But the prairie landscape resists instrumentalisation. It displays a tangle of loops, oxbows, and sloughs that disrupt the grid. These illustrate the effect of water: undermining the agricultural grid, erasing and breaking it, forcing an accommodation by the machinery of resource extraction and distribution systems. This disruption is not only spatial but also temporal: riparian knots represent a time frame of seasonal (and episodically cataclysmic) cycles.
Every few years thousands of square miles of farmland are inundated by floods. Over time river courses alter dramatically, snaking across the landscape in an ever-changing evolution, leaving traces of past inundations and water courses as rifts in the grid. This process occurs over cycles of time of long and short duration, in contrast to the grid which aspires to act ‘out of time’, trying to preserve one pattern forever.
As it inundates the land, the mediated flood leaves islands here and there where material has not yet been entirely washed away.
Media can overflow just as a river does.
Frustrated in its attempts to channel meaning, to fit within a pipe, to flow at the bitrate prescribed to resolve an image, media too can exceed its banks. Sometimes it scatters in juddering fragments of image and sound, representing something, though what we cannot tell.
Having spread beyond its bounds, its meaning, media can stand immobile, the stagnant waters of ‘loading’ waiting to dissipate into the Earth.
Do the rifts we observe in these images emerge at that breaking point between means and desire, between our cognitive drive to know, to map, to control, and the failure of the systems we deploy to do so? Are they the debris left behind by the ever- increasing flood of data we demand?
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 6
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