Maybe the swamp is having a moment as a motif in philosophy and art?
I noticed it last year with
Swamps and the New Imagination: On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture, and Philosophy edited by Nomeda Urbonas, Gediminas Urbonas and Kristupas Sabolius.
“It is not easy to define a swamp, even in biology. The term is frequently used to characterize marshes, bogs, mires, wetlands, meadows, and other grey zones between land and water. In that sense, “swamp” is a metonym for a variety of transitional ecosystems and functions. This book invokes that concept as a tool to address the vital urgency of human cohabitation with other forms of life, placing the swamp at the crossroad of disciplines and practices.”
And today I came across Most Dismal Swamp.
“Most Dismal Swamp is a mixed-reality biome, an art platform, a multi-scalar mystic fiction, a forecasting laboratory, a long tail, a transitional ecosystem, a party, a cognitive scaffold, a bad dataset, a curatorial MMORPG, a memeplex aggregator, a planetary weirding studio, and a record label.
“It is a model for parsing, navigating, and elaborating a Dank Enlightenment: globally variable synaesthesia across multiple and simultaneous dimensions.”
Here’s an art video from the Most Dismal Swamp installation titled Swamp Protocol.
“Swamp Protocol is an atmospheric ‘procession of the damned… a procession of data that science has excluded…'”
Two items are clearly not a trend, but I suspect these projects grow out of some dank swampy compost oozing across the perimeters of contemporary scholarship.
(100 Days of Blogging: Post 035 of 100)