A three-channel video installation.
In the winter of 2019 and summer of 2021, art and research collective The Nomadic Department of the Interior (NDOI) traveled to the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou to investigate the impacts of big data infrastructural development on the people and landscape. Caches from the Landscape is a short film in the form of a visual travelogue. Starting from a post-industrial village — a relic of the Third Front Movement — the film travels to relocation villages of people displaced by the world’s largest radio telescope and continues on to data centers tunneled into mountains and new tech plazas in China’s Big Data Valley.
In these brief fragments, the film captures a changing landscape, past memories and new monuments. Various human and non-human encounters give a glimpse of the current moment: the continuous arrival of big data infrastructure development and how it is reshaping histories, topologies and collective identity.
A childhood tale in a place that is not missed, a relocation village housing families who had to make way in the name of science, and Miao folklore about home and land.
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A mountain excavated to be replaced with exabytes of data, collecting the nation’s digital traces. A giant reflective dish looking outward, gathering signs of extraterrestrial life.
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Remains of an abandoned projected future never realized. On-going construction building upon new promises at once vague and confidently precise.
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Exhibition
2023, presented at PLATESPACE, Beijing.
2021, Temporal Stack, The Deep Sensor. Group exhibition at Research Centre of Contemporary Visual Art, Guizhou Normal University, Guizhou, China.
Publication
2021, Geosyllabus, Freeport & Geocinema.
Special Thanks
June 1 - Aug 31, 2021, Mediated Film/VR Residency, China Residencies
February 8 - March 17, 2021, Residency at Signals & Storms Laboratory with Geocinema, Freeport Institute
