Damage Technics

I sit waiting for the camera to capture the passage of time, trying to acclimatise my perception to a different temporality. I watch the ripples on the surfce of the lake and the clouds drift across the sky, the gorse rustle and the distant diggers scurrying: the things that all move in my time. But what I am trying to see is beyond the time of my presence here, beyond the ability of the timelapse function I am using to gesture towards it. I am looking for how this landscape has been and is, was and will be, transforming imperceptibly. Trying to look for rather than looking at.

The diagonal cuts in the spoil-scree slopes opposite have been repurposed by sheep and wild ponies to feed on the scrub. Ingesting and excreting in the service of the soilless land. Moss, grass and ruminant, persistant pondweed photosynthesis. Fungi sprouting from faeces. All this patient toil, just visible, beneath a mountain of quarried spoil, a man-made future moorland-to-be.

Today, for the first time, a rock steadies my tripod, anchoring its spikes into the mud. The camera’s stability is provided by the land – its carbon fibres, once drawn from rocks, now pulled back pendulous down to rock. I sit at the edge of the moor, and the edge of the pit. Fungi grow in faeces at my feet. The moor spills over the previously barren benches of machine hewn, or digger dumped stone. Slowing my perception I watch the gorse rolling annually further down the slopes, trying to perceptually timelapse the decade advance of lichen into moss into grass into gorse.

I see the rain-cut rivulets in the scree, eroding familiar patterns of flow in the shovel-flattened embankments. The warning signs proclaim this to be the destabilising force of subsidence, but it’s actaully returning structural stability to the precarious mounds of spoil. Coagulating finer particles washed through gravel, cohereing granular particles, the gradual carbonation of gaps among the aggregate, securing footings, spreading weight. Fungi cultivated in faeces. How does the crust remediate itself following such comprehensive disturbance? Will these vast banks of ground granite solidify again having been blasted apart, dug and crushed? What are the forces that conjoin pebbles into rocks in the way that molelcules form covalent bonds by sharing electrons? Do those processes scale? While writing, grey clouds have rolled away and returned, the sun momentarily baked the scree and dried the dew. Precipitation, evaporation, precipitation, evaporation, precipitation, evaporation. Sedimentation.

On the drive down I listened again to the excellent Geopoetics episode of the Future Ecologies podcast. An unnamed participant asked: “At what point do the molecules of apple become molecules of me?”. Since I started writing this I have eaten two apples: one russet, one cox. I cast the core of the second aside: at what point do the molecules of apple become molecules of the ground? A couple of minutes later I watch a small fly, whose emerald thorax catches the light, alight on the apple: at what point do the molecules of apple become molecules of fly? What then is the difference between fly, ground, apple, and I, when molecules of apple are simultaneuosly becoming all of us in the same place? Faeces becoming fungi.

My camera has been beeping incessantly all the while, marking out the seconds obsessively, out of sync with the reversing tipper trunks on the western horizon whose diesel chug flutters to and from my ears. In front of me now, a cream-grey waste of recently bulldozed dust. At its edges brave pioneer grasses gather nutrients from the puddles among tyre tracks, whose chaotic patterns cross-hatch the bare bed of a future open-cast lake. What organic life will first force a toehold in these mechanised striations of soilless surface? How do the catepillar track tracks of industry become a matrix within which remediation begins?

At my feet, in the triangle marked out by the tripod’s legs, this process is well underway. In places glistening pebbles the size of coarse salt belie the mechanically ground nature of this ground. Away to the right the moor’s spillage over the edge is perhaps only a single solar orbit underway. I count the species that have carved a niche, whose roots bind scree for larger roots to dig among, find poise and reach up to cast their seeds down the ravine, to hold the stones and channel the rain among them, incrementally replacing that which has been blasted from them. Everywhere fungi are germinating from faeces.

Today, as part of the exhibition Seismic Mother in London, we launched Petrified Media. Below is the text of the talk that I gave, which is just an updated version of the talk posted 18 months ago and given at the exhibition opening. But somehow the conclusion is much more satisfying here, so repetition or not, I’m posting it here:

At its core this book is about the relationship between rocks and digital image technologies, or as I now think of them – earth media and technical media. Everything we make, every cultural object, is derived (or grown) from the resources beneath our feet. By changing the physical state of rocks we have made hammers, cars, iPads and the instruments used in volcanology. From the lithosphere humans have built what geologist Peter Haff refers to as a technosphere, that extends from the deepest mine cavities and underground science facilities up to the geosynchronous orbit of the most distant communication satellites. Haff now describes this technosphere as a planetary paradigm, one whose potential impact is equal to that held by the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere or biosphere. However, Haff writes, “unlike the other paradigms, the technosphere has not yet evolved the ability to recycle its own waste streams”. Volcanoes, I quickly discovered on starting this project are part of the lithosphere’s circularity. One of the main causes of volcanic activity is the geological process of subduction. This takes place at tectonic boundaries where one plate is pushed beneath the edge of another, forcing the softer of the two down into the Earth’s mantle and triggering the release of magma. Subduction zones are sites of geological recycling, where portions of the crust are folded back into the planetary metabolism.

At the beginning of the Earth Art Fellowship from which this book developed, these were some of my questions:

– What is the difference between a rock and a camera?

– If a camera can be made from a rock then is the rock not already capable of photography?

– And what happens when a camera turns back into a rock? (as is presumably already happening at some unknown depth in the crust). Does it return to a previous lithic state or will it sediment new minerals to be unearthed by future geologists?

More recently I’ve been experimenting with extending this playful equivalence between rocks and camera into my personal life, to see if it might be possible to simply replace the memento role that photographs play with rocks. I never print a photograph any longer, but my house is increasingly littered with stones collected from particularly memorable locations or events, and when I hold them, sure enough, I am reminded of the site and time where I picked them up. Following this principle I have decided to illustrate today’s talk with objects rather than power point.

The short video I made during the fellowship begins with the line: “To photograph a rock is to point polished pebbles at a rock”. Which is really just to say that the image sensor in our cameras is a sliver of near-pure silicon, extracted from a predominantly silicate planetary crust, refined, and hooked up to a series of also-silicon computer chips to process light into image data. But, long before human beings made cameras : weren’t rocks always already processing light into data? The photosensitivity of silver and silicon are not inventions after all, but discoveries. Benjamin Bratton writes that with the appearance of the first photograph of a black hole the aperture of the camera has become the size of the planet – meaning just that this image is triangulated from simultaneous telescopic exposures at multiple terrestrial sites. But hasn’t the earth – absorbing incident solar radiation and developing a photosynthesised bio-image across its land masses – always in fact been a camera?

Speaking with Professor Heidy Mader, who sadly passed away before the publication of this book, I was struck by the centrality and continuity of silicon in the experiments being conducted on the Disequilibrium project, with which my Fellowship was associated. Silicate rocks are collected from volcanic sites, they are imaged onto silicon image sensors in the synchrotron at Diamond Light Source and these images were analysed and input into a computer model in Manchester – an algorithmic magma chamber, synthesised in silicon, in which the behaviour of liquid silicates can be modelled. By the time I return from my first trip to visit the various scientific partners in the consortium, this reflexive arc of silicates within the Disequilibrium experiments has captivated me. I summarise it in the video so: Minerals are melted into machines to analyse minerals as they melt.

In volcanology, disequilibrium refers to moments in which the key variables: namely temperature, pressure, gaseousness and crystallization are in constant flux, as for example during eruption. One of the central problems addressed by the Disequilibrium project was therefore to develop a methodology to photograph a rock while it is melting. I turn these words over and over in my head:

• To photograph a rock while it is melting.
• To photograph a melting rock.
• To melt a photographic rock.
• To melt a rock while it is photographing.

…and resolve that my response should be to melt the camera.

