Making the E.E.R.K.
By Kate O'Brien-Nicholson
26th August 2024
By Mark Simpson, co-author of Energy Emergency Repair Kit
It’s 7:40 am on July 24 when the email arrives: “Town of Jasper, Jasper National Park, evacuated due to wildfire.” Two days later, the fire reaches the rustic townsite, burning so fiercely it has created its own pyrocumulonimbus weather system complete with a raging firewall nearly 400 feet tall. By the next morning, over a third of the town has burned to the ground. The devastation’s quicksilver speed is quite simply staggering. While many factors contribute to this wildfire – cuts to the provincial firefighting budget, dead growth left by mountain pine beetle infestation, fire suppression practices, the aesthetics of wilderness that condition and produce how mountain parks are supposed to look – it’s brutally obvious that climate crisis is the driving cause, a fact made all the more painful by Alberta’s status as an obdurately, obtusely climate-skeptical petrostate. Welcome, yet once more, to what Andreas Malm calls the warming condition (The Progress of This Storm 11).
The Energy Emergency Repair Kit, a multimodal, genre-bending manual I’ve created with my comrades in the E.E.R.K. Collective, was written with such harrowing occasions firmly in mind and in view. Two cheers for timeliness and relevance! Our crew began collaborating several years ago as members of Speculative Energy Futures, a research network at the University of Alberta that uses arts-based practices to imagine new modes of energetic futurity. Back in 2020, S.E.F. was planning to bring some research-creation projects to COP26 in Glasgow – “Burning Ambitions” was the working title for my own crew’s proposed contribution – but another kind of fast-moving wildfire, the pandemic caused by Covid-19, managed to dash our hopes. All S.E.F activity had to move online more or less immediately, which presented some major challenges to the sorts of research creation we sought to undertake. But we persevered, convening in the Zoom room for near-weekly confabs to trade ideas and worry at problems and tease out images we’d then expand and distend and mutate in shared docs blooming, spore-like, across the fibre optic circuitry that connected us all. The resulting assemblage of creative possibilities offered abundant material to hone, while attuning us to the promise of negentropy, alerting us to the power of subtraction, and inspiring us to try whenever possible to deviate the designs.
The E.E.R.K. emerged from these unexpected, exhausting, yet oddly liberatory circumstances. A strange fabulation, the project aims to decompose and recompose how we might know and feel the entangled emergencies of viral spread, climate catastrophe, and fossil-fueled impasse. Its design interleaves image, text, and sound in order to conceive energy’s emergency and emergence together. Mycelium is our co-conspirator, at once medium, trope, and muse for the unruly speculative probes we have crafted. As we labored over many months, we always found enabling constraints to guide and shape our activities – foremost among them the initially unwelcome need, born from lockdown conditions, to create our project’s manifold facets in the no-place of the cloud, to collaborate together at a distance, to form an absent-present collective inspired and enlivened by the weird energies surging through our endeavors. Bound to the cloud, we made sure to articulate a vital commitment that guided us throughout our ongoing collaboration: the recognition, especially with emergency the rule not the exception, that our own energies were, if potent, likewise and importantly finite, which meant making their conservation a crucial and perpetual part of our creative practice.
The E.E.R.K. plays with the repair manual genre, but it does so earnestly and lovingly. The point is neither satirical nor ironizing – the E.E.R.K. means what it says! What’s more, the manual is strangely user-friendly: deliberately provocative, yet hopefully enticing and energizing too. The E.E.R.K. Collective wants our project to bring joy and give courage, fuel dreams and unnerve commonsense, so that readers might find, in amongst its speculative bids, some as-yet unthought ways of reckoning the climactic and energetic emergencies already here today and sure to intensify tomorrow. Our burning ambition 2.0: please, deviate our designs!
The E.E.R.K. Collective is a group of artists, designers, and scholars from across Turtle Island. The Collective engages in “decomp poesis,” a creative practice focused on exploring speculative encounters to promote care and repair. By collaborating with a wide array of experts, the Collective embodies a commitment to deviating designs and fostering innovative approaches to energy and environmental challenges.
Mark Simpson is Professor of English and Film Studies and Principal Investigator for Transition in Energy, Culture and Society at the University of Alberta, a multi-year research project with Future Energy Systems.
Order your copy of the Energy Emergency Repair Kit HERE!