Rock Repo

With this collection of computational ROCKS, The Underground Division gets closer to the unstable stories of particular ROCKS as told through scientific, poetic, public and technological discourse.

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Sinking Alloyances + Planetary Burial

May 2021

Planetary estuary environments are recognised for their capacities to capture and store carbon, known as carbon sequestering. Quantified, measured and commodified as sinks for so-called 'bluecarbon', saltmarshes are rendered back into the flows of carbon trade.
Sound: Shadow Graphs, Katrina Burch aka Yoneda Lemma feat. Ultrasonic Dreams (2020), commissioned by Metal for the Estuary Festival 2021.

Violent amalgamations

June 2020

Conga damage, in the Cajamarca region. Computational ROCKS are projected over satellite images appearing with the creepy latency of a wound waiting to be re-opened. Modelling so-called rare earth minerals, precious metals and ore deposits from gold extraction.

Attractions

February 2020

Oil spills inside a particle of rock in purple rejection, and text connectors juxtaposed with polarized terms on magnetic forces, in two planes.

Realtime/Runtime

February 2020

Apparatus of extraction. Atomic number 14. Silicon authoring rocks authoring silicon. Crystalline to hypercomptation to landfill. Blue-grey metallic lustre. Cooling elements.

Lithopologies

February 2020

A formula to be kept close, some scaled up-and-down rock formations on a deadly vehicle set on fire and a fossilized stellaria shelving its matter on top. All in smooth rotation.

Geopoethics

February 2020

Microscopic rainbows of an ordinary rock, with nonstop rotation of colonially implicated crystals in the form of sugar, recipient and citrine; and with nonstop roll of synonyms of the word "neutral" cutting together geology apart.

Feeling backwards

February 2020

A backward speculation: feeling amalgams of projection and not, re-writing rocky memories of scanning procedures, ongoing friction written form the core of queer technosciences, on top of a very mundane workspace.

Procedural Worldmaking

February 2020

Mundo Subterráneo. One Million, two hundred and twenty five thousand three hundred and fifty vertices to be grabbed. Two Lidar caves scaled to be moused over overlap on a flatland. Volcanic rearrangings and mythic proportions.

Unthought infrastructure

February 2020

Transtextual combinatory flow in opposite direction to the moves of a diamond, a piece of coal and zoomed-in azurite ... all on top of a tiny loop of a reversed volcano eruption. Check the computed lighting, shining on the diamond stuff some are made of.

 

Rock Repo

With this collection of computational ROCKS, The Underground Division gets closer to the unstable stories of particular ROCKS as told through scientific, poetic, public and technological discourse. Recognising that ROCKS have their own lively forces and relationalities, the Division studies ROCKS' 3D imaginings, the softwares and hardwares that ROCKS intervene on and builds new glossaries on the go. These studies operate as a chipping away at what limits the collective resistance and reparative capacities of and with ROCKS. However, a great deal of stony patience is required to resist and repair the damages from the very practices which bring ore and its energies to the surface of the earth.

As an ongoing inquiry into what ROCK is, the REPO asks what ROCKS could be and in which ways ROCK is seen or considered as an entity separate from its environment. It works with the 'deep implicancies' of moving between figure and ground, asking what happens as a result of this cut, and what other formations could appear. Sharpened by queer and anticolonial sensibilities, the Division investigates the way undergrounds are quarried, measured, quantified, historicized, visualized, circulated, predicted, classified, remembered and modelled. The REPO as an instrument itself crystallizes some stories of spatial and temporal geologic processes and throws rocks through the glaciated windows of turbocapitalism.

The ROCK REPO is a device built by a team of trans*feminist post-normal scientists for thinking with ROCK. Managing rock slope instabilities by LiDAR scanning, optimising strata modelling for fracking, rendering cavities in 3D for gaming, and algorithmically smoothed rock shaders are all deposited in the REPO. The REPO inquires into these banal, exquisite, violent, static, carbonivourous figurations to fracture the normative 3D processes of geocomputation and their crushing exploitations and extractions.

The first seven amalgamates were made for Body Building (TETEM: Enschede, 2020). The 8th, Violent Amalgamations, is developed for the on-line exhibition ¿Cómo continuar? (Centro Cultural de España in Lima, Peru; forthcoming, 2020). The 9th, Sinking Alloyances + Planetary Burial, is an audiovisual installation Eco Gallery at Wat Tyler Country Park, commissioned by Metal for the Estuary Festival 2021.