But my camera is largely plastic, and most photos are no longer taken with a camera, so perhaps inevitably, I turned my attention to my recently broken iPhone 5, the camera of which also has a scalar relationship with the samples used by volcanologists. Heating a contemporary technical artefact to a temperature at which the melting points of its component parts are surpassed reveals its underlying materiality. Melting breaks down the temporary arrangement of these materials into a functional whole, forcing apart alloys and rearranging elements according to their physical properties rather than their electronic schematic. Anode and cathode seep together. Neat metallic squares of micro-components located to control electrical currents flowing between them now flow together : cobalt, copper, titanium and chromium recrystalise with one another in a matrix of molten aluminium that previously enclosed them in commodity form. A molten phone, baked in the subterranean heat of a nearby magma chamber, is one potential future. To melt a camera – is to manufacture a technofossil.

Jan Zalasiewicz has written extensively about contemporary technofossils, the likely traces of our Anthropocene era that will be evident in the stratigraphic record of the planet to future paleontologists. Silicon and quartz are so inert and resistant that, in his opinion, they are most likely to defy the chemical weathering of deep time, perhaps even more so than the industrially hardened types of steel found in many consumer technologies. It is possible then that some of our semiconductors might survive the extremes of temperature and pressure, and that the microelectronic paths etched into them will retain or imprint their form in the surrounding bedrock. Graptolite fossils have survived to the present as the hollow spaces left by their skeletons became pyritised (pyrite is more commonly known as fool’s gold). In commenting on the likely candidates for pyritization among our current urban detritus, Zalasiewicz identifies “the interiors of any of the myriads of tiny metal and electronic gadgets that we now produce in their millions … for these in themselves contain iron, one of the ingredients of pyrite”. Even in this brief discussion of the futurity of media objects, it is clear that the samples of molten phone I produced will bear no resemblance to the real effects of deep time on today’s electronic waste. Isolated from the hydration of the subterranean environment and dramatically accelerated in comparison to centuries or millenia of gradual baking and compression, the furnace is a blunt instrument whose results are in no way comparable to the speculative future they seek to materialise. Yet this is also how Science operates, by removing samples from their context and simulating the forces upon them in a controlled environment.

In another essay Zalasiewicz uses the example of the Antikythera Mechanism, which was found 120 years ago in the Aegean Sea inside a 2000 year old shipwreck. 72 years after it was found its purpose was understood by analysing it with X-ray tomography, revealing it to be an analogue computer engineered to predict astronomical positions and eclipses, the toothed cogs which enabled its identification also appear to us now as a 2 millenia ancestor of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. It seems inconceivable to us that our current technologies of computation could be forgotten, reinvented and then rediscovered in as little as 2000 years.  And yet this has already happened in the geological blink of an eye that we refer to as History.

Among the temporalities of geological processes such as sedimentation, compaction, metamorphosis, and deformation, the assembly of a mobile digital technology in the early twenty-first century represents a radical rematerialization of terrestrial resources both in terms of speed and geographic reach. We might even describe these mutually alien timescales as existing in a state of disequilibrium. Our media hardwares are pinched together in a geological nanosecond by an industry whose reach encompasses the planet and delves deep into its crust. In the current absence of an internationally scalable program of disassembly, a few years later, discarded and perhaps partially stripped for parts, the terrestrial temporalities of oxidization, erosion, and crystallization take over again. This disequilibrium between the planetary capacity to regenerate material and the technosphere’s capacity to produce waste causes technological flotsam to pile up in “sacrificial zones” across multiple continents.

After a period of lockdown I returned to the samples of molten iPhone in the basement labs in Bristol. I process the resulting lumps of molten metal using the tools and techniques of the petrologist, grinding and polishing them for microscope imaging and electron microscope analysis. Media theorist Jussi Parikka speaks of A Geology of Media to draw our attention to the deep time planetary processes that produce the ores extracted in the service of our industries and sciences. The pounding of waves that has ground and sifted monocrystalline quartz for centuries before sand is scooped into furnaces, the gradual accretion of heavy minerals in the coastal sands of Western Australia and Senegal, or the coursing of thermal springs through volcanic pumice that precipitates a lithium-rich brine now pumped from beneath the Atacama desert for our batteries. But, in practice, the dark grey ingots of no-longer-smartphone are relatively unyielding to the tools of geology. What is required instead is perhaps closer to a Metallurgy of Media.

