Reclamation[1] denotes artistic invention and investigation into the semiotics of the energy extraction industry as the Appalachian mountains are eroded into electric pulses, a synthesized alchemy taking various forms of entertainment and utility across the world's power grid. As the metaphysics of an electrate[2] society emerge (Ulmer 2003), the oral traditions of song and folklore in Appalachia containing the collective memory of workers’ rights history and coal industry disasters are paved over by digital entertainment media. The driving force of this artistic research is one of heuretics - to ask what can be made from the coalescence of digital metaphysics progenated by the extraction of fossil fuels and the surface constructions of orality, family, and career under the power disaster of late capitalism. The following projects are efforts to invent the digital apparatus to konsult[3] the relationship between surface, disaster, and workers' bodies.
As the number of coalmining jobs have been on the decline since the 1970s with the new practice of mountaintop removal mining [MTR], the mine wars' shaping of worker's rights, [4] and coal mining disasters are generationally eroded in cultural memory by a memory-shocking barrage of electronic information in the forms of information, entertainment, and light. (Crary 2014). My work and research is driven by a desire to visualize the fatalism embedded within the reoccurring disasters, emergent in through Appalachia's rich literate and oral forms,
Using Google Earth, you will find their GIS and LiDAR data compiles into a 3D modeled topography that is especially detailed over coal mining regions. Although Google does not make downloading their 3D geometry available, I developed a handy workflow for grabbing the topography while it is rendering in the software as data is transferred from Google's servers to my personal computer. The script is based on an open source tool available on GitHub called GLIntercept that is commonly used to nab 3D models from video games with server-based assets such as Mass Multiplayer Online RPGs (i.e. World of Warcraft). (Horning 2014) It was primarily developed for video game modification communities. This hacker technology allows me to grab a snapshot of strip mine site 3D models from Google Earth's servers. The script, therefore, exports a model whose focal point is finely detailed with the strip mine's flattened surfaces and access roads clearly defined, fanning out into a still-rendering low-polygonal flattened version of the landscape on the outer edges in the cone of vision, a mimetic display of reality.
Through lyrical Appalachian music, the legacy of sons becoming coal miners is both foretold by fathers and protested by mothers. Kentucky-born Jean Ritchie cries in her disaster ballad, West Virginia Mine Disaster, written following the Hominy Falls mine disaster in 1968:
//
There's Timmy, fourteen, and there's John not much younger
Soon their own time will be coming to go down the black hole
//
This song expresses this fatalistic grief for the children the singer knows by name from a rare feminine perspective. Similar ballads written by men express the same fatalistic attitude, but with resignation and pride as in Billy Edd Wheeler's ballad Coal Tattoo, 1968:
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Someday, when I'm dead and gone
To heaven, the land of my dreams
I won't have to worry on losing my job
To hard times and big machines
And I ain't gonna pay my money away
On dues and hospital plans
I'm gonna pick coal, where the blue heaven's roll
And sign with the angel band
Sing with the angel band...
//
My disaster ballad is a doom-metal trudge that lasts for thirty minutes from start to finish. I devote much of my life to playing the sousaphone, an American marching version of the tuba, which requires strong lungs and copious breath. My disaster ballad was specifically crafted in response to the Sago Mine Disaster, but since researching mine disasters around the world, I often find a common cause for death is carbon monoxide asphyxiation. During the performance, another condenser microphone in the room picks up low-frequency, high-amplitude signals and processes them into a dual-video projection of footage of mine disasters interlaced with entertainment media. But the consciousness of the video stream is subject to YouTube's algorithms as it logically jumps to the next video during the thirty-minute performance. I view my breath as a battery and a filter.
I grew up going performing at and attending punk shows held at the Hodgesville Community Center outside of Buckhannon, WV. These events were a community gathering full of energy and protest for the dark world gathering around us. But we never knew, never sang about the disasters occurring in our own state and to our own fathers and brothers because our minds were filled with the problems outside our locality.
Once I became fully aware of the history of coal in West Virginia, and the Sago Mine Disaster of 2006 occurring also just outside Buckhannon really bringing to light the fatalism of our region, I turned to studying disaster ballads. I found that women like Jean Ritchie and Hazel Dickens were doing the punk-rock thing by writing songs of protest, calling out the culture of coal mining that preyed on masculinity and patriarchy. I began performing a collection of disaster ballads publicly to generate discussion about the coal industry, but also more broadly about working with communities to develop their own ideas on how to remember and express collective loss and pain.
But they built bridges
to get across the valleys
on flat planes made of floating rock,
suspended on steel forged by fire
released from coal
in the industrial rituals of burning.
By recognizing their fate bound to Sisyphean climbing they also decidedly defied it to live lives exponentially flattened across the surface.
These works are developed as heuristic processes with each production constructed through the same manner with data extraction and the general accident of MTR as a double-headed linch pin.
The top two projects, When the Poplar Tree Struck the Sago Mine and Surface Mining, in the middle column explore the 2006 mine explosion at Sago Mine, near my hometown of Buckhannon. The accident killed eleven miners in our community, and exposed a clear pattern of safety negligience and disregard for those mineworkers' lives. One of those workers, Martin Toler Jr., left a note scrawled on the back of an insurance application that impacted me so hard that my entire aesthetic considerations began to revolve around the reocurrences of coalmining disasters and the fatalism it embeds in those communities impacted by the energy extraction industries.
The third project, Subtractive Manufacturing, was developed much in the same way of processing topology extracted from Google through digital fabrication and the anecdotes of living through the destruction of Appalachia. However, the land here is the coordinates of Kayford Mountain, where political activist and founder for the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation Larry Gibson held out on his family property against coal operators pressuring him to move off his land.
I consider each of these projects as telling relative piece of the story between these lands and their digitization. Through these works the data is reclaimed as part of the land itself inseparable.
The surfaces of these mountains, O spirit move me, freely from the deep, black caverns of coal underground, cross the crick, over the fog, up the hee-uhl, and up over yonder and into the dark stars of Vandalia.
Permeating
the hills
like ants
in their anthills,
coal industry came and kicked it over and poured soda over the chaos. By blasting the mountains and pushing them into the valleys, the black coal seams faces the night sky unequivocally.
In the air it oxidizes, the water turns orange,
up is down, there's a Wal*Mart in them thar hills.
Our calf muscles grow ripe with a lifetime of climbing. Up and down from the bowels of our mother the mountain, through the finity of dirt piled high, the little glacial carvings, and into the patches of night untouched by the proliferation of light burning around its edges. We know this land which gives life is just a surface between the infinities below and beyond that life. Darkness lie above and below.
