This Game
Comes With
the Worst Prizes
Virtualizing the virtual: A real-time simulation of Bayan Obo, the world's largest rare earth extraction site unfolding continuously. No Player/ No Exit.
About
The project looks at the Bayan Obo site in the Mongolian desert, a crucial source of rare earths whose dirt transubstantiates into the ether that sustains planetary computation, green tech fantasies, and interplanetary reveries. The extraction site exists like a perpetually open scar on the face of a capitalocenic earth as it looks back at us. Way more powerful than land art yet irreversible. A seemingly irresistible catastrophe.
Our so-called IRL existences are shaped by decisions made online, and that realm in turn shapes everyday life in the physical world. The rare earth elements mined here are refined into the magnets, phosphors, and catalysts that make planetary computation possible. In other words, the dirt in Bayan Obo is atomized into the bits that power crypto mining, stock trading, video games, mass surveillance, or warfare. All the while, operational images produced through satellite imaging, spectral scanning, and machine vision generate and parse the datasets used to enable further extraction.
Extraction and perception close into a self-perpetuating loop, as reality resolves into images.
Contemporary mining works like videogames. Operators in centralized control rooms in, say, Australia, navigate gamified 3D renderings of extraction sites distributed the world over, interfacing with real-time sensor data that turns deep-time geological complexity into a series of available, actionable resources, often through rigs that look remarkably like gaming setups.
The externalities of extraction and processing are spatially displaced, concentrated in planetary sacrifice zones that remain out of view. Some technobros get rich AF with magic internet money so they can drive Teslas by the Bay, while people in the Mongolian desert are left with a radioactive wasteland for millennia.
In this game, geological data, satellite imagery, and topographic information, alongside algorithmic techniques for real-time atmospheric simulation, have been assembled into an environment devoid of player agency. Here, you can only see.
When reality is gamified, and extraction becomes a game, this piece asks what refusal can look like. When images take on extractive work, it asks whether other ways of seeing are possible without rendering the world open to more capture.
Aesthetic Dissonance
The state of mental discomfort or psychological stress experienced when holding contradictory beliefs, values, or ideas as aesthetic experiences at the same time. The earth's destruction renders literally in-credible, spectacular landscapes.
At Bayan Obo, the geometric precision and arresting color palette of the terraced extraction sites turn planetary-scale violence into a perverse technological sublime, where awe is produced by large-scale territorial intervention and industrial systems become objects of wonder through a politics of perception.
Here, a world-ecology of power, production, and reproduction that binds class rule, heteronormative patriarchy, and white supremacy to projects of endless accumulation depends on rendering its own violence as scenery. It trains perception to find beauty where it should seek accountability. The gaze stares in wonder at the violence produced by accumulation, while aesthetic experience becomes accumulation's medium.
Zines
Produced during an artist residency at Verge Contemporary, Sacramento, CA.
![[dis]possessed](https://differential.space/thisGame/img/06-1small.png)
Image-acquisition as a colonial act of territorial dispossession. Deep-time geology compressed into the timescales of capital. Risograph print.
Turning dirt into crypto. The internet as the colonial realm at the end of Geography. Laser print.