Environmental Machines, Datafied Earths

Abstract

The presentation will depart from the method of Geocinema, which is to examine infrastructures of earth-sensing data as forms of cinema. Drawing on their recent fieldwork on the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China and their subsequent documentary, Making of Earths (2020), Solveig Suess and Asia Bazdyrieva will speak on the techniques of earth sensing, vast resource extraction, and present day demands aimed towards battling a future of climate change. While simple sets of data are accrued from geological to techno-political formations, they translate into the many versions of Earths. These large-scale imaging operations feed back and circulate across scales of the body, the apparatus, the landscape.