Abstract for the Posters ‘New World Order: Sand’ and ‘Mining: The Seabed’ (Detail from The Sand Bank project created for 50th Anniversary of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Zooetics+ at the Art Culture Technology program, MIT, 2018)

The universal architectures of modernity, which encompassed the bunkers of World War II and the ‘inverted skyscrapers’ of the cold war, together with the progressive communal architectures of the era of social welfare and human rights, found their form in the solidity of concrete.

Sand, the principal constituent of concrete, therefore ‘underpins’, and ‘underwrites’, modernity – from its cultural and ideological productions, to a large slice of its investment structure. We gaze at high-rise concrete offices, on the other side of the street, through windowpanes of silica. The products Silicon Valley pin us to our seats as our digital self zips across the blinking circuits of electric and sand. However, despite its ubiquity, some kinds of sand – the kind that holds up the roof of modernity – is in trouble and, with it, the concrete assumptions of the future we once thought we were building.

To examine the material infrastructure of our time means examining speculative investment in real estate and communication infrastructure. These ‘architectures of modernity’, and the burgeoning ‘land building’ and ‘extractivist’ economies, have a profound effect on the planet and its ecosystem. Marine mining – for sand along the littoral, and for minerals in the deep seabed – create chemical changes that radically disrupt the ecosystem.

The meaning of modernity is thus being re-written. Flourishing seabeds become desserts in the water. Concrete ‘ghost cities’, in nowhere places, rise on an excess of speculative capital. Yesterday’s lunch is remembered forever in disaggregated silicon networks. The house of progress is built on sand.