I began thinking for this article when, in a blur of insomniac film consumption, I came across The Farthest: Voyager in Space, a documentary about the NASA Voyager’s venture into intergalactic space and the peculiar passenger it brought along with it: The Golden Record.

This article explores The Golden Record as an embodiment of our worries of extinction and the queer potential for art at the edge of the universe to hold the memory of an incomplete we.

As I was writing this article, I was obsessed with putting into practice performative writing as an embodied method for grappling with the limits of knowledge and the reaches of “the human” as an ontological category.

In the summer of 2016, I sat in a dark room in a residence hall with a friend at Columbia University where I had a summer internship. I had come across a documentary, Into Eternity, that sounded fascinating. After a deep dive search on how to stream it (we for sure streamed in legally, no question about it) we connected to the TV, and turned off the lights, a decision that would embody the melancholy of the film.

The documentary explores how the building for a “permanent” nuclear waste storage facility, Onkalo, in Finland defies a spatial & temporal logics, invoking a communicative problem: “how do we warn beings not to enter the nuclear waste storage repository.

The US has its own complicated history with attempting to build a permanent storage facility and a rather humorous history of trying plan for the facility (see my performance page to read more about a play I wrote that parodies a 90s era DOE report).

This article explores the conditions that make (im)possible deep-time communication through a (re)articulation of performance theory, at once generating a critical examination of performativity’s potential for envisioning a radical environment politics and refocusing the posthuman turn in performance toward contemporary material concerns.

My co-author, David Monje, and I spent years wading through the abundance of wolf stories in popular culture to explore how the myth of the human-child raising wolf centers a humanist logic that constantly prioritizes humans even in the discussion of nonhuman beings. Ultimately, we suggest that the human-child-raising wolf mythos props up white supremacists version of nature as ontologically violent.

Writing this article with David only furthered my deeply-held commitment to collaborative writing. Intellectual kinship makes the intellectual life tolerable and, dare I say, a worthwhile endeavor.