Summer Research Reports: Lee Crandall on Visualizing Crypto-Economic/Ecologic Networks
BCNM is thrilled to support our students in their summer research. Read about Lee Crandall on Visualizing Crypto-Economic/Ecologic Networks!
My dissertation focuses on what I conceptualize as “prospecting” from gold mining to crypto mining, in continued legacies of extraction, and reanimation of ruins/ruination. Using a relational geographies approach, I research the production of techno-natures from rural agricultural and wetland ecologies of Solano County, CA and upstate New York where proposed crypto-cities and crypto-mines inhabit post-industrial “ruins” and “wastelands” of prior manufacturing sites, coal power plants. Many of these crypto mines and data centers rely on cheap electricity from Robert Moses-era hydroelectric plants which forcibly displaced entire cities, building on legacies of prior indigenous dispossession, and outputting new forms of pollution.
With the support of the Berkeley Center for New Media Summer grant I was able to conduct various site visits and preliminary fieldwork at over a dozen crypto mines, data centers, and post-industrial sites of power production and ecological extraction. Here, I documented not just the infrastructure itself but the broader environment and multispecies ecologies, habitats/housing. I was also able to visit several archives, museums, and visitors centers to learn more about the New York Power Authority and Niagara Power Project. Through this research, I became increasingly aware of the importance of ecologies of power – especially water (hydropower) and wind – and its relation to economic and political power, racial capitalism, and extractivism that make such crypto-prospecting possible.
This geolocative visual and audio documentation, as well as a form of introspective “nature writing,” will inform the development of a future critical cartographic/mapping/archival project that will also include digital modeling and animation/rendering. Ultimately this interactive visualization/archive project is meant to help make transparent the often opaque environmental, economic, and social costs to crypto mining, while moving away from universalizing claims towards conveying grounded specificities. Thank you BCNM!