According to a project conducted at the University of Plymouth where an iPhone was ground to dust and X-ray diffraction performed on the results, a smartphone consists of 22 different metals:

33g of Iron                           
13g of Silicon                        
7g of Chromium                    
7g of Chromium        
6g of Copper                       
2.7g of Nickel                   
2.5 g of Aluminium               
1.6g of Calcium                     
0.7g of Tin                             
900mg of Tungsten              
160mg of Neodymium         
90mg of Silver                       
70mg of Molybdenum          
70 mg of Cobalt                    
36mg of Gold                        
30mg of Praesodymium       
20mg of Tantalum                
10mg of Niobium                 
7mg of Antinomy                  
5mg of Gadolinium               
2mg of Dysprosium              
2mg of Germanium              
2mg of Indium                      
7mg of Antinomy                  
5mg of Gadolinium               
2mg of Dysprosium              
2mg of Germanium              
2mg of Indium                      

To identify a rock using the traditional method of optical mineralogy it must be sliced and polished to a thickness of 30 microns or 0.03mm. At this thickness it becomes translucent and its index of refraction can be measured by the interference pattern of polarised light shone through it. To identify a rock then, it must first be turned into a lens. The rock is incorporated into the body of the camera: earth media becomes technical media. The screen of a phone is similarly polished, buffed smooth to the molecular level using the rare-earth element Cerium. However, the refined metals contained in my manufactured slices of iFossil cannot be identified by optical mineralogy, so, I use the electron microscope. I am told that looking for rare-earth elements in molten lumps of iPhone is literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. But I persist and eventually find that in addition to the 22 metals identified in Plymouth I find fragments of a white lattice made of pure Zirconium, and contacts around a capacitor containing Bismuth as well as gold and silver.

To disassemble a complex technology into its constituent elemental metals requires considerable energy expenditure, involves toxic processes, and will never recover all of the materials. In a 2018 paper titled ‘Limits of the Circular Economy’, the authors model the recycling of metals from a Fairphone 2 by three different routes: smelting the phone in its entirety, dismantling and selectively smelting its modules, and shredding, sorting and metallurgical processing. Of these three techniques, the second has both the smallest environmental footprint and recovers the highest quantity of critical materials. However, even though as much as 80% – 98% of valuable metals such as gold, copper, silver, cobalt, nickel, palladium, gallium, indium, and zinc were recovered, the total percentage of material recycled was only 28%. The circular economy is currently proffered across industry and public policy as a silver bullet to the problems of finite resource and exponential waste, but when at looked at from the perspective of holistic commodities, there will always be a remainder – perhaps as much as 70% – which constitutes slag that cannot be recovered industrially.

Technologies are internally awash with circular systems, feedback loops, and recursive processes. But science is yet to design an apparatus for the re-crystallization of media into minerals, hence there is no means to metabolize all the “integral waste” of the technosphere. We can turn rocks into cameras but we cannot turn cameras into rocks. Having folded the planet into urban environments, scientific apparatus, and media technologies, the question remains as to how we might selectively unfold those actions.

I recently visited the geologist – Dr Arjan Dijkstra – who blended his phone to perform the compositional analysis that I just listed , and I put this question directly to him. He is now working on a means of synthesizing rare earth minerals in the lab, dissolving pure neodymium in phosphoric acid, filtering and baking the resulting residue to produce monazite powder. When asked whether such a procedure could be applied to objects of e-waste like batteries it quickly becomes clear that the only means of doing so would be to shred it into a fine powder, dissolve this in acid and bake the resulting sludge to powder at high heat over long durations. To turn technical media back to earth media, is as toxic and energy intensive a process as the manufacture of the technology in the first place.

