We Have Always Been Geohackers

As the so-called earth spun before us, the universalist geologic commons emerged. A particular regime embedded within the software that imbues the histories of colonial earth-writing and a geologics in which “[e]xtractable matter must be both passive (awaiting extraction and possessing of properties) and able to be activated through the mastery of white men.” In these scenes of turbocapitalism, the making present of fossil fuels and metals as waiting for extraction heavily depend on software tools, such as Gplates, for handling, interpreting and 3-D visualization of geological data. These entangled softwares form an infrastructural complex of mining and measuring. Such tools belong to what we refer to as “the contemporary regime of volumetrics,” meaning the enviro-socio-technical politics––a computational aesthetics––that emerge with the measurement of volumes and generation of 3-D objects. A regime full of bugs. 

We Have Always Been Geohackers, To be published in: How to Relate, UdK (Universität der Künste), Berlin [forthcoming]

+ access to full online version at the Volumetric Regimes wiki.