Here we outline our guiding concepts used to formulate our project’s methodology.

Edges

As concepts, edges produce ambiguousness, which is precisely why they are contestable. We explore the literature around the notion of an edge through different disciplines and areas of thought. For example, an ‘edge’ could be an advantage, this is the case when an edge is used to describe a characteristic or trait that someone possesses (specifically a skill that gives one the upper hand) as opposed to using it to describe a physical boundary. Edges can also be spatial discontinuities. The term can be employed as a technology of division and control that creates borders and frontiers. The term is also associated with ecological diversity, spaces in which species meet in the condition of the edge where two kinds of ecosystems converge. 

In our project, edges, and their ambiguous nature, are critical to think through in relation between aquifers and the underground. These invisible, porous spaces continuously challenge how the edge is drawn and conceived. In the image above, the border of the Río Blanco aquifer is shown over the topography of the region. The border of the hydrogeological study of the aquifer intersects with the lines of the digital elevation model. These lines are a series of edges translating height and depth for the viewer’s eyes. The border of the aquifer follows the border of the sub-basin, a notion that is used to delineate the edges of aquifers in the face of the difficulty to precisely verify them in the field. There are many factors that challenge this drawn edge. Our project will continue to explore those factors asking not only how people deal with the edges they invoke but also how science relies on their plausibility to support decisions and mold our imagination of the subsurface.

References for this concept include:

Ilaria Vanni and Alexandra Crosby, “Edge,” Environmental Humanities 15, no. 1 (March 1, 2023): 164–67, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216217.

William Cronon, “Why Edge Effects?,” Edge Effects, October 9, 2014, https://edgeeffects.net/why-edge-effects/.

Christos Lynteris and Rupert Stasch, “Photography and the Unseen,” Visual Anthropology Review 35, no. 1 (2019): 5–9, https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12174.

Matthew Cooper, “Spatial Discourses and Social Boundaries: Re-Imagining the Toronto Waterfront,” City & Society 7, no. 1 (1994): 93–117, https://doi.org/10.1525/ciso.1994.7.1.93.

Manasvi Aggarwal and M.N. Murphy, Machine Learning in Social Networks Embedding Nodes, Edges, Communities, and Graphs, 2021, https://link-springer-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/book/10.1007/978-981-33-4022-0.

Andrea Rissing, “Fences: Technologies, Boundaries, and Making Change,” Journal for the Anthropology of North America 22, no. 2 (2019): 66–68, https://doi.org/10.1002/nad.12106.

The Unseen

The unseen is central to the project of thinking the ‘Social World Downwards’, as the underground is just that; an invisible space that is a continuous denial of sight. Seeing presents a kind of paradox, as in order to see the underground, we would need to also unearth it, thereby destroying it.  

We work with Harun Farocki’s concept of the operational image to understand the unseen, as well as contributions to the idea from Jussi Parikka in his book “Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual’ and Susan Schuppli’s work around the “Material Witness”. Both works question the centrality of the image and what it depicts, arguing instead to understand images also through the assemblage of actions and politics that constitute them – which extend into realms of the unseen, or as Parikka calls ‘the invisual’. For Schuppli, this also constitutes a form of visual evidence. We also consider discussions in political geology around the struggle to represent the geosphere, and the history of representation of the underground. 

In an effort to work with images differently, we activate different registers that might help us visualize the underground. In particular, we are experimenting with hearing and sound as ways to prompt what visualization might be. Here are two recordings from the project’s fieldwork:

This is a recording of the sound a pump makes when it is extracting water from the aquifer. This is a constant sound that only stops when the large tanks are full. As soon as water is used, the level goes down in the tank and the process starts again. 

A recording of one of the rivers in Rio Blanco. It is a medium size river, but the sound, while at a different pitch, resembles very much that of the pump. What lies in the realm of the unseen has the ability to be manifested in different ways through the cues that we get from different sensorial atunements to approach it. 

References for this concept include:

Parikka, Jussi. Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.

Schuppli, Susan. Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020.

Farocki, Harun, Julia Giser, and Georges Didi-Huberman. Desconfiar de las imágenes. 1. Aufl. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2013.

Bobbette, Adam, and Amy Donovan, eds. Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5.

Malicious Geologies

Daniel Mann and Eitan Efrat, 2020, The Magic Mountain (still)

“The hydrogeologist constantly faces complex aquifer-aquitard systems of heterogeneous and anisotropic formations rather than the idealized cases pictured in texts. It will often seem that the geological processes have maliciously conspired to maximize the interpretive and analytical difficulties.” – R. Allen Freeze, John A. Cherry. Groundwater (1979)

‘Malicious Geologies’ is an concept that we derive from different forms of popular culture, movies, literature, in which the earth, and in particular, the underground, has its own forces that conspire against humans, against our forms of knowledge gathering and even against scientific reason. We found references for this concept in the genre of Eco-Horror, film, hydrogeology, Cold War studies, Media and Spatial Studies. The underground is an uncertain space, invisible to the human eye and this gives way to the imaginary that this unknown world is a place where geological forces are operating with their own agency, working to occlude our senses, our ability to know and understand. 

Daniel Mann and Eitan Efrat, 2020, The Magic Mountain (still)

References for this concept include:

Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles, eds., Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, AnthropoScene : the SLSA book series (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021).

Sasha Litvintseva, Geological Filmmaking, First edition. (London: OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS, 2022).

Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

R. Allan Freeze and John A. Cherry, Groundwater (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1979).