Created by Luca Iuzzolino at the HFK Bremen (Digital Media), 61.4223 invites viewers to experience the moment of contemplative observation of a transformed landscape. Inside a 1m³ cube are sculptures of the ten active German open pit mines. 41 machines represent the active bucket-wheel excavators, with their arms mimicking the movement of the mighty excavator so easily overlooked from a distance. A light flash from the individual machines indicates the moment the real-world counterpart moves a cubic meter of earth: 61.4223 moments per second. Adjacent to the ceiling hung 1m³ cube, the excavation progress is visible in a track-like device showing exactly how many cubic meters have been moved since the installation started.

I propose that technology and the machine as artefacts are subject to the systematics of Marx’s fetish; efficiency and thus, the capacity to create profit out of supposed nothingness are being naturalised into them. Technomass becomes an index of capital accumulation and follows the logic and interest of capital in its distribution and multiplication. Technological actions are guided by causality; in nature that is handled by them, a memory of transformation (Transformationsgedächtnis) is created inside the landscape that makes past and potentially fading possibilities of aesthetic perception (Vergangene Atmosphären) of nature (Seel) tangible and through the thus dwindling freedom of nature, leads to a negative aesthetic judgment, an opposition to the technological treatment of nature.

Luca Luzzolino

As these sites undergo extreme landscape transformation, they become massive technological artefacts, with their open pits being particularly suitable illustrative objects of this entanglement. Once the justification/meaning of the open pit mine ends, they appear ugly; and renaturalized in order to conceal the consequences of the technological treatment of nature.

Project Page | Full Thesis (online/pdf) in German | Digital Media at HFK Bremen

Supervised by Dennis P Paul and Ralf Baecker