Abstract
New Operaism explores new ways that humans can operate within the deepening Anthropocene, challenging the ontological positions that take for granted a benevolent nature. The project is a speculative fiction that envisions a new form of territorial life, one that seeks to inhabit the uninhabitable. Given the vulnerability of coastal waste infrastructures, the project attempts to transform a drowning landfill at the mercy of climate change into a thriving post-material community. Examining the starting and ending points of the global trans-boundary electronic waste flow, the vulnerable communities living in close proximity to the landfill begin to occupy their new aquatic territory by processing the landfill and trans-boundary electronic waste into building materials, aquaculture and energy systems, augmenting the natural and synthetic systems into a cyborg ecology. A society established from urgency, the exploited labourers project themselves into an alternate reality, one in which they gain full autonomy by harnessing the power of technology to move into a post-labour future.