“Social justice work is about creating systems of justice and equity in the future, creating conditions that we have never experienced. That is a futurist focus, and the practices of collaboration and adaptation and transformative justice, are science fiction behavior.” – adrienne maree-brown

Our thoughts splinter to cover ground reminiscent of the distorted organ solo from Sun Ra’s Atlantis. It meanders but not without melody or purpose. It is evasive like the shadow of a moving dragon.

As the ghost moves from the machine to the cloud and onward in a reinvigorated quest for space, let us stop to imagine a prehistory without our predatory nature, the prevalent impulse of our species. Assigning values to death that life itself cannot achieve. A future past that is lost. 

Earthworks get their name from a science fiction novel. These citadels of dirt, the dissolving jetty, the tunnel displacing ground in alignment to stars, the trenches of intention but no function. These are works of science fiction as well, philosophical inquiries into our relationship with the earth. Reconciling geological time with human time.  We are not only understanding our past but predicting our precarious future. 

There is an obvious paradox. Sun Ra’s look to Saturn as metaphor has been co-opted by unending colonial mindsets. We will let the billionaires take their friends to Mars and the Moon and give Earth back to those it was taken from, perhaps we reinvent the ground as Saturn beneath our feet, as a satellite floating through the expanse of it all, a laboratory for consciousness. 

Space is the place from the perspective of the Arkestra but also from the perspective of political geography, spatial justice, property as a manifestation of freedom and the required volume to hold experimentations in consciousness. One must have space to be present in the physical yet invisible helical toroid and to vibrate through time. To reclaim and live in a place, volume must be captured. 

The true measure of an artist is how much water they displace, a choreographed cannonball of the ego into the pool that is the space-time continuum. It is a möbius commute, it is the noosphere, not as elevated consciousness hovering like ozone, but land, structure, roof and sky weaved together by our travel through its fluidity.