ELAINE GAN

TIME MACHINES, 2016 ongoing

A forthcoming book and digital project about a flowering grass that we know as rice and the more-than-human assemblages through which it has come to matter as plant, machine, and data.

This is a multi-sited story that seeks to articulate the multiple temporalities of biogeochemical and technoscientific assemblages — the interplays of rhythms, cycles, and breaks in timing that drive continuity and change. The sites include the world's largest rice research institute, IRRI in the Philippines; the Central Valley in northern California; the Mekong that runs through Laos and Vietnam; a seed vault in Svalbard, Norway; and rice terraces in Philippine mountain provinces.

The book is an argument against relentless productivity, the telos of ever-higher yields, and a critical-creative invitation to see rice differently — as more-than-human time machines that make and unmake modernity's ecologies and empires.

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   Invasion of Sap-Sucking Planthoppers (excerpt), 2020
   In this composite image, photos are arranged so that they can be read horizontally, from left to right, then from top to bottom row.
   In the top row, brown planthoppers feed on rice plants, a damaging effect of excessive fertilizer spraying; row 2: growth cycle of
   high-yielding varieties of rice upon which planthoppers depend; row 3: multispecies assemblages present in wet-rice fields;
   row 4: sites of everyday consumption such as food markets and street stalls; row 5: seed banks, labs, and research institutes;
   row 6: global supply chains and futures markets.

 

   diagram for Flowering Times, 2018

 

   Oscillation: When Rain Falls Along The Mekong, 2016
   In this composite image, the viewer is invited to see a moment along the Mekong River as an assemblage of multiplicities: plants,
   weeds, grains, worms, fish, fishing nets, mud, boats, motors, locals, tourists, pots, river banks, and so on.

 

   When A Flowering Grass Becomes A Crop, 2014
   left to right: Flora de Filipinas, 1833, Manuel Blanco; Useful Plants of the Philippines, 1937, William Brown - Philippine Dept of
   Agriculture and Natural Resources; Rice Production Manual, 1967, University of the Philippines College of Agriculture; Catalog of
   Philippine Seed Board Varieties, 1998, Philippine Rice Research Institute

 

   Photos, sketches, notes from rice fields and research labs in Si Phan Don, Laos (2017); Los Banos, Philippines (2010); Svalbard,
   Norway (2015); Orissa, India (2020); Sagada, Philippines (2011); Biggs, California (2018); Kolkata, India (2019); Cosumnes River,
   California (2018); Lajas, Puerto Rico (2018); Banaue, Philippines (2011)