The Making of a Synthetic World

On February 4, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, OH, a village ninety miles southeast of Cleveland, OH—where we live—and fifty-one miles northwest of Pittsburgh, PA.

Within my blood /
There are strains of promises /
Made by a budding nation /
To my once enslaved family

How long plastic will endure is an open-ended question, unknown and subject to many variables, including chemical composition, exposure to sun and wind, erosion, the kinds of animals that encounter it, and where it ends up.

For two sweltering summers in 1989 and 1990, I worked as an engineer at Amoco’s Chocolate Bayou plant in Alvin, Texas, near Galveston.

One night, while dancing, she fell off the stage and crashed onto a customer / a body clad in a resilient gleam / acting as a tantalizingly flimsy barrier / Strange hands. Inquisitive hands. Dirty hands.

In the decades immediately following World War II, the rapid spread of synthetic materials derived from petroleum colonized all aspects of everyday life. These new petrochemicals reshaped the cultural practices and material products associated with the “American Dream.”

Most spinal catheters—for example, those used to deliver epidural anesthesia during childbirth—are made of polyamide resin, polyurethane, and nylon block copolymers.

No laboratory of the future is possible without the stuff of the past. The conditions of possibility for any “new” technology always derive from the present. Plastics are no exception.

My baby has just settled in his crib, and I am doing a bit of work. While he sleeps, I scroll the Hagley Library and Museum’s digital archives on my laptop from bed, while hooked up to two Medela breast pumps humming the silicone-softened song of mechanically expressed milk.

I wanted to talk to you, because we are collaborators. One of our biggest collaborations was being roommates during the first Covid lockdown in 2020. I learned a lot from you and your relationship with plastics and waste during that time.

At the end of Boyz n the Hood, Doughboy crosses the street to talk to Tre. It’s morning—we don’t know what time, exactly, but Doughboy confesses that he hasn’t been up this early in a long time.

Edges and ends of worlds are encountered frequently in the films of Harun Farocki. They form recurrent courses of navigation, tugging along ships and airplanes, riders and avatars, waves and clouds, memories and simulations.

Years before I would turn to seed beads and beading as a research subject and co-conspirator, I learned, while beading with an Elder in a beading circle at the Native Women’s Resource Centre of Toronto, that we did not just get seed beads from colonizers as is commonly thought.

“Arctic Junky: Plastic Sugar Puffs toy from 1958 washes up in the Arctic 59 years later to give a chilling warning about plastics in our ocean,” declared a 2017 headline in The Sun.

In November 1851, the German architect Gottfried Semper articulated the material crisis facing the arts. Semper had spent the previous year in London, helping design the Canadian, Danish, Swedish, and Ottoman pavilions at the Great Exhibition.

In Cradle to Cradle, architect William McDonough describes pollutants as misplaced materials. Carbon, for example, doesn’t belong in the atmosphere, where it traps the sun’s energy and contributes to global warming. Carbon belongs in the soil, where it supports plant life and, by extension, feeds the entire world.

Plasticity comprises the capacity to change, to be molded, to radically deform and transform under pressure while miraculously retaining self-sameness. Instead of falling apart, plasticity persists in the face of destruction.

Rebirth Garments specializes in making swimwear, dancewear, and athleticwear for queer and trans disabled folks of all sizes and ages. I started the clothing line in the summer of 2014, when there were very few gender-affirming undergarment options and even fewer swimwear options available.

Shortly after I finished breastfeeding my son, I learned that researchers had found microplastics in human breastmilk.

The word “microplastic” was coined in 2004, fifty-one years after General Electric and Bayer began developing polycarbonate, fifty-four years after DuPont began manufacturing polyester, and sixty-two years after Dow Chemical built a polystyrene plant.

the only truth: a grim plastic nebula has swallowed the sky

& what of the water below

While scholars of race have critiqued the conflation of black(ened) humans with animals, objects, and machines in Enlightenment discourses, my concept of ontologized plasticization reframes the confluence of blackness and the nonhuman.

LeCreebusier, the Indigenous Trickster, unearths a discarded phoropter, a thing of the past that can quickly determine the exact vision correction needed to readjust the twenty-first century Indigenous gaze.