The most heinous circumstances are the most allegorically rich, but even absent the anarchic brutality of these wars and the Conradian odor of campaigns against them, the lesson is more global: there is no Stack without a vast immolation and involution of the Earth ’ s mineral cavities. The Stack terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices and spitting up mobile phones. After its short career as a little computing brick within a larger megamachine, its fate at the dying end of the electronics component life cycle is just as sad. What is called “ electronic waste ” inverts the process that pulls entropic reserves of metal and oil from the ground and given form, and instead partially disassembles them and reburies them, sometimes a continent away and sometimes right next door. Minerals originally sourced from the Congo might make their way to California via China, before being pulled by hand from a dead phone and burned or buried in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, or Lagos, Nigeria, two of the most active repositories, a short distance from their source. <sup>26</sup>
- Geo-graphy and Geoaesthetics
As a transcontinental effect, this digestive cycle can also be seen as a sort of distributed composition, a discontiguous plastic-metallic mega-assemblage remade every day with little molecular bits floating in the light, across the ocean and our lives. To call these flows “ compositions ” is not to excuse their due ethical weight, but instead to remind ourselves that they are recomposable, and as such, that any sense of inevitability about how they are now arranged today is shortsighted. How unfamiliar could its flux and churn be from what it is now? At the radical end of that contingency, what is the ultimate recomposability of such materials? The answer may depend on how well we can collaborate with synthetic algorithmic intelligence to model the world differently — in other words, thinking takes place in relation to territory, and concepts not only represent the world but also make it according to their situation: diagramming, deforming, drawing and redrawing, and segmenting of the Earth back on itself. We internalize ideas from ground and sky according to whatever perspectives are available (Copernicus, Solaris, Hubble) until like the upside-down spacewalking astronauts, we are dislodged from this reference and given back to the void.
The Stack is not only on the Earth and built out of the Earth; as a composition, it is also a framing of the Earth, and so its geodesign works through its specific sorts of line-making and putting segments of the world in motion. Elizabeth Grosz develops a philosophical trope of demarcation as an elemental principle of animal world-making. She writes, “ The earth can be infinitely divided, territorialized, framed. … Framing is how chaos becomes territory. Framing is the means by which objects are delimited, qualities unleashed and art is made possible. ” <sup>27</sup> Making enclosure by drawing a segment of the world into a presentation is elementary place-making; it is the gesture of geography. Schmitt would not disagree up to this point. The frame, however, is a peculiar sort of introduction of difference whereby the surface of things appears to fold in on itself. It captures and exhibits its subject curled back on itself by a delineation of figure and ground. Grosz links the act of framing, however, not to the subtractive competition of natural selection but to the multiplicative energy of sexual selection and its economies of display, expenditure, and abundance. In her Darwinian parable, the animal draws territory with its paw, its wing, or song refrain not only to fend off predators but also to stage itself in the view of a mate. She quotes from Deleuze and F é lix Guattari ’ s last collaboration: “ Every morning the Scenopoetes dentirostris, a bird of the Australian rain forests, cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over so that the paler internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way it constructs a stage for itself like a ready-made; and directly above, on a creeper or branch, while fluffing its feathers beneath its beak to reveal their yellow roots, it sings a complex song made up from its own notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates; it is a complete artist. ” Beyond what is needed for survival in the moment, this act of self-framing sets the world in motion with a composition that motivates communion. The composability of the Earth is “ not linked to some intrinsic relation to one’s own body but exactly the opposite: it is linked to those processes of distancing and the production of a plane of composition that abstracts sensation from the body. ” Grosz writes that the frame “ is the particular contribution of architecture to the taming of the virtual, the territorialization of the uncontrollable forces of the Earth. It is the frame that ... liberates the qualities of objects or event that come to constitute the substance, the matter. ”
Earth Layer
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