Welcome to Unnatural Heritage.
Mending the gap between our natural and digital worlds.
Unnatural Heritage is a regular practice of re-enchanting our natural world, re-entangling ourselves and our senses in its wonders, and grounding digital life in its glorious limitations. Rather than rejecting the digital world in embrace of the natural one—let’s be honest, there’s no going back—I hope to tease out how they are in fact one and the same—a tangled, glistening network of vibrant, planetary matter. In part, Unnatural Heritage attempts to undermine digital technology’s more captivating illusions, disenchanting it just enough to reveal its earthly nature. Your phone is, after all, just a bunch of talking rocks.
Unnatural Heritage refers to the strange new world we have all inherited—a planet so profoundly altered by human activity that it constitutes an entirely new geological age. One of silicon and plastic, where undisturbed nature is increasingly hard to find. It dwells on the wisdom and perceptions of past generations and the cultural legacies we might leave for future ones. It questions who we consider kin and which life forms we consider family. And it considers who owns what with regard to the singular piece of heritage we all share: the Earth.
Unnatural Heritage also calls into question the idea of nature itself. A wildly non-descript term referring to *gestures vaguely* literally everything else, the word “nature” is violent in its generality, flattening the immense diversity of life into a single vague concept to be set beside humanity. What is nature fades into the background. It’s a laughable linguistic choice, given that humans make up only 0.01% of Earth’s total biomass. Bacteria alone outweigh us by 1100 to 1, and bacterial cells outnumber our own 10 to 1 even within our own bodies. We are not, and never have been, separate from nature.
But among Earth’s many lifeforms, we are undeniably unique. While we make up only a small fraction of life on this planet, our cultural artifacts—our buildings, computers, toothbrushes, and trash—have now grown to outweigh the entire biomass of all other living things combined. We have dammed Earth’s rivers, cleared its forests, altered its atmosphere, and mined its rocky depths. We have rendered Earth itself an artifact, and by extension, artificial. Unnatural Heritage confronts the artificial Earth we now inhabit, making space for a nature that is weird, uncanny, compromised, and queer. A natural world turned unnatural.
Where do we go from here?
