沉入地下的喀斯特景观
Down to the Underground Karst Landscape



This project explored the materiality behind cloud computing and storage in China’s very specific area guizhou that inspired by the notion like “zombie media” and “media archaeology”. From what Haff (2014) described that the technosphere that spreads over the “earth and atmosphere” seems to be the physical evidence of global-scale’s human activities, especially because of the technological developments of the recent twentieth century. Moreover, we have never been so able to leave the lasting imprints on the Earth’s surface on a global scale, the artefact that inhabited the Earth’s surface and its subsurface also made the subsurface a precipitated world of chaotic “hyperobject” (Morton, 2013) that littered with industrial debris and land-filled pollutants. Down to the underground Karst landscape implied “what’s on earth” and aimed to present the presence of technological products, which are also 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.

这个项目受到“僵尸媒体”和“媒体考古”等概念的启发,探索了中国贵州这个一特殊地区的云计算和存储背后的物质性。根据Haff(2014)的描述,遍布“地球和大气”的技术圈似乎是全球范围内人类活动的物理证据,特别是由于20世纪最近的技术发展。此外,我们从未如此能够在全球范围内在地球表面留下持久的印记,居住在地球表面和地下的人工制品也使地下成为一个混乱的“超物体”沉淀世界(Morton, 2013),到处都是工业碎片和填埋的污染物。Down to the underground Karst landscape暗示了“地球上有什么”,旨在呈现技术产品的存在,这也是已被开采的地质层的证据,并试图向我的观众提出一个问题,即我们如何追踪任何记录数据中心与自然表面下景观之间纠缠的痕迹?




Details of the installation sculpture.

I selected some key elements such as stones, desertified sand, soil and water to simulate Guizhou Karst landscape’s geological strata in a transparent sculpture installation. Meanwhile, I inserted some abandoned electronic waste boards and cables with copper wires exposed to it’s surface into the installation. However, there are three key points I would like to highlight. Firstly, though the clear acrylic board seemed a little discordant to the other natural features, the reason why I used it is to emphasis a sense of the hidden conflict to my audiences, since the seemingly transparent cloud computing could not claim to be green . Also, because of the complexity of the geological structure, even we were in the “clouds” we could not see the physical existence of materiality behind the intangible cloud data, and how they left the traces in the geological landscape.

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. 
我选择了一些关键的元素,如石头,沙漠化的沙子,土壤和水,在一个透明的雕塑装置中模拟贵州喀斯特景观的地质地层。同时,我将一些废弃的电子废料板和铜线暴露在其表面的电缆插入到装置中。然而,我想强调三个关键点。首先,虽然透明的亚克力板看起来与其他自然特征有些不协调,但我使用它的原因是为了向观众强调一种隐藏的冲突感,因为看似透明的云计算并不能声称是绿色的。此外,由于地质构造的复杂性,即使身处“云中”,我们也无法看到无形云数据背后物质性的物理存在,以及它们如何在地质景观中留下痕迹。






其次,自然特征与这里破碎主机上的投影相结合,不仅是一种地质可视化,而且旨在带来一种视角,即地质学包含了河流、山谷、洞穴和地层的物理方面,这些方面为我们的生存提供了基础,此外还与支持有机和技术生命的更广泛的地球物理系统相关联,特别是传输、计算和存储。




第三,关于在计算机主机上放映叙事电影的设置不是随机选择的,而是有意为之的。我的多媒体装置是基于一个推测性的考古场景,在贵州喀斯特洞穴的深处,曾经是云计算数据中心的命脉,只有废弃的没有硬盘的计算机被埋在地下。


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.

叙事影片通过从卫星影像到地下世界的垂直视角呈现。它的灵感来自布拉顿(2021)所说的,如果《蓝色大理石》可以以电影的形式呈现,我们可能会看到早期的海洋迅速转变为一台被光纤组成的电子电缆网络吞没的蓝色计算机。使用双屏设置的原因是电影包含多个线程,例如虚拟数据和数据中心基础设施如何由洞穴中的电源维护。在这个过程中,许多图像看似不相关,却有着内在的联系。双屏可以打破单一的线性时间概念,但过去、现在和未来在图像中交织在一起,形成一个真空。



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.

地图的概念很大程度上受到了Bratton的堆栈理论(2016)的启发,该理论已应用于行星尺度计算的地缘政治,在堆栈中,Bratton提出了从地球到用户的六个不同层。事实上,堆叠的结构使这张地图难以阅读,但它也试图传达一个复杂的想法,即信息碎片是如何被故意隐藏在大型数据中心背后的。


Bratton, B.H. (2016) The stack: On software and sovereignty. MIT press.
The invisible system behind the Tecent Seven Star Data Center.
The Earth layer.
The Cloud & Address layer.
The City layer.
The Earth layer.
Benjamin Bratton’s stack theory described infrastructures could be divided into six layers, each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers of a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention.

This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers of a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention.

Benjamin Bratton的堆栈理论描述了基础设施可以分为六层,每一层都按照自己的术语进行映射,并将其理解为由硬系统和软系统混合构建的更大整体中的一个组件。我们在堆栈里,它在我们里。

该模型以协议“栈”的多层结构逻辑为基础,其中网络技术在模块化和垂直顺序中运行,为我们新兴的基础设施提供了一个全面的形象,并为其正在进行的改造提供了一个平台。



Visual Experiment: Sand Table Projection.