CORES

by Nicolas Sassoon & Rick Silva
with an accompanying essay by Elise Hunchuck and Jussi Parikka

Eight Fragments on Eight Stones

Here, on the lithosphere, where the earth meets the sky, there exists a long history of how rocks and stones can be seen as images and can be read as texts. A multitude of worlds has been interpreted through surfaces of stones as they depict worlds.[1] Imaginary or not, they reflect historical events — a vertiginous array of scales, landscapes, and — sometimes — ruined cities. But they also include abstract forms and lines that offer geological points of origin for questions, including those of art and aesthetics. From the poetics of stones to the geological, we are nowadays more likely to count, classify, and catalogue than romanticise: geological surfaces and stratifications are measured and mapped such as in the cartographic codes for lithographic patterns. From sandy and silty dolomite to sandstone and shale, quartzite and granite to igneous rock the surface and subsurface are a slowly-unfolding inscription of different minerals.

The following eight fragments are reflections on rocks, technicity, duration, and place evoked by CORES, the series of digital animations featuring 3D-scanned rocks by Rick Silva and Nicolas Sassoon.

Fragment 01
Stones and rocks are everywhere, and everywhere they mark a place and a time. Not necessarily a moment, as in, historical time, but a site in its duration. An enduring environmental record. To casual observers, as objects, rocks may seem anonymous and interchangeable, but what makes them unique is their exceptionally high viscosity, and from this, their capacity to record deep, long histories. Entirely concrete, they contain an excess of potential for abstraction.

Fragment 02
The heat and pressure of the Earth’s molten core can form metamorphic rocks, conglomerates of other types of rock (like marble and schist). The eruptive force of the Earth pushes magma up and out into the atmosphere through ruptures in the lithosphere — geologic ‘events’ we have named volcanoes — where it cools, hardening into igneous rocks (granite and basalt). Here, where the lithosphere meets the atmosphere, weather and erosion caused by the atmosphere and the material forces contained within it — wind, water, and ice — break down the surfaces of the earth, scouring, weathering, moving them from one place to another. Eventually, they settle, finding themselves in a body of water where they, as sediment (those many pieces of rocks from many different places) settle in, together, the weight of the water above and the atmosphere above that pushed down on them, compacting them, making them harder and harder still. The resulting sedimentary rock — like shale, like limestone, like all other rocks — may, if given the opportunity, eventually make their way back to the top of the lithosphere, where they will meet the atmosphere, once more, to repeat this lithic choreography, once more.

Fragment 03
Stones record and express the passage of time. As mediating records that are geological and not alphabetic and as sensors that also feature in theories of media and time, the way they can be read opens up a different regime of signs: not reading stones for divination, but as data. This does not dismiss the long history of pattern recognition and apophenia where the surface for interpretation can be the Moon, Mars or a rock sample from Earth. But with non-human interplanetary travel underway, the lithic is no longer limited to those secret interiors of the Earth, but expanded out, beyond the surface of this planet to any planet. [2] Now, “we can see it in the night sky, a whole other world,” and now, any surface will do, any scale can contain a multitude of possible worlds. [3]

Fragment 04
Following Michel Serres, we too think “it is worth telling the story of a small, local, singular element, that of an atom, a grain of sand” — a rock — “a thin layer of fluid somewhere in the middle of this violent zone where various flows intermingle.” [4] Geological strata are dynamically shifting, but rocks have been moved around especially intensively and extensively over the past 400 to 500 years, across lands and seas, aboard ships and other vessels. Colonial and scientific expeditions (often the same) shifted botanical, zoological, and indeed, mineral samples across continents, often ending up in Western collections. From Hans Sloane to the Challenge ocean journey to later expeditions to the Antarctic, rocks were removed, collected, labelled, brought back and displayed as items of other worlds. A political geology of rocks is thus inseparable from a political history of colonialism.

Fragment 05
The digital re-rendering of rock samples is but another form of technicity, built upon earlier stratification. The millions of years-long construction of rocky landscapes and geological formations first scanned and then rendered as data have their promiscuous compressions accelerated, here with Boolean operations, as waves of patterns, shimmering, presenting themselves as unstable translations — transcriptions, even — of those almost hypnotic Widmanstätten patterns.

These rocks, like other rocks, exist on liquid, crystal digital screens. Their very display is premised upon their duplication. An individual stone sample is already an information network that can be read for signals across thousands, millions of years, then itself duplicated into something, in a screen. The scans, the abstract patterns of the samples, produce a digitally animated, abstract geology on screens that are themselves a condensation of minerals: silica sand, tin, indium, gallium, sphalerite.

The digital animations are variations on a theme concocted by the rocks themselves.

Fragment 06
Rocks and stones are themselves uneasy kinds of objects. The labels and classifications of collection are but one organisation of a multitude of samples, each sample rock evacuated from it’s landscape. As Robert Smithson remarked on the earth as a museum: “[...] the recovery of rocks makes the earth become a kind of artifice.” [5] Found in abundance and in many varieties, they are collected and displayed, curated and adorned for their visible and invisible qualities.

