Spectral Ecologies: Sintering More‐Than‐Human Pasts to Less‐Than‐Certain Futures

How do we mourn the loss of more‐than‐human beings, and what becomes of them when they are gone? This commentary examines two installations in Spectral Remix , an art exhibition at the 2025 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans. The first is Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer's Glacier Graveyard , which memorializes glaciers lost to anthropogenic climate change. The second is the XYZ Collective's The Atlas of Heritage Trees , which uses laser scanning, 3D printing, and digital animation to rematerialize ancient trees now threatened by climate change and saltwater intrusion. Drawing on embodied and affective encounters with each installation, I show how Glacier Graveyard extends human funerary rituals to glaciers through an immersive and visceral encounter, while The Atlas of Heritage Trees imagines uncanny technoscientific afterlives for dying trees as they are translated into digital forms. I engage the analytic of sintering —which refers to both the physical process that bonds ephemeral snowflakes into durable glacial ice and an advanced laser technique used in 3D printing—to examine uncanny resonances across these two more‐than‐human works. Taken together, these works show how installation as a medium can facilitate a deeper reckoning with more‐than‐human pasts and less‐than‐certain futures, forcing us to confront which bonds we choose to make and which bonds we choose to break in our shared worlds.