Agnoston 1

This work addresses contact without acquaintance. Encounters with life forms we will never meet. Most species will remain unrecorded, and countless are vanishing within our lifetime. Yet each of those species is already acquainted with us through our far-traveled emissaries—microplastics. The pale discs read as gauges—they suggest eroded spherules from polymer breakdown, tally marks, and the nurdles (pre-production pellets) themselves. The tidy near-grid promises method and legibility, yet the translucency clarifies the terms of knowledge, precisely by blurring the line between observation and contamination. Plastics bear our trace and carry it ahead of us, introducing our civilization to organisms our sciences may never name.