Desiring Unspeakable Entropy captures the process by which the landscape of the Chichibu region of Japan becomes aestheticized like a piece of Land Art. The region is well known for its unique geological condition and a symbolical limestone mining site of Mount Bukoh. The aestheticization happens through the spectacle of it created by drones and satellite imagery. The traces left behind on the scale of the millions of years of the Earth’s geological history and the deformations wrought by modern industry, as well as its irreversible entropy, are discussed in terms of a single ecology from different perspectives. The elaborate operations of the drone that project overland images as seen from the sky, allowing us to manipulate our impressions of the comprehensive ecological landscape of the site in an almost playful fashion. This playfulness of the multiple perspectives triggers our contemporary desire to (visually) “see” the spectacle of environmental crisis. At the same time, our bodies somehow suffer from vertigo and a sense of displacement.

This work was commissioned by IMMA for the exhibition ‘Desire: A Revision from the 20^th Century to the Digital Age’, September – March 2020.