0. Intro | 1200
1. Consortium | 1200
[khronos]> geocomputation
time: originless/endless standardisation
2. Consortium-Amalgamate | 1200
[gold figures? or something else?]> 
time: processing/rendering/molecular
3. Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole | 1200
[Conga] > latent emergence of both khronos and el dorado
time: endless universalizing/standardising-processing | 1200
4. Conclusion | 1000

HP makes a new document 18/19
FS rereads 20
JR continues on 23rd
HP + FS take it on until 3 aug
Finishing altogether, HP, JR and FS live 6 + 7 aug - 9 till 13 h each day 
===============================================

Three images:

1. http://www.zenakruzick.com/african-tribal-art-images/7055full.jpg
2. https://www.khronos.org/members/list
3. screenshot from wound mouse-over google

*Figurations of timely extraction
"we broke the earth, now we fall through time" (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

In this chapter we engage with three figurations of extraction (consortium, borehole and amalgam) and with some of their interdependent articulations as specific forms of transnational hyperstructures, gold mining and computation. We are making use of the contaminated and contaminating practice of figuration (Haraway), and plotting stories to highlight some of the milestones of deadly collaboration, of optimised acceleration and of sedimented damage. Such stories might provide a way to make present the time-space material and semiotic complexities that emerge from the connections between extractivism, computation and material values.

This text is an attempt to expose how the rocky figures of consortium, borehole and amalgam shape life/nonlife temporalities, and the temporalities they are embedded within. By placing turbocomputing processes next to the megaanums of the stones, we provoke agential crossings of combined exclusions and occlusions that each create unique modes of discrimination and privilege. With Elizabeth A. Povinelli we try to attend to the specific complexities of the ongoing emergence of worldlings in contemporary industrial and technoscientific continuums and the specific, irregular and unstable intersections that constitute each bit of existence and their differentiated realities.

We attune with the works of practitioners that mobilize figurations such as Haraway (OncoMouse, REF), Povinelli (the animist, the virus, the dessert, REF), Yusoff (rifts, p.104, King (the shoal, p. 8), Wynter (MAN1, MAN2) and Barad (Starfish, REF) as a way to intersectmultiple problematics. Figurations are not fictions, as they are not so much involved in representing but rather in presenting, thereby activating stories of deep implicancies in technosciences. This hands-on storytelling is also on the agenda of The Underground Division, a disobedient action-research collaboration on techniques, technologies and infrastructures of subsurface rendering and their imaginations and promises. With help of many others we explore the computational rendering of subsoil explorations through volumetric, getting busy with narrative assets for discounting time with a trans*feminist sensibility. [REF division] [xxxxxxxxxx missing: an explanation/definition of what we mean by volumetrics]

Consortium, borehole and amalgam are three figures of timely extraction that allow us to inhabit, intensify and dismantle the regime of technobiomythical geontopraxis. They are joined by many other tales and stories such as Akan gold weights, timely titans and wounded rocks to give an account of some of the diverse temporalities and modalities that unfold from their intertwined stories. In an attempt to attend to the entanglements at work in computation, gold mining and transnational hyperstructures, we chose not to discuss these figures separately, but to think with figure-combinations as a form of volumetric "figure tactics": figuring, then, as a way to think through modes of holding rocks together but also of holding together with rocks in contingent, computational worlds via the dimension of time. The figurations are therefore first of all about inhabiting and situating practices (Haraway) but more specifically about departing from the figures of geontopower (Elizabeth A. Povinelli). Her work with the figures of the dessert, the animist and the virus asks us to not just let the bio- emerge without accounting for the co-presence of onto, bio, geo, and subsequently cramp out other urgent critical analysis of the geo-.

The specific time studies activated in this chapter ask how syncronization and standardisation, repetition and memory, innovation and processing continue to be key operations in the volumetric realm of geocomputation. Of course the crossings of time and matter are multiple and dynamic, but on this occasion we are paying attention to the mateiral cultures that establish a combination of repeated damages and latent regimes to maintain extractive forces, practices and modes.


*Consortium
We start our processes of disclosing extractive volumetrics with the 'consortium'. The consortium is a figure of alliances which brings together stakeholders, transnational cooperations of corporations that seek each other, almost magnetically, and come together in order to plan ahead, to be ready for a future: their future which is a probable future, in terms of environmental costs, technological culture and political economy. The figure of the consortium approaches the monetized timing and time tracking of extraction through the gesture of strategic alliance. The big powers of international companies, transnational economic organisms and/or global industry incorporations, ally for an accurate and synchronized extraction. The performance of consortia separate winners from losers through their ability to strike that fine balance between cooperation and competition. Delimiting clear edges between what goes inside power crusts and what goes outside, as well as what gets done now and what is left for later or will never be done, consortia forge paths into the future because something is at stake; a finger needs to be placed into the wound, sooner or later. Already-powerful agents such as corporate and public entities agree to pool their resources and synchronize their processes by setting and committing to standards and preferred protocols, made to their measure. In this way, they can join forces to direct a development (as in: a progress) in the interest of those who consort, and route possibillities away from those that do not. This results in everyone outside the consortium needing to cope with the imposed standards, and their temporary agendas. 

The volumetric regime that we take up in this section is organised by linear and optmised figurations of time. In particