WILD ANIMALS! CAUGHT ON CAMERA!
Amoeba 4.27.24 | Surveillance footage as nature documentary
Good morning, earthlings.
And welcome to something new from Unnatural Heritage: the Amoeba.
If you’ve been reading the posts up until now, thank you. They’ve been a joy to write and research, and when you reach out about them, it makes my soul flutter in a way that feels rare and profound.
Taking your own mind seriously is hard work, but the practice of weaving random scraps of thought into a series of little quilts has been deeply rewarding. Someday, I hope there’s enough to have a picnic on. You’re obviously invited.
The Amoeba is an attempt to do something looser, less structured, and more conversational. It’s a way of sharing updates and ideas before they’re fully baked—to blurt out what’s on my mind and hopefully hear what’s on yours.
Amoebas are tiny, amorphous little blobs of life that can change shape at will. Live Science describes them as:
“single-celled microbes that "crawl," and sometimes, can eat your brain.”
In some cases, amoebas aggregate into social networks (i.e. slime molds), exhibiting emergent properties not present within the individual alone. Through a kind of strange, distributed intelligence, beautiful forms can arise. Welcome to the Amoeba. You’re a part of it.
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So What’s Brewing?
I’m working on a few pieces right now, all of which keep calling me at weird hours and leaving cryptic voicemails.
The first piece is a personal one, about the three years I’ve spent growing a garden in Bed Stuy. It’s a piece I’ve been resistant to pursue, mostly because I find the genre of garden writing to be a huge fucking bore. It’s always so cloyingly wholesome and gentle, always grounded in the ~LeSsOnS oF tHe EaRtH~. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m an ardent student. But the tensions found in garden writing are often too innocuous. Humility is an essential character trait, and it’s uncouth to act otherwise. Pain is subdued and fury muzzled. It denies the capacity of nature to frazzle our minds, rot our brains, to infect us, to poison us, to bind and deceive us. Gardening writing neuters nature in the service of a certain kind of wellness, a certain kind of wisdom. It’s a sanitary genre covered in dirt, and I refuse it.
Anyway, the piece is spewing out of my orifices regardless, covered in moss and mucus. I’ve tried to cut it up into digestible little chunks to share with you all, but unlike most monsters, it cannot live in pieces. In that way it is a baby.
So it will be a short story, which I realize in the digital age is basically Lord of the Rings. But I hope you find a quiet moment someday to sit with it. It would mean a lot to me.
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I Always Feel Like…
I’m also working on a couple of pieces I’ve begun to refer to as “a natural history of surveillance.” Twenty-first-century society is entirely predicated on surveillance, from the mining and selling of personal data to the post-9/11 police state of security cameras, CCTV footage, and dashcam recordings. We’ve domesticated surveillance, too—inviting Nest cams, baby monitors, and Alexas into our homes and private spaces. Even social media is a kind of self-perpetuated surveillance. Pics or it didn’t happen. A selfie to feed the algorithm.
In a hyper-connected world that’s always watching, it’s hard to know how to act. The surveillance state has completely changed the way we behave, shifting our understanding of both stealth and performance. But for the birds, it’s nothing new.
A while back I became obsessed with a video of a hawk attacking a drone mid-flight. Perhaps it mistook it for a piece of prey; perhaps it was rebelling against its machine replacement. Either way, it highlighted something key: the ecological world is already one of high stakes and hyper-connectivity. Predators may be watching from above, but it’s still fun to gather in a tree and sing a song every morning. If anyone is adept at navigating the new world of surveillance, it’s animals. Just look at the footage.
All throughout the surveillance landscape, you’ll find animals photobombing traffic cams, getting caught naked by Google Earth patrols, and knocking on our doors like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Excuse sir, do you have a moment to talk about Mother Nature? It’s a delightfully accidental form of nature documentary that’s maybe not so accidental.
Below are some of my favorites.
the seagull! 😍