Designing the Monstrous Sublime: A Field Guide to the Anthropocene’s Hybrid Creatures

Hermit crabs caught in lightbulbs. Lab animals manippulated to grow parts of human bodies and cows with holes installed in their flanks (“connulated”) so that scientists can study them. But also: Fordite, a “rock” formed by the congealed drippings from automobile painting racks, and Trinitite, rock that fused as the result of atomic tests. And: fake trees that are really cellphone towers, mountains missing their mined tops or artificial peaks from which we ski or in which we go for rides.

More familiarly yet: hedgerows, plantation forests in their endless grids, contrails and robotic dogs. All of these are hybrids that we as human beings have either created deliberately or caused to appear through our actions and inventions, and all have been collected by Nicolas Nova into his remarkable little black book, A Bestiary of the Anthropocene. (Set Margins': 229 pp.)

These marvels are packaged into a tight little volume that, like any good field guide, you could slip into your backpack and then consult when you run across that glob of Fordite or notice that the albatross circling over your head is outfitted with cameras and sensors to track shipping movements.

But, as its name implies, the Bestiary is also self-consciously modelled on those medieval manuscripts that collected fantastic inventions such as unicorns and mermaids along with merely unfamiliar animals, or parts of animals that were of particular interest—apparently beaver balls were much valued and thus commented on. The difference is that these are not “real beasts next to invented ones,” but hybrids that result from human actions. They are also all, and mostly frighteningly, real.

Some of our creations or interventions, like the animals we use to track people or bombs, or the lab rats onto which we grow human parts, are deliberate. So are the hedgerows and Disneyworld mountains, which are also examples of how we change nature for our own good or at least enjoyment, just at a larger scale.

Then there are the complete recreations of nature so that they can performs task for us, whether they be those cellphone towers or artificial reefs made from building parts or deliberately scuppered ships.

In some cases, we do so for the better, as in planting green walls on buildings or making use of and promoting the growth of bacteria or worms that can ingest and break down plastic.

In others, nature has learned to make use of what we have produced: birds employ whatever they can find in our largely human-made worlds to make nests, but Nova also cites the sea skater, which has adapted itself to use the vast islands of congealed human waste floating around the oceans.

Overall, though, the hybridization of the human-made and the natural has produced more horrors than wonders. Nova mentions hermit crabs who thought they could make themselves at home in discarded lightbulbs and got caught, sea turtles strangled by the plastic rings that once held sixpacks of soda, and, of course, the landscapes turned into sterile wastelands by nuclear leakage or explosion and chemical leaks.

For all that, and for the doom and gloom that pervades the essays Nova commissioned to accompany his bestiary—along with the black paper on which texts and images are printed—there is something wonderous and at times even delightful about these hybrids. “Robots roam playfully in the uncanny valley,” essayist Matthieu Duperrex notes.

Our mouths drop open in disgust and terror at some of these monsters and monstrous scenes, but we also smile at the Roomba hitting the wall over and over again or delight in the beauty of some of these hybrid creatures. Certainly, some of the artificial landscapes we have produced have their own beauty, even if superbugs “created” by adaptation to antibiotics and spread through our global economy threaten our lives.

I think Nova could have gone a bit larger in scale and noted how ranges of skyscrapers in central cities become artificial mountain ranges, with their foothills, cliffs, and valleys, and oil refinery and processing sites such as the area between Houston and Galveston or the line to the west of Rotterdam have become places that do not have a direct analogy in nature, but are new, monstrous scenes.

That monstrousness is the quality the Bestiary has but does not quite highlight: the sublime quality of these phenomena. Almost all the hybrids he has collected evoke the mixture of awe and horror, wonder and fear, and exhilaration and vertigo that Edmund Burke defined as the sublime.

The texts that follow the images emphasize the unsustainability, violence, and cruelty of what we have done, which is as it should be, but they do so in a manner that is conventional. The wonder of this little book is, or could have been, to go beyond preaching to the converted to lay out that sublime quality.

If Nova had shown the hybrids in a large format, in full color, in a beautifully presented book that carried the medieval tradition of bestiaries into our contemporary age, it might have made us shudder, wonder and, ultimately be aware of the scale and strangeness as well as, yes, the horror of what we as human beings have done.

That would, however, have been another book, and not one that you could pull out when, on your hike through the wilds of the Ukraine, you noticed a trained eagle take out a drone overhead and wondered whether it was related to a similar raptor you noticed clearing the fields around the airport where you landed of birds. I think I would happily give that ability up for a true modern bestiary.

I would also love, as I noted above, to see this Bestiary extend into the realm of the completely human-made world, noticing how most of our buildings are made out of hybrids of ore, sand, chemicals, and petroleum products that have been transformed into I-beams, concrete frames, or wall coverings so thoroughly that we do not notice them.

I would love to see how building waste becomes its own landscape of garbage piles, and how we create hybrid forests of ferns, potted plants, and bamboo inside our office buildings. The hidden rivers that bring water into cities and carry waste out, the woven webs of cables, and the vistas opened and closed by billboards could all be part of such an extended collection of marvels and horrors.

What Nova has concentrated on instead are those places where the strange appears in a clear and evident manner. The advantage of his choice is that such prosthetic beasts (including us human beings, as he points out) and landscapes are easy to identify. The disadvantage is that they are relatively rare.

I look forward to a second Bestiary that would let me roam through the places where we live, work, and play to find the sublime horrors and strange delights hidden in the surfaces of the everyday.

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.