HANQI LI
BIO&CV
沉入地下的喀斯特景观
Down to the Underground Karst Landscape
This project was inspired by the notion “media archaeology” and explored the materiality behind cloud computing and storage in China's guizhou area. Drawing on Haff’s (2014) idea of the technosphere as physical evidence of global-scale human activities, and Morton’s (2013) concept of the chaotic "hyperobject" formed by industrial debris and pollutants, Down to the Underground Landscape used projection installation combined with a sculpture that simulated Guizhou's landscape to present the evidence of geological strata that have been mined, and try to bring a question that how could we seek of any traces that recorded the entanglements between data centers and landscape beneath the natural surface to my audiences?
Secondly, the natural features that combined with a projection on the broken mainframe here, was not only as an geological visualisation, but also aimed to bring a perspective that geology encompassed the physical aspects of rivers, valleys, caves and stratum that provided a foundation for our survival, additionally linked to a broader geophysical systems that supported both organic and technological life, especially the transmission, calculation, and storage.
Thirdly, the setting about projecting the narrative film on a computer mainframe was not a random choice, but intentionally. And my muti-media installation was based on a speculative archaeology scenario that in the depths of Guizhou’s Karst cave, where once the lifeblood of cloud computing data centers, only abandoned computers without hard disks are buried underground.
Down to the Underground Karst Landscape exhibited on the Arts Electronic Festival, Linz. (2023)
Screenshots of the narrative films.
The film presented through a vertical perspective that from satellite image to the underground world. It was inspired by what Bratton (2021) noted if The Blue Marble could be presented as a film, we might perceive the rapid transformation of the early oceans into a blue computer engulfed in a network of electronic cables made up fiber optics. And the reason for using dual-screen setup was that the film contained multiple threads, such as the virtual data and how data center infrastructure was maintained by power in a cave. In this process, many images appeared unrelated, but were intrinsically linked. The dual-screen could break down the single linear concept of time, however, the past, present and future are intertwined in the images to create a vacuum.
An archaeological map.
The concept was greatly inspired by Bratton’s the stack theory (2016), which had applied to the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation, and in the stack Bratton presented six different layers from the Earth to the User. In fact, the stacked structure made this map difficult to read, but it also tried to convey the complicated idea of how pieces of information were deliberately hidden behind the large-scale’s data centres.
Visual Experiment: Sand Table Projection.