Fragment 07
But rocks are not strictly cultural, and they are not strictly geologic. Though there are fixed inventories of stones — archives, natural history museums, and scientific collections to name a few — rocks are animated in different ways. They are placed and replaced, measured and shaped to fit a logistical order. Even before its nascent digital re-rendering, the modern history of scientific geology is one of rational order. Sedimentary. Metamorphic. Igneous. And the variety of patterns and structures, aesthetic yet epistemic: one reads the specificities of each stone through abstractions — Widmanstätten patterns, Liesegang rings. How do we read the authorless texts that each stone might reveal? For, “already present in the archives of geology was the model of what would later be an alphabet.” [6]

Fragment 08
Stones are remarkably versatile and as such at the base of the continuum of nature to culture. Entirely artificial as part of the millions of years of forming and weathering, they are formative of architectures before architects, and according to many, art before artists. Crack open a rock, and the patterns revealed are both aesthetic and epistemic. As Serres writes, referring to Jules Verne, rocks and minerals are also a reminder that visual culture does not necessarily start only with the sun and light, the heavens above, but in the darkness of caves and inside rocks. [7]

To return to rocks and all of the affordances they offer [8] is part of the Anthropocene-themed interest in geological stratifications that lends itself to scientific periodisation — and it is a tempting metaphor. But it also shifts geological periodisations to political histories: of colonialism, capitalism, industrialisation, and other timelines that recur in the contemporary moment of rocks as projectiles, and the stones that build up monuments — now ready to be taken down.

Essay notes

1. An essential reference text is Marguerite Yourcenar’s illuminating introduction to Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones. Translated by Barbara Bray. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970, 1985.
2. Here, we respond to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s evocative writing on geophilia in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015), where “the lithic inhabits the secret interiors of the earth.”
3. Responding to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: “Mars is a rock—cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it’s heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world, but too nearby, too close with the reach of the people who've made such a hell of life here on Earth” (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993).
4. Michel Serres. Atlas. Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2005, p. 95, translated in Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain, Vapor, Ray Manual, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014.
5. Robert Smithson. “Fragments of a Conversation (1969).” In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, 188-191. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
6. Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones (1970, 1985).
7. Please see both “The cave streaming with light” and “Matter and mirror” in Michel Serres, Eyes. Translated by Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
8. Following Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, among others.

Essay authors bios

Elise Misao Hunchuck is a Berlin-based landscape researcher, editor, and educator trained in landscape architecture, philosophy, and geography (University of Toronto). She is a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal, a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art School of Architecture (London), a Senior Researcher and Teaching Fellow in the Landscape Architecture program at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London, and a lecturer at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design (University of Toronto).

Finnish theorist and writer Jussi Parikka is professor of Technological Culture & Aesthetics at University of Southampton (Winchester School of Art) and Visiting Professor at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague where he leads the project on Operational Images and Visual Culture (funded by EXPRO – Czech Science Foundation). He is the author of several books including Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology and A Geology of Media. Photography Off the Scale (co-edited with Tomas Dvorak) is forthcoming in early 2021.

Artists bios

Nicolas Sassoon’s work has long been concerned with the tensions between the pixel and the screen, reflecting on their entanglement and materiality by integrating pixelated figures, moiré patterns and early computer graphics into experiential displays. This focus on early computer graphics is driven by the sculptural, material and pictorial qualities of this imagery, as well as its limitations and its poetics. Sassoon's work often explores the projective dimensions of screen-based space, and the many relationships between computer technology and the natural world. His research leads him to engage frequently in cross-disciplinary projects in the fields of architecture, electronic music, textiles, and art. Nicolas Sassoon was born in Marseille, France in 1981, he lives and works in Vancouver BC Canada, on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art (US) Eyebeam (US), Current Museum (US), Vancouver Art Gallery (CA), Plugin ICA (CA), Contemporary Art Gallery (CA), Charles H.Scott Gallery (CA), Western Front (CA), PRETEEN Gallery (MX), Victoria & Albert Museum (UK), the Centre d’Art Bastille (FR), House of Electronic Basel (SW), Arti et Amicitiae (NL), MU Eindhoven (NL) , Today Art Museum (CN), Chronus Art Center (CN), the Berlin Fashion Week (DE)) and the New-York Fashion Week (US).

Rick Silva’s videos and installations envision near-future ecologies altered by technology and climate change. Silva was born in 1977 in Brazil and lives in Eugene Oregon where he is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Oregon. He has exhibited his work in over 20 solo and two-person exhibitions including Transfer Gallery in New York and LA, Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver, New Shelter Plan in Copenhagen, Interstitial Gallery in Seattle, The Ski Club in Milwaukee, and Holding Contemporary in Portland Oregon. Silva’s work has been featured in publications such as WIRED magazine and Rhizome’s book Net Art Anthology.