As a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow, I am now working on a four-year artistic research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund called Cryptocrystalline, which will include new works that invite being-with the inhuman, around the topics of geological animacies and data capitalism in the geographies of the U.S. Western deserts. Rare earth minerals serve as the electric interface of our most intimate touch, communication, computation, and governance. The acceleration of climate crisis in the past half century is occurring at the same time as the rise of media and data-driven societies. How can we attune our attention to earthly substances and agencies as they shapeshift through capitalist supply chains of technological commodities? My focus is on the legacies of toxic colonialism in the Great Basin in California and Nevada, and as a geopolitical staging ground for outer space travel and mining that aim to sustain data capitalism and post-petroleum economies.

Cryptocrystalline gives slow, observational attention to the subterranean and the geological within an overlooked geography at the core of shifting strategies of power and technogovernance: the Great Basin. It is an active volcanic region extending from Southern Idaho to Nevada and eastern California. A vast, geologically formed desert with the largest and most ancient artesian water reservoirs on the continent, the Great Basin has been home to humans for over 20,000 years. It has been ravaged by settler colonialism, with the Gold Rush in the 1850’s followed by contaminating tests in nuclear weapons development, drone control centers for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more recently, rare earth mining, artistic earthworks, and experiments in corporate sovereignty.

My project focuses on these legacies of and resistances to toxic colonialism in the Great Basin, and the staging grounds for extraterrestrial ambitions that aim to sustain data capitalism and post-petroleum economies. Through multiple extended site visits and interviews, I will produce experimental documentaries, writings, and extended visual materials that focus on the geological interconnections of selected sites: the expansion of Silicon Valley’s infrastructures and land claims from Mountain View across I-80 into the rolling desert hills of Sparks, NV; lithium mining claims surrounding the Paiute people’s Kooyooe Pa’a (Pyramid Lake); queer gentrification and hot springs culture in the desert; and monitoring the active volcano that lies beneath the Idaho National Laboratory, the first nuclear reactor in the U.S.