Megan Jeanne Gette

MEGAN GETTE, then a graduate student at University of Texas, Austin, Texas, received funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Remedial Earths: Sensing Energy in the Permian Basin,” supervised by Dr. Marina Peterson. In the Permian Basin, oil and gas booms and busts compose volatile yet indefinite atmospheres as consequences of geological derangement: gas emissions, frackquakes, and light pollution. Its 24/7 infrastructural operations set in motion intensities of feeling around the imperceptible — as the processes of the anthropocene take place just beyond human perception. Measurement breaks beyond techno-rational utility into expressive modes that serve affects of loneliness, encroachment, and broader conspiracies of silence in the desert. Apparati as methods or tools of representation become instruments for tracing vagueness, as the body is figured as a measuring device for matter’s expressivity. Listening with temporal milieus situated in felt zones of sensation in and around the Permian Basin’s rural communities, I situate the poetic as an inframaterial register and minor scientific modality. In this infra- register, the edifices of realism cohere and fall apart as solid and singular objects become atmospheric, diffuse. Broadly, I examine how geological processes of the anthropocene are perceived in moments and glimpses, and in what ways its thresholds of expressivity come to matter as data, toxins, affective registers and points of politics.