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Can we reverse our way into repair? A recent conversation marking the conclusion of a small exhibit at NYU Steinhardt’s 80WSE Gallery suggested we might. Ricky Ruihong Li and (isabelle-a-tan), founding members of the Workshop for Environmental Technik, or WET, reflected on the “counter-archival” impulse that led them to parse and reproduce details from the archives of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. With Keller Easterling drafted in the position of moderator, Li and Tan described how various documents, reports, and images bespeak the agency’s Sisyphean attempts to control water and extend its technical domain. Taking apart these infrastructures at both the diagrammatic and syntactical level is, of course, a very Easterling move, despite the scholar adding little to the discussion. But the procedure comes across as a little too mannered; blinkers on and backing out of the driveway seems a curious way—counterintuitive to the point of cuteness—to address the mammoth questions produced by US military-environmental technologies. Even so, an attunement to the fine grain of the bureaucratic, environmental, and constructive techniques surely can’t hurt.
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