ArChimera // The Island of Entropic Flux

Manhattan’s spatial morphology has constantly been bended into new existences, depicted by its landscapes entangled in various temporalities and scales. ArChimera // The Island of Entropic Flux is a magical realist cartographic configuration of Manhattan, a speculative alteration anchored in the city’s contemporary realities and challenges.

[Speculation in Deep Time: Flooding across Manhattan, throwing the city under a layer of silt, thus crystallising it into a geological layer. A crew of geologists depart on an expedition to analyse the geological properties of the newly surfaced Island of Entropic Flux. The island is becoming a large rock of siltstone existing in deep time. Erosion eventually uncovers the geological anomalies found on the island’s rock shell - fossilised residues of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The Crumbling Garden sits on the southern edge of the island, speculatively located on Gansevoort Peninsula. The peninsula has crystalized into a large chunk of unknown plastic geology. The crew constructs a micro architecture on a retreating cliff - The Receding Micro-Erosion Meter - in order to measure the erosion rate of this new geological finding]. Through the creation of speculative cartographies, ArChimera constructs a speculative landscape of Manhattan. Taking the form of an archipelago of islands, the project explores Jean-Francois Lyotard’s meaning of a scapeland – a territory of estrangement. The proposal experiments with landscape formations provocatively conceived as gardens, akin to Gilles Clément’s mental territories of hope. The Island of Entropic Flux is one of these speculative islands: a spectral manifestation of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, functioning as a landscape-clock measuring Deep Time. Within a speculative reality, the island is shrinking and weathering; a territory where erosion’s dynamic qualities are foregrounded. This speculation derives from a synthesis of past and future moments into the present. The project accepts 1) the eventual lithification of Manhattan’s edge under ecological stress, 2) Anthropogenic geology as defined by Jan Zalasiewicz and Kim Freedman in “Buried Treasures”, New Scientist (1998) 3) Gansevoort Peninsula as a hub of waste transfer to the Fresh Kills landfill when it was operational, and 4) Gordon Matta-Clark’s project Day’s End, an intervention executed on Gansevoort Peninsula in 1975, mirrored by The Receding Micro-Erosion Meter.