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Energy Afterlives Main Menu Introduction About Coal Oil Nuclear Textual Afterlives Musical Afterlives Planned and unplanned musical responses to coal, oil, nuclear Physicalizations and Visualizations Links to all our project pages Interviews A collection of interviews with writers conducted by Energy Afterlives students. Feedback

Experiments, Embodied Work, and Contributions

TEXTUAL EXPERIMENTS

Our course clusters have embraced experimentation!

Textual Afterlives asked students to produce data based on a short story, and graph it using data visualization tools
One assignment asked students to write a story from a non-human perspective (e.g., animal, plant) that engages with course topics and themes.

FIELD WORK

No. 9 Coal Mine: an underground anthracite mine tour in Coaldale, PA
Silver Creek Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) site in New Philadelphia, PA
Anthony's Coal-Fired Pizza: pizza cooked with anthracite from the same vein we visited in the No. 9
Southeast Alaska: Sitka, Juneau, mining histories, whale watching, extraction legacies, glaciers, and microplastic sampling

DATA ART

Our course clusters have focused on embodied learning. From a science perspective, data art is an opportunity to engage with data in new, embodied ways.

We made paint from Acid Mine Drainage waste, then used it to paint data about AMD in Pennsylvania
Energy Strings: we prompted our community to interactively visualize our collective sense of the future
Energy Cubes: we physicalized human energy use through time using wooden blocks
Soundscapes: we visualized how energy has changed how it feels to be alive in the auditory realm
Bugscapes: but how has the sense of the world changed ... if you're a bug?
Sulfur Tapestries: knitting our data into mini-tapestries to show how sulfur dioxide emissions have changed through time
We've also had 20-ish student projects produce data art!

INTERVIEWS

Ernestine Hayes: place, land, and stories in Juneau, Alaska
John K. Samson: songwriting, activism, and the Athabasca Tar Sands
Warren Cariou: land, extractivism, petrography, and the Athabasca Tar Sands
Yevgenia Belorusets: photography, labor, war, and coal

EVENTS AND EXHIBITS

We value sharing our work with the wider Bryn Mawr community.

STEMLA '22 exhibit opening
Exhibition Crawl for Energy Afterlives

THEMATIC ART

Our courses have also had chances to produce art inspired by the themes of our cluster, not strictly as data representations!

Warren Cariou led us in a cyanotype workshop
Found Poetry: we used the readings from our courses to make magnetic poetry
Several students have made spontaneous related art!

MUSICAL AFTERLIVES

By chance, music has been a big part of our course clusters.

Energy Afterlives wrote and performed a gift of song for our hosts in Alaska
STEMLA '24 re-wrote and performed "Great Atomic Power"
We had an amazing conversation with guest speaker and musician John K. Samson
José Vergara's classes have all assembled playlists that speak to the themes of our clusters
Energy Afterlives destroyed the karaoke scene at Ernie's Old Time Saloon in Sitka, and at least held our own at the karaoke at The Crystal in Juneau. Finished it all off with an end-of-semester karaoke party!