Short extract from work in progress, Chapter Two of my book on Deep Time Now. In this chapter I propose dust dispersal as way of rethinking nuclear spatiality. Most of the book is building theoretical arguments through art practices, but this is from a more formally experimental section, testing writing as dust carrier device through an experiment modelling particle assemblages.
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To the biofilm-carrier it was a pulsing herbarium
Dry mineral aerosol grain; ~10 µm pavement heat-plume; urban boundary layer; human foot-traffic wake. / aerosol grain with nascent moisture film; weak thermal updraft; Millbank street canyon flow / slightly humidified particle (liquid bridge at surface asperities); convection cell over sunlit asphalt; NOx-rich roadside microatmosphere / uplifted coarse-mode aerosol; shear eddy; vehicle-induced turbulence (bus wake) / river-edge flyer, salt and sulfate traces adsorbing; Thames breeze corridor; riparian cool-air drainage / partially cleaned (pollen lost), mineral core persists. / shear-lamina transition; open-sky mixed layer. / 10⁹ yr paleo-frame shift / sea-spray-salted agglomerate from Proterozoic shoreline. / proto-coastal breeze; early microbial mats’ aerosolized metabolites. / cloud-condensation-like embryo (sub-deliquescent). / shallow convective cell over warm lagoon. / settling coarse-mode fleck. / shoreline eddy; microbial aerosol consortium. / snap forward / multi-era palimpsest particle. / warm-air floater, slight buoyancy surplus. / tarmac heat ripple; slow vortex pair.