way that was very different. It was not the usual debate about expanding the definitions of art…
Category: Ecology of Bad Ideas
Learning How to Die, Finally: Revisiting Thought in the Age of Extinction
 Emma Kauffman Part One: The Carceral Logic of Western Thought Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom. -Jacques Derrida, The Gift of…
A Mighty Forest Is Our Race: Race, Nature, and Environmentalism in White Nationalist Thought
Kevan A. Feshami Caspar David Friedrich, Rocky Valley (The Tomb of Arminius), circa 1813, Oil on canvas. Public domain. âThe truest form of prayer is communion with Nature.â[1] Penned by influential white nationalist David Lane, these words capture a deep…
Why Say âWeedâ in the Capitalocene?
Ellie Irons White clover blooms in two disparate habitats in Troy, New York: a brownfield on a former junkyard (left) and a residential lawn subject to frequent mowing (right). When the phrases âannoying weedâ and âurban evolutionâ ran in a…
biPolar Bioart: USDA APHIS FDA BRS notification request
Adam Zaretsky Intro: Meet the Bipolar Flower, Bipolar (manic-depressive), Double Dipped, Zinc Fingered (ZF), GMO Arabidopsis thaliana plants. These are plants who have been âwhole genome frackedâ in a bipolar duet of two artificial transcription factors (activating and repressing) competing…
Roots and Stems: grassland political ecologies, past and future
Sarah Kanouse A phalanx of windmills guards the border between Colorado and Nebraska. Visible for miles on the treeless high plains, the giant turbines appear to inch closer as I approach the state line at eighty miles an hour. The…
A Great Green Desert: Into The Pit
Ryan Griffis If you drive through the flat territories of Illinois, Indiana, or Iowa â US states that form the center of a region known as the âcorn beltâ â you are almost certainly going to be surrounded by vast…
Symptom: NetworkÂ
Ken Ehrlich A network is a break is a fissure a metaphor an analogy a misunderstood sign a desperate attempt a domain a reminder a sense of touch a feeling. A network is a broom closet a despairing glance a…
they didnât bring enough water
Lindsey French and Willy Smart Cautionary Signage in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. 7 January 2016. Water becomes more saline as it approaches the Salton Sea. It is a lake with no outlet and no input either, other than what is…
EAT (y)OUR SIDEWALK: an interview with SPURSE
Alex Young The Civil Appetites, 2013, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester, NY. Alex Young: I want to start by asking what might seem like a fairly simple — yet perhaps-not-so-simple — question, namely: how would SPURSE describe itself to someone…