Jo Letke
Chemical Framing
55
© Judy Natal 2014 www.judynatal.com
0/ Thinking chemical thoughts, or the eruption of some voice inside telling me these are chemical thoughts, is a messy affair. Messy in the sense that the chemical is a stack of junk that phases in and out of my existence, and will eventually (if it has not already) contort my fossil into a pleasing future-aesthetic. Timothy Morton writes, “when you approach an object, more and more objects emerge” (55). I have been approached at the same time as I am approaching—there is a slimy, unidentified mess between the chemical and me, in contrast to the cosmic. Chemistry is more than the symbols and signs that become distilled into formulae, but invites other concepts in: the molecular, life, art, unreasonable scales to mentally inhabit, new material intensities, and so on. All of this is to propose a new