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Saliocene
designed in Nikole Bouchard’s studio at Yale University (2019)
featured in WASTE MATTERS: Adaptive Reuse for Productive Landscapes edited by Nikole Bouchard (2021)
presented at ACSA Imag(in)ing A Future Imperfect (2021)
and written about in a piece for Pidgin at Princeton (forthcoming)
This proposal for an infrastructural system for desalination is located on a lithium mine in Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. This study speculates on how the plant’s own proprioception system could camouflage itself from the extractive gaze of industry by leveraging a unique property of the salt flat: the mirror effect.
Inspired by prior experiments with 3D scanning’s ability to offer a second life to transparent objects through glitches in photogrammetry scans, the plant’s own proprioception system would allow it to begin siphoning water to its salty flesh to recreate the mirror effect. The plant will erode and reclaim its colonized grounds of extractive capital and create shelter from the surveillant gaze of satellites under its reflective body for fauna in the area.
During the rainy season, a thin film of reflective water coats the surface of Salar de Uyuni and renders it unphotographable by causing incoherent aberrations in the digital sensors of satellite-mounted cameras.
By strategically adjusting the physical space, the desalination plant continually alters pixels in the surveyor’s camera, rendering the salt flat illegible.
Salar de Uyuni has been used as a satellite calibration site due it’s low coefficient of elevational variation. However during the rainy season, the surface of the salt flat becomes reflective, rendering it unintelligible.
Cartography has historically been used as a tool to create boundaries of private land for extractive purposes. Infrastructure, as a method of colonization, conceptualized nature as a space and material to be manipulated into a technological system of connections to promote the circulation of capital and goods. This method of colonization has been perpetuated through technologies of surveillance.
Collages produced from scanning mirrors and overlaying “glitches” onto satellite images of Salar de Uyuni to begin erasing what the fictional satellite perceives.