ecoscope

Meditations on nature, technology, and humanity

Issue #10
March 2023

ESSAYS

TALKS

GALLERY

ZINE

ABOUT

PAST ISSUES

Notes becomes an archive of your lost words, of all the moments you otherwise would leave behind in the recycling bin. In this way, it is more than a scratchpad, it's an archive of you. And unlike a journal or a notebook, you never put it away on a shelf; you carry it with you, indefinitely.

When I type on a mechanical keyboard, I can see the key lower, feel the switch actuate, and hear the keycap and switch bottom out on the board. A sentence echoes out into the room like a symphony with each row playing a different harmony in the orchestra.

Historically, the human ability to create art, tools, and technology was cited as proof that we are greater than animals and deserve dominion over nature. We used these means to separate ourselves. Now, using the very same tools, we can disarm this damaging attitude.

Some things in Bug Square should be wrong. In this world, bugs are celebrated features, not just bugs. Or rather they are bugs, but are also features. Creating Bug Square showed me how errors inspire me in my life, and I hope that highlighting bugs will encourage you to be inspired by the bugs in your life.

Nesting. In a broad sense, nesting is an attempt to house, conceal, protect, shelter, and regulate the temperature of newborns. In the most widely understood meaning, animals nest to prepare for the arrival of their offspring. While all animals nest—in broader cultural understandings—the term is usually applied to the nesting of birds and human women.

The neighbors are awake now. Today is the day. There is always one day in a year when they will wake up from their naps and find something worth eavesdropping on. They get themselves a glass of water, and listen.

Camouflage is an unspoken acknowledgment of the rivalry between the wearer and the watcher. It is an artifact of antagonism itself, embedded into our skin, pelts, and chromatophores.

I wonder if, floating in the air and crawling on the surfaces around us, the invisible world of microbes might provide us the information we need to recreate the smells and tastes of our past.

Fermentation is as close to alchemy as we’ll get. Throw some milk in a pot, heat it up, let it cool a bit, add a spoon of yogurt, and overnight, you’ll have a new batch of yogurt. Magic.

When I think about the times in my life where I felt pure Joy — there’s always other people there. There’s always a sense in those moments that I could do anything — because of the people I was doing it with. It is only within Big We that we become the most fully actualized versions of our individual selves.