The first volume of the dust and shadow reader[s] (a publication) in the form of a commonplace book (also available in pdf format).

You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants some magical solution to their problem and yet everyone refuses to believe in magic. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Dust is everywhere because its source is everything. Its most remote origins in time and space are the Big Bang, collapsing stars, and the dark line across the center of the Milky Way, which, according to astronomer Donald Brownlee, “is a line of dirt perhaps 65,200 light­ years across, and 3.832 X 1017 miles long.” Here on earth, dust comes from everything under the sun: minerals, seeds, pollen, insects, molds, lichens, and even bacteria. Its sources also include bone, hair, hide, feather, skin, blood, and excrement. And things of human fabrication, too numerous to mention, also cover the earth and all the atmosphere with dust. Joseph A. Amato, Dust

Humankind is flickering, displaced from itself, ecstatic, rippling and dappled with shadows. Shadows made not only by some other entity interacting with it, like the sun through the trees, but shadows that are an intrinsic part of the thing. Tim Morton, Humankind

fieldnotes 1
awareness exercise
ways of listening
objects and cairns
designing bridges
walking exercises
recipes
fieldnotes 2

The chapters build an open-ended assemblage, not a logical machine; they gesture to the so-much-more out there. They tangle with and interrupt each other—mimicking the patchiness of the world I am trying to describe. Adding another thread, the photographs tell a story alongside the text but do not illustrate it directly. I use images to present the spirit of my argument rather than the scenes I discuss. Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the end of the World

[L]et us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. Virginia Woolf, Hours in a Library

Sources of quotes and citations can be found on the bibliography page.

Dust & Shadow Reader #1

CC-BY-SA March 02018
Design and Photography FoAM (Earth) http://fo.am
Authors and editors Maja Kuzmanovic, Nik Gaffney, Ron Broglio, Adam Nocek and Stacey Moran Nocek
Supported by ASU, Global Institute of Sustainability