Log from Lab #4
How do we make visible what is systemically obscured—especially when the tools we use to visualize the problem are themselves part of it? That became the central provocation for this lab. How to extract the problem with extraction through our own extractive practices? Working with data, images, and immersive technologies we often find ourselves glaring at the fractures behind the smooth screen, and they’re glaring back. It is a Mineral Drama, as the title of the lab declared, an uncomfortable staring contest. Don’t blink. Try to hold your gaze longer than your co-star. It’s impossible to win, it’s impossible to not look away, but there’s a drama there and it’s planetary in scale. It pits digital against geological, personal against political and the frictionless scroll against the coarseness of the raw materials. The ambition to excavate the smartphone—its buried minerals, its global conflicts, its geopolitical scripts—is enough work for a lifetime. We had five days.
And then the screen lit up again.
The largest bankruptcy in Swedish modern history came as no surprise if you’d been following Swedish news, but the Northvolt deep dive hit like a small, bright crystallization of the slow violence we were aiming to trace. 💎The sustainable car battery company’s promise of powering the so-called green transition instead left dark holes in the national pension funds that had invested billions in the endeavor. What’s left are also gigafactories in Skellefteå that never delivered the Lithium-ion batteries they were built to construct. What’s left are laid-off immigrant workers, scrambling to stay in a country that desperately needs more people in the north but fails to support those who arrive. Another green promise turned 👻. A moment when imperceptible trajectories flickered visible (?) and felt (?).
Let’s set the scene.
(Photo: Emilia Wiehe)
“We” were myself, artist-architect Cenk Güzelis, film- and theatre director Gorki Glaser Müller, and artist-filmmaker Alva Qi. We started out in a couple of prep meetings online where we decided that Cenk would share his work with a modified version of the app Record3D giving us the capability of streaming ourselves (or our faces, or anything, using the LIDAR on our smartphones) into Unity, real-time. On the website for the Northvolt bankruptcy auction, we found 3D scans of four of the factory facilities, made for showcasing the objects that were up for sale. So we could actually do virtual walk-arounds in these big hangars with racks tall as trees and called things like “Coating Anode” and “Vortex Flow Crystallizer”. How do we enter into those spaces not just as prospective buyers (I try to “go-visiting” the feeling of having the virtual tour intensifying my urge to spend tens of millions of dollars on a Coating Anode… and fail) but as ourselves or at least our LIDAR selves?
We could see the scans on the auction site were made by Matterport, a Californian company specialising in spatial mapping and the creation of so-called “digital twins”. That was a start. I found a python script that could help us “archive” the models, meaning download them for offline viewing. The downloads gave us .DAM-files that we didn’t know what to do with – until we found another script to convert them into .OBJ files and so possible to import into Unity. Cenk applied all the textures (coating the Coating Anode). Suddenly, we were inside.
While Cenk added a billion texture files to the models we took some time to level the group: I sat with Alva and Gorki to teach them how to understand the weird poetry of the command line. How to run scripts in the terminal, find the information needed to download the scans using browser inspector. (If this sounds foreign—spend some time with your terminal. It teaches you to grasp things by the root. <3)
We populated the models with 3D-objects: a Tesla car, a reindeer, workers digging out the floor, as well as texts we’d found in the comment sections of Youtube videos where the Northvolt CEO Peter Carlsson describes the vision of his company. Hopeful remarks, stories from workers who enjoyed the landscape of Västerbotten, paranoid witness statements saying they’d seen Chinese spies sneaking around the factory buildings etc. And then “Anyone here after the bankruptcy?”. Well, we were, and so were the Matterport workers scanning the facilities. We could see them hiding in stitches and behind pillars.
Lithium-ion batteries are built on the same opaque infrastructures of exploitation as the fossil fuel systems they aim to replace. As one analyst put it: “Those who control these supply chains will control the balance of industrial power for the remainder of this technological cycle.” Is this the right strategy for life on this planet? If so: who do we want to have that control? What if the factories were collectivised? What if Trump bought them? Or China? Or you or me? In an attempt to mirror the ongoing bankruptcy auction we thought: what if we auction out the models we’d scraped?
The event we were a part of at the end of the lab week was called “enjoy the unknovvvn” and “gathered people exploring intersections of art, technology and shared experience”. There were performances, installations, pop up shops, some juggling and lots of conversations. There was a theme of stones running through all of the days, with alchemy, mineral deals and other entanglements of digital and ecological systems literally displayed in an old shop on Claesgatan in Malmö. We’d understood that the podcast Café Bambino was using the event in order to launch their own crypto currency, branded as “socialist”. If we were to auction out the models we figured it would then have to be in the form of NFTs. The fact that we could then have the winning bidder buy Northvolt with socialist crypto was just conceptually very elegant, n’est ce-pas?
The auctions were carried out one every half hour, with 2-4 bidders on each slot. The bidders were live streamed into the models and the rest of the audience could see the auction projected on a wall in the shop. The starting bids were the same as the real starting bids, only in BAMBINO$ instead of SEK.
(photos Thom Kiraly)
I called out CAN I GET ONE HUNDRED MILLION?
Full of our own conceptual elegance, what have we really made visible? When we try, we take in our hands the very artifacts of this crisis. Scanning the problem is the problem. It sits in the very chemistry of photography and the very chemistry of power. Have we turned these operations against themselves in any way whatsoever? I laugh. Sitting in this heap of Drama, trying to stop/think/accelerate/mirror/whatever. I blink. My opponent continues to stare with its double gaze, through one velocity that dazzles, and another that drains.
👁️✋👁️✋👁️✋👁️✋👁️✋👁️✋
Keep swimming. Keep computing.