Made in collaboration with Asma Kazmi.
Carbonivore is a speculative chimera—part animal, plant, mineral, and machine—assembled from 2,000 pounds of reclaimed e-waste. Its tangled mass of cables, server racks, monitors, and cooling systems recalls the concealed infrastructures of the global data economy. Pulsing with simulated consumption and waste, the creature acts as a parasitic agitator, embodying the voracious appetites of the Cloud, Big Data, and AI.
The installation brings into view the immense power demands of server farms—architectural behemoths that often consume more electricity than entire cities—while tracing the rare earth minerals that underpin every digital device. The extraction of cobalt, lithium, and other elements links personal technologies to networks of ecological devastation, exploitative labor, and species extinction. Animated video sequences collapse these distances, reattaching technological detritus to its geological origins and reminding us that digital culture is never divorced from the earth it exploits.
Rather than presenting extraction as a closed system, Carbonivore emphasizes its unfinished and entangled consequences: toxic residues, disrupted ecologies, and precarious forms of human and nonhuman survival. These entanglements persist in the creature’s “offspring”—surreal forms composed of lithium, cobalt, and silicon—that extend the speculative ecosystem across the gallery. To witness these elemental figures is also to confront the mines, quarries, and evaporation ponds from which they were torn.
By exposing the hidden infrastructures of computation, Carbonivore insists that digital technologies are not immaterial but grounded in vast ecologies of matter, energy, and labor. It calls viewers to reckon with the planetary consequences of technological progress and the fragile futures entangled in its wake.
Exhibited at:
Carbonivore, Gray Area Art Gallery, San Francisco
More Than Meets AIExhibition at the Worth Ryder Gallery
and
Internet Tour: Invisible Infrastructures and AI Hallucinationsorganized by Mario Santamaria