Every juncture in the formation, transformation and deformation of minerals and media discussed here is shaped by intense thermal energy. From the production of metal-rich magmas in subduction zones to their scientific synthesis in the laboratory furnaces, from the notional technofossil of my molten smartphone to the selective smelting of e-waste recycling; these processes are all powered either by the “high-temperature internal heat source of the planet”, or by the cheap, widespread availability of geologically fossilized sources of fuel. Even in the currently science-fictional proposition of a completely circular economy, the maintenance of the technosphere would remain dependent upon such energy intensive combustion to de- and re-manufacture its component parts – unless of course everything can be built to last as long as Voyager 1 which was launched two years before my birth and yet continues to broadcast successfully to earth from a distance of 23 billion kilometres – perhaps the furthest extent of the technosphere. I wanted to end today with a somewhat facetious science-fictional proposal of my own. On the wall over there is the first work I have made of this type, a proposal to perpetually generate renewable electricity from the magnetosphere by constructing a continent-scaled copper coil in Antarctica. According to the Anthropocene Working Group the industrial extraction of minerals and metals has now altered the geological functioning of the planetary system that we inhabit. On the surface of that planet the effluents of industry and wastes of overproduction and rampant consumption poison the biosphere and atmosphere. So perhaps we need to find a way to reintegrate these solid waste products – the unrecyclable dross of this circular economy we are supposedly building – into the lithosphere from which it came, to allow the planetary process of subduction to process our waste. Rather than dumping waste in the so-called sacrifice zones of Baotou in China, or Agbogbloshie in Ghana, perhaps we should dump our waste in Subduction Zones, to be sucked at a tectonic pace back into the mantle of the earth, molten and erupted again as metal-rich minerals for novel production. What would happen if we tried to start recycling our waste using tectonic movement and volcanic heat instead of the mechanics of the shredder and the fossil-fuel furnace? Imagine for a second a civilization so convinced of their own ingenuity and so addicted to the speed of their engines that they routinely dump end-of-life tesla batteries into magma chambers to speed the recrystalisation of their nickel-cobalt cathodes for remanufacture. And then wonder: how far are we really from such a futile fantasy?

Next week a new video work, commissioned by Avantwhatever, and the culmination of almost two years thinking about earth observation and the epistemics of false colour images will be launched in Melbourne. So, in anticipation, I am publishing here the text voiceover from it, which in the video is delivered by Finnish performance artist Suvi Tuominen:

Alunite Index
Atmospherically Resistant Vegetation Index
Atmospheric Penetration Index
Atmospheric Removal Index
Bare Soil Index
Burn Area Index
Calcite Index

In astronomical photography colour images are constructed by coding and displaying invisible wavelengths of the infrared spectrum as red, green and blue: visualising radiation as colour. Multispectral remote sensing turns this technique back upon the Earth’s surface to analyse its composition. Satellite imaging has taken a photographic logic developed for understanding the cosmos and applied it to the analysis of lived landscapes.

Carbonate Index
Carotenoid Reflectance Index
Cellulose absorption Index
Clay Alteration Index
Deforestation Index
Difference Vegetation Index
Disease Water Stress Index

In geology, colour has long been used to identify minerals. In the traditional geological practice of optical mineralogy, polarised light is shone through a thin-section rock sample, which can then be identified by its colour: its index of refraction. In present day geophysics it is not the refraction of white light, but the reflection of the infrared spectrum, that’s used in the remote identification of minerals.

Dolomite Index
Enhanced Vegetation Index
Ferric Iron Alteration Index
Ferrous Silicates Index
Fire Detection Index
Forestry Coverage Index
Global Environment Modelling Index

A computer mouse scans across the desk beneath it with a monocular eye, navigating among the red, green and blue pixels of the screen by measuring pulses of reflected light bouncing back from the surface beneath. Rapid reflections guide the cursor across simulated landscapes. A bounding box is drawn on the screen. A prospecting target is marked on the map.

Green Atmospherically Resistant Index
Green Chlorophyll Index
Green Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index
Healthy Vegetation Index
Infrared Percentage Vegetation Index
Kaolinite Index

A specific combination of wavelengths enables the identification of an individual mineral or the analysis of a certain variable. This is known as a spectral index. There are a potentially infinite number of spectral indexes. Each one requires a chromatic calculation to be made, a false colour image made from three or more discrete frequencies of light radiation: added, subtracted, multiplied or divided by one another mathematically.

We are living through a dramatic acceleration of spectral resolution. It is no longer sufficient to image the world in colour. To target its minerals accurately requires hyperspectral perception: the ability to image individual frequencies separately.

Laterite Index
Leaf Area Index
Leaf Chlorophyll Index
Leaf Water Vegetation Index
Magnesite Index
Methane Index
Modified Chlorophyll Absorption Ratio Index

The LEDs in each pixel of this image are made of a compound of indium, gallium, and either phosphorous—for the reds—or nitrogen—for the blues and greens. Gallium is produced from bauxite, and Indium from either cassiterite or sphalerite. The connection between colour and minerals, so apparent in the history of pigments, persists in digital photography. In electronic images, colour is metallurgy: the mixing of colours is the mixing of metals. The glowing pixels of this image are illuminated metals: colour wrought from rocks.

Modified Triangular Vegetation Index
Moisture Stress Index
Muscovite Index
Normalised Difference Built-up Index
Normalised Difference Glacier Index
Normalised Difference Lignin Index
Normalised Difference Nitrogen Index

When acid is poured onto an image sensor the spectrum spills out. Every colour it has imaged, seeps across its surface in saturated hues. When you cut into pixels, colours pour out. The spent silver of mass analogue photography and the rare metals from the screens of last century’s televisions are settling on sea beds and leaching from landfills to sediment future lithologies. Meanwhile, overhead, orbital eyes analyse reflected spectra, scouring for new deposits.

Normalised Difference Snow Index
Normalised Difference Vegetation Index
Normalised Difference Water Index
Normalised Multi-band Drought Index
Normalised Pigment Chlorophyll Index
Optimised Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index

Hyperspectral imaging operates by vibrating a quartz crystal with specific, audible frequencies to manipulate its refractive index. This compression and decompression of its molecular structure selectively filters the wavelengths of light passing through it. To analyse the composition of the landscape we must look through a resonated rock.

Photochemical Reflectance Index
Plant Senescence Reflectance Index
Quartz Rich Rocks Index
Red Edge Position Index
Renormalised Difference Vegetation Index
Silica Dioxide Index
Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index

Due to its extreme dryness and high exposure to ultra-violet radiation, the Atacama desert has been used as a terrestrial analogue for a Martian landscape. The low levels of nitrates in the soil make both unsuitable for supporting vegetation. To image these remote landscapes with a spectral index is to assume their future function in the production or transmission of energy, data, or images.

To apply a geological index to a landscape implies a concession to its minerals. The extraction of images from the ground precedes the extraction of minerals from the ground. Imaging the planet with this mineral hungry gaze assumes that it exists only to provide for the production of images.

Structure Intensive Pigment Index
Sulphate Index
Transformed Difference Vegetation Index
Triangular Vegetation Index
Water Band Index

My mouse scrolls over landscapes colourised by spectral calculations: pixels of pegmatite and quantified quartz, that will all be refined to reflect and record, transmit and illuminate images. Landscapes optimised for the production of images, images optimised for the production of minerals. Landscapes reproduced on screens, screens reproduced from landscapes. Even when a digital image doesn’t move — the screen it appears on has a ‘refresh rate’. What is the refresh rate of a landscape?

Worldview Improved Vegetative Index
Worldview New Iron Index
Worldview Soil Index
Worldview Water Index

Cameras of crystalline metal survey landscapes, capturing the reflectance of rocks to feed their own futures. Satellites and screens feed on soil adjusted landscapes, transmitting indexed images of normalised deforestation. Colour has become a technology of quantification: endlessly indexing every inch of the earth to calculate the profit from its pixels. What are the worldviews embedded in these spectral indexes? What worldviews do they exclude?

The meaning of the word index is dependent on context. Here it signifies the measurement of a specific condition, or the presence of a certain mineral. In financial markets an index measures the average change in value, of a single commodity or a range of products. To measure the economic viability of a mineral deposit, its volume is calculated by rendering the subterranean space in blocks: pixelating rocks quantifies their value.

Bloomberg Copper Index
Dow Jones Commodity Industrial Metals Index
Dow Jones UBS Aluminium Subindex
Nasdaq Commodity Silver Index
Precious Metals Basket Index
White Metals Basket Index

Indexes of visibility and indexes of valuation. Indexes of visibility and indexes of valuation. Indexes of visibility and indexes of valuation. Indexes of visibility and indexes of valuation.