Lewis Mumford said that people who use old technologies are the ones who believe in magic. This work, created during a residency at the Center for Book Arts in NYC during 2016-2017, was broadly focused on how paper and printed matter, an “old technology”, can have contemporary impact as a form of magic-making. My navigational tools for the end of the Anthropocene consider the (im)possibility of individual action as we prepare for and exist in a period of rapidly shifting relationship with our environment. Made using traditional printing and bookbinding processes, these works are intended to have their own agency and power: incantations, maps, instructional texts, etc. These works repurpose various tools (visual symbols, maps, rituals) that humanity has traditionally used to explain and control our natural environment as unauthoritative reference materials for the future. Below are excerpted pages from a book of recitations and imagined landscapes for beyond the Anthropocene.
Norah Maki 