Digital immediacy obscures the material extraction beneath it

Evidence

Immediacy stylizes the spirit of circulation in instantaneity and realness, but Burtynsky’s works mediate the supply chains and resource development that materialize the platforms of the circulation economy. As he himself notes, “In our ephemeral information age, people think we’ve left behind the stone, bronze and iron ages … But they’re all still going on—we use tonnes of this stuff every day. You just have to look.” His looking therefore encompasses projects like Quarries, Mines, Oil, and more, relaminating the culture of on-demand flow to the pits of its engineered waste, while hypothesizing that all this terraforming could work for different ends. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 331

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether ‘relaminating flow to waste’ describes a genuine alternative aesthetic or merely a new representation of the same system.
• ADDENDUM: The material substrate beneath immaterial culture parallels the tamarisk/tree-material angle; both render visible what planetary infrastructure hides.
• XREF: connects to: Mastering matter is now less pressing than building information networks — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 680; Image and text circulation materially drives the climate crisis through its physical substrates — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 558; Extraction imperative forces relentless automated tracking and framing experience as free raw material — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1067 (+1 more)