Adam Antonio Montoya, IDSVA

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Document Type

Text

Broad Creation Date

2026

Language

English

Location

Portland

Abstract

This dissertation examines the North American deserts as sites of ontological uncertainty and transformation. It reconsiders the region’s familiar images of wilderness and frontier through their unstable appearances and latent depths—material and otherwise— revealing not absence or void, but a resplendent perceptual condition in which mirage, glamour, and erasure become world-forming forces. The project thus seeks to develop a theory of the desert’s cryptæsthetic dimension, elaborating on its hallucinatory logic of latency, the phantasmic, and dream.

Across three conceptual terrains—Malpaís, Abgrund, and Pandæmonium—this study moves through volcanic badlands, irradiated basins, haunted canyons, and ontological sinkholes tracing out this cryptic sensorium in which seeing and feeling is inseparable from the oneiric and the imaginal. Through a rejection of the extractive and reductive empiricism of the so-called west, this dissertation favors instead a more situated attunement and reckoning-with these places as strange animacies on their own terms—proposing a phantomist methodology in response that privileges its disorientation and spectral proximity.

A “wilder west” thus emerges not as a symbolic frontier of its endings or failures, but as an epistemic condition of its own transformations: a haunted ecology where the grounding of perception and perspective becomes delirious, disobedient, and daemonic. To be “on phantom country,” then, is to dwell within this unstable field from the standpoint of a desert-ed humanism, where the ground itself gives way to proliferating abyssal images and inhuman correspondences. Wilderness and deserted-ness then reappear not as a pristine nature beyond nor without the human, but as an in-formed, pandæmonic mode of thought at the darkened edges of its own campfires.

KEYWORDS: desert west, animism, phantomism, wilderness ontology, abyssal phenomenology, pandæmonic ecology, cryptæsthetics

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Fine Arts | Philosophy

Publisher

Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts

City

Portland ME

ON PHANTOM COUNTRY: THE CRYPTÆSTHETICS OF A WILDER WEST



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