SYLVIA H JANICKI

Toxic Speculations

Fabulating with Environmental Data in A Permanently Polluted World

This project presents a set of artifacts as a speculative fabulation that reorients relations to environmental toxicity, centering environmental illness narratives. Specifically, “Ray-Flats” is a speculative pollution sensing shoe that “glows” in proximity to toxic sites in Atlanta, achieved with a GPS sensor, LED lights, and mapped to coordinates of land pollution data taken from EPA databases. Alongside the shoe is a navigational guide that shares the mythos of the shoe and provides alternative mappings of toxicity. The project aims to highlight both the lived reality of people with environmental illness, in which feeling and negotiating pollution is always already a part of daily life, while foregrounding their expertise in navigating toxicity, sensing precarity, and ”staying with the trouble” of living in a polluted world.