Ledger
Lou Garcia-Dolnik
2021, digital text.
Commissioned by Firstdraft. Courtesy the artist.
Soft Power presents experimental responses, new critiques and speculative futures in the face of myriad power systems we must confront and dismantle. Like their peers, Lou Garcia-Dolnik explores what is obscured and nullified in emergent and established systems of power.
As Bitcoin mining computers work furiously to best their data compatriots in the business of solving internet algorithms for the interests of a select, monied few, the socio-material and ecological damages to Bitcoin-energy-mined sites, often precariously peopled and politically vexed, are invisibalised by Bitcoin’s front-facing veneer of unbounded growth and ‘first-come-first-serve’ riches. As such, the logics that undergird the extraction of wealth from Bitcoin’s ‘dematerialised’ infrastructures manifest in the cryptocurrency’s efforts to market itself as a ‘data-only’ technology: nothing comes from nothing undergirds the vicious realities of cryptocurrency’s parasitism on cheap energy on sovereign lands.
Liu Chuang’s ‘Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities’ (2019) chronicles the lost, found and transformed in the Zomia highlands of Southeast Asia where cryptocurrency mines have abetted the excoriation of ecologies, human and non-human relationalities, agencies. The film concludes with daguerreotypes of Mongolian women in traditional wedding dress morphing into images of Natalie Portman as Padmé Amidala morphing into daguerreotypes of Mongolian women. Science fiction exhausts the capacities of the subjunctive imagination to conjure the passed via the symbology of the still-here. Entertaining the possibility that Bitcoin mining’s colonial-capitalist apparatus may too set its claws in The Philippines, Ledger wrestles with the impossibility of imagining a homeland always-already imminently ruined by technocapitalism.
Lou Garcia-Dolnik is a poet and editor working on unceded Gadigal land. Their writing has been awarded Second Prize in Overland's Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a place on the shortlist for the 2020 Blake and 2021 Val Vallis Awards, and an Academy of American Poets University Prize from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021. A poetry editor for Voiceworks and alumnus of the Banff Centre's Emerging Writers Intensive, they are a 2020-21 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow and Varuna Residential Fellow.
—After Liu Chuang’s ‘Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities’ (2018)