Historian Terry Smith has proposed that a world is a mix of intimate settings and far-off powers, and that existential meanings are embedded in everyday routines that oscillate around supraspecific logics (neoliberalism, globalism, nationalism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for example). 3 In this framing, the emphasis is removed from the individual subject itself, and dispersed to the space that is created through connection between interacting subjects or objects that bypass a hierarchy of control and form an entangled relationship to each other. This is an entanglement that has had impact throughout the history of the United States. With observations that the European conquest of the Americas in 1492 coincides with a notable marked drop in atmos- pheric carbon, historian T. J. Demos writes, “The new geological epoch… represents the genocidal ending of an earlier one, with the Anthropocene’s origins being inextricable from early modern globalization, practiced through resource extraction, military conquest, and culture-erasing colonialism. One can rightly argue that the world’s currently threatened end—that of catastro- phic climate breakdown—has been rehearsed many times before, prepared through the long unfolding of capitalism’s five-hundred-year-old history.” 4 Increasingly, as Demos highlights, cross-medium historians and scientists agree that the impending collapse is a superstructure, living in an interchange of the multiple worlds various spheres of society already occupy. Theorist Jack Halberstam refers to these oscillating phenomena as “paradigm of collapse,” meaning that as a western society we are not only seeing the hyphenation of fields coalesce but that we are mixed into that coalescence as a state of long extended emergency. 5 Contemporary exhibitions from recent years centering SF and spanning varying mediums have evidenced a rising interest in this topic, however Burns’ work remains unique from these exhibitions in its insistence upon the potential of its own reality. 6 It falls in historic lineage with contemporary artists who activate phenomenology to tap into an art of interaction. Presented in both immersive and interactive installations, a visitor performs systems of alternative perspectives as they learn about the works through inhabiting physical space and methods of discovery. 4 T. J. Demos, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing , (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 9. 5 Jack Halberstam, “An Aesthetics of Collapse” (lecture), October 20, 2021, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, video recording, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Wf6Xw6bHAfs. 6 A few of which include the film series Future Imperfect (2017) organized by Joshua Siegel, Born in Flames: Feminist Futures (2021) curated by Jasmine Wahi, the 48-hour forum Afrofuturism + Beyond directed by Louise Martorano, Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/Present/Future (2020) curated by Suzanne Fricke, Chelsea Herr (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), and ManuelaWell-Off-Man, and Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (2017) curated by Robb Hernández,Tyler Stallings, and Joanna Szupinska-Myers.
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