there is a cool pdf version of this essay with images and some design put into it. [You can find it here] <- it’s more fun to read it that way
About a month ago I went to Wilhelmshaven, Germany (, a whole journey on its own), to film a short film named UNDERHANG-Notes. I’m not going to describe the film because I’m bad at it and a formal description just doesn’t work. You should watch it! (If you can. I don’t know when its going to public) Some of the images I use here are from that journey.
I went to Wilhelmshaven to meet someone named Juan De Fuca, thats a small part of their alias at least. Their full name is: “Juan De Fuca Plate” 051- Bernardson .tc .ltd. A company owned super-structure functioning as the new mechanism to maintain the tectonic movements of the lithosphere, a structure that is or hosts or is connected to a sentient non-humanoid being. I don’t really know how it works, I don’t know if anyone does.
The Juan De Fuca plate is actually a small tectonic plate located on the coast of north-western part of the North American continent squished between the in comparison even larger Pacific and North American Plate (plates that have lost their grander meaning because of economic disputes that physically fractured both plates into smaller and cheaper pieces.)
So how did I “meet” 051 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany? Well, the German government has a research project going with the Canadian government to catch, relay and document the signals that these machines use to commune. I was so lucky that I was able to work alongside the researchers for 3 days and take my share of data back to the Netherlands. I used this to make a visual interpretation of 3 small conversations between 051 and apparently a derelict…. something (there is some information I was not able to access.)
OIL REFINERY
My interest in architecture started from an early age. I’ve always been fascinated by skyscrapers and other massive buildings and the role they played in an environment. I never saw many though as the Netherlands is both great at hiding its industry, striving for deindustrialization, and does not build many high buildings because of its swamp-like ground, historic cities and general inconvenience.
These structures like skyscrapers but also other structures on a similar scale like: oil refineries, power plants and chemical plants, super bridges, structures that have have such a different magnitude of scale to our fleshy bodies that they feel alien, their architecture does not seem to aid the people that build them anymore. I will call these structures super-structures.
The global effort to build within the earth’s mantle, 100km deep, is the largest of these structures we know for now, there are very few documentations of how they actually look so for my short film I had to fill in some gaps. For this I used the oil refinery as an example, the oil refinery in ways is the predecessor of the tectonic plate, they both have a similar scale, alienhood and intent. That intent being to perpetuate (economic/physical/libidinal) movement.
Nearby the research centre in Wilhelmshaven is a harbour, oil refinery and a chemical plat that produces S-PVC, in a sense those structures made Wilhelmshaven and the position it now has exist, it is a very industrial city. The HES Wilhelmshaven Tank Terminal to be more precise is a costal tank terminal/oil refinery for deep-sea vessels that go to the EuroPort 4 km down the coast.
The oil refinery and its neighbouring chemical plant span about 3 km. Statistics don’t help in understanding its scale though. Comprehending the scar it represents is a serious challenge for anyone and people local to these structures can make up entire stories as to what the structure is and what it represents.
These ways of making sense come from the haptic nature of the oil refinery, it asks of the viewer to “fill in the gaps in the image, engage with the traces the image leaves.”1 we aren’t necessarily built to answer to that calling though. We tend to try to comprehend structures by finding its “human essence” and establishing certain puncta within the skin it is a textural way of perceiving the intertwining tubes as a single whole, a full frame (and beyond). I am not an expert in these structures, I don’t know where chemicals start and where they end so making up a grander narrative feels redundant. (Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs feels applicable here as well.)
In my documentation I attempted to capture these structures in this way and how they steam and leak into the sky. How the sky is equal parts oil refinery and that the oil refinery never ends.
The same principles apply to the tectonic plate.
COAL MINE
To continue going down the industrial lineage of the tectonic plate we should also look at the coal mine. For my short film I also filmed in a national park in Belgium named the Hoge Kempen. A large part of this national park came into existence because of the coal mines that changed/scared the landscape while it was active in the 19th century, you can see the landscape trying to cope with this history.
Most if not all of these super-structures are simply industry acting within its character. From the coal mine to now the tectonic plate. Magnitude can differ but the structures all act within the same blueprint established in the industrial revolution, they all exist within the process of alienation. This is also why they ask of haptic readings of themselves, something alien can’t be grasped from a punctum, else it wouldn’t be alien, it can only be seen from a glance. There is no other way read it without trying to join in or fall into fictious or even conspiratorial talking points.
But what is the industry’s character than? Its main trait is that of production, production being a very broad word. Steam is a form of production, oil a a form of a production, energy is, consumption is. From a haptic view, the void that is created by the machinery in bubbles deep within the earth (oil) or on the outer layers (coal) is equally a form of production as “void excludes solid but solid must include void to architectonically survive.”2
The origins of all production all start at desire. equally the least and most human of all the emotions as it can become so much larger than us, every economy drives on desire and has its own desires and every industry all the same. Desire goes both ways though, the production within industry also accounts the production of desire. The existence of industry creates the voids of longing simply by existing, it is a similar principle to the nuclear bomb: if it exists why not use it.
EXTENSION
The desire that is made by the desire machine that is industry is another reason to haptically perceive the structure. The glancing what we do upon it and its produce is also what creates the desire to create puncta on it and its produce.
OIL REFINERIES, AGAIN
Although my writing here is in large parts not related to this, I want to end my essay with a theory as to how the tectonic plates are a certain sentience and indulge a bit in the fictitious or conspiratorial ways of creating puncta within industry. Their sentience being a very schizoid anxious and lonely sentience. The dialogues between the two structures in large parts were entirely mediated through a libidinal desire, even more clearly so than us humans (us hiding it behind certain layers of identity.)
What if they are actually just two normal humans, pressing buttons but in deep deep isolation, perpetually being kept alive because of their produce and the role in their production, and there is no way to stop it or to gain anything. A similar existence to the AM in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream but like worse. Another case of science fiction becoming a little less ficticious.
Or just my silly little theories.
NOTES
- Marks, Laura. “Video Haptics and Erotics.” Screen, 39(4), (Winter 1998). p341 ↩︎
- Negarestani, Reza. “Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials.” p44 ↩︎
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fisher, Mark. “Flatline Construct: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.” PhD diss., University Of Warwick, 1999.
Fisher, Mark. “Post-Capitalist Desire.” (Edited by Colquhoun, Matt.) Repeater Books, London, 2021
Negarestani, Reza. “Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials.” Re.Press, Melbourne, 2008.
Marks, Laura. “Video Haptics and Erotics.” Screen, 39(4), (Winter 1998).
Marks, John. “Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity.” Pluto Press, London, 1998.
Hes International. “Hes Wilhelmshaven.” Accessed June 19, 2023.
https://www.hesinternational.eu/en/terminals/hes-wilhelmshaven