Bani Brusadin, Giulia Colletti (eds.) - The Vast Automaton

A monstrous era of industrialisation is unfolding around and through us. It is beyond human comprehension, hyper-granular but opaque, ubiquitous and always somewhere else. It is multi-scalar, as its processes and bodies are capable of mobilising and intersecting multiple layers of human and non-human lives, from the nano to the planetary scale, from the molecular to the geopolitical, fostering novel interconnections and frictions, when not overt conflicts. Emerging from an extensive process of extraction and transformation of planetary resources and intelligences, such an evolving landscape embodies both a material force and a powerful cultural engine. Networks of global logistics, real-time management, smart agents and automated feedback loops not only redefine production, supply chains, or the design of infrastructures, but also human intelligence and subjectivity, as well as a sense of agency and the functioning of democracy at scale. All of a sudden, a strange similarity emerges with the old mining industry, a production machine lying beneath the earth’s surface perpetually cloaked in obscurity, whose only marks manifested either as its inconspicuous overground facilities or as the illnesses on workers’ skin and lungs. The current scenario poses a similar challenge, but at a rampant speed and intensity. What is the industry, when industrialization runs through data streams and convoluted decision-making processes? Where to look when there is apparently nothing to look at? When machines and sensors do the job of seeing and understanding instead of you? How can you orient yourself when you only get blurred shadows of what industrialisation is really setting in motion? How do you reclaim agency and redefine justice? In this terrain crumbling beneath our feet, we are requested to imagine the unimaginable.