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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

Cyanotypes by Kaitlyn Kruemmel (left) and Andrea Truque (right)

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Experiments, Embodied Work, and Contributions 22 A brief summary of our attempts to engage with energy image_header 2024-08-06T11:16:37+00:00
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!
CYANOTYPES 9 Interpreting energy in layers and shadows image_header 2024-08-04T15:36:01+00:00
In Summer 2024, the STEMLA Fellows were honored to host Warren Cariou, a Winnipeg-based writer, photographer, film-maker, professor, storyteller, and activist. In addition to talking with us about petroleum and land relations in the Athabasca Tar Sands (and our own backyards), Warren led us in a cyanotype workshop to approximate his process in creating petrographs.

The students used found material from around Bryn Mawr's campus and the Silver Creek Acid Mine Drainage Remediation site in New Philadelphia, PA. They also took photographs inside and outside of the No. 9 Coal Mine in Coaldale, PA, stills from films we watched in our cluster, images related to fossil fuel extraction — and turned them into digital transparencies. They layered these found objects and images to create shadow-scapes that spoke to Energy Afterlives themes.
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Linked below are the pages our students created from their cyanotypes:
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This page is referenced by:

TEXTUAL EXPERIMENTS

FIELD WORK

DATA ART

INTERVIEWS

EVENTS AND EXHIBITS

THEMATIC ART

MUSICAL AFTERLIVES