Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Earth-O-Meter: Color Studies OchreElpitha Tsoutsounakis (bio)Ochre is always in a state of becoming—becoming color, becoming blood. Ancient, stellar death becoming current, terrestrial life; geological making. Design becomes epistemic tool beyond aesthetic representation.I join a body of academic and community scholars around the globe who think with Ochre from a variety of disciplines. How have we evolved through and with Ochre? What future does Ochre bring as art or technology? How can Ochre remediate legacies of extraction? How can we return to the material from our current abstraction and commodification of color? How can we relate to terrestrial beings beyond anonymous resource? How can Ochre reveal plural realities of time and place through erased or forgotten narratives?This exploration has become the Field Studio Geontological Survey (FSGS), a design research collective assembling and extending Ochre dimensions to expand human/nonhuman inter-subjectivity. The collective is inspired by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which has surveyed, mapped, and catalogued the U.S.—and the world—extensively and completely, translating earth matter into anonymous “natural” resources. Through its manipulation of geopower, USGS mediates our human relation to the more-than-human. The Geontological Survey diverts USGS tactics—survey, map, catalog, archive—towards a future feminist Ochre imaginary though collective practice in field, community, and studio operations. Ochre bodies, pigments, swatches, and the maps and artifacts produced with/by them, are archived at UnknownProspect.org.Earth-O-Meter 231101 (see Fig. 1) is assembled with thirty-six Ochres from FSGS Folio 2301,1 all surveyed in field operations at Temple Mountain Mining District in the San Rafael Swell, Utah. The swell is a geological anomaly at the edge of the Colorado Plateau, an anticline pushed up 60 million years ago during the Laramide Orogeny. It measures roughly 64 [End Page 109] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Earth-O-Meter 231101: Ochre bodies from Folio 2301 and their respective swatches made with pigment in gum arabic and water. Full-scale color image and more on Ochres from Folio 2301 can be seen at unknownprospect.org.km wide and 121 km long. Erosion has revealed millions of years of geological time exposed to the desert sun along the reef edge where so-called Temple Mountain emerges from the southeast flank. An ancient marine environment left us the Chinle Formation in the Triassic Period—a formation marked by colorful instances of oxidation or reduction based on [End Page 110] fluctuating sea levels and water conditions. The meter begins and ends with Ochre that appears “green” (28.006) alongside Ochre that appears “violet” (18.003). They arrive next to one another just as they are found in the landscape: green nestled in violet, reminding us of lapping waters so long ago.Folio 2301 and the Earth-O-Meter are lines of flight for a material color theory, one in which color is not an abstract, perceived characteristic observed by physics, or a trick debating its place in or out of the mind. Color, or chroma, are material signs in the universe. Folio 2301 archives Ochre bodies from Temple Mountain alongside their respective pigments and the registry of community members who prepared them. The pigments were swatched to produce eight plates containing color studies or “palettes of place.” In Ochre, heat moves iron from yellow to red, water differentiates green from violet. Fluctuations of heat, time, pressure, electromagnetic field, and energy all play a part in the matter of color.While it is inspired by the cyanometer, a tool made to measure the blueness of the sky,2 the Earth-O-Meter is not a tool for measuring color, or earth-ness. It is a portal and a sign where the energy and intelligence of iron is flowing and evolving—all around us, before us, and after us. The cyanometer is made using Prussian blue, which is an oxidation of ferrous ferrocyanide salts. Prussian blue is known as the “first synthetic pigment.” By tinting Prussian blue to create the spectrum of the sky, technics modify iron to produce a divergent color in order to measure an ephemeral effect of atmosphere. The sky’s blueness is our experience of...