The earth's core is hotter than the sun, yet the earth continues to breath coterminous with its own exhaustion. Weathered by its own volition, the earth necessitates a posthumous technology to resuscitate lifeforms, ecosystems and future subject matter. Geoengineering techniques of the future renders the earth as a flatline, delineating a de-industrial visual culture grounded in contemporary reticence of environmental collapse. Our visitor arrives to the scene all too late. This project follows this visitor, as observations of a derelict industrial wasteland accompany emergent and potential re-terraforming techniques at a planetary scale. Our visitor’s heretical impulse towards the silence of the wasteland is ruptured by preliminary observations for future study:
- “Asthenospherica” indexes a host of nonpetrochemical energy nested deeply below the lithosphere. It is a source of energy to come. Grounded and earthbound, “asthenospherica” is the unbound conceptual impulse towards resource extraction beyond the thanatic-imaginary. But although geothermal energy reservoirs inundated a collective fantasy, their inaccessible depths are those of a primordial abyss. Riddled by the same anonymous processes determinant of poromechanics, catastrophisms, sedimentations but also earthquakes and faultlines. The depths to which posthumous technology explore recoil a Medean impulse latent within asthenospherical research and development.
- Somewhere in the lurianic Kabbalah there are rumors of an earth science tainted by mysticism. In the commentary, tikkun olam is offered as a deep ecology, holobiont structure or abiogenetic fissure of potential - or, a self-referential earth science of planetary restoration. Contemporaneous with other modifications of the climate - solar-diffuse mirrorization, synthetic oceanic assemblages, carbon neutral technology, sulfur dioxide injections - each a method of bringing the earth back to a retrogression , or prior stasis point. These artifacts of a denounced visual culture ooze like confessions of an earth science guided by planetary restoration. Each only defined, and subsequently limited, in the wake of prior catastrophe.
- Sublithospheric accretion-mining colors entire landscapes in rust. The synthetic weathering of the planet is a false divination of a future dislodged by anthropos’ own temperament. Instead, the transmission is replete with images that correspond to the obsolescent decline of steelworks. The residual shock metamorphism gradually enameled the earth’s surface with rust, as the highly accelerated oxidizing process volcanized all things organic and artificial into a desolate landscape immersed in a sepia haze. Our visitor balances above the remnants of a decaying culture, engulfed by an image of the retrograde present. Nearby the flatlined roar of adjacent machines digging, the atmospheric remnants of exometallurgy. Our visitor vents a quiet exhale ten thousand feet from the ground, as exhausted as the worn horizon, in the rust of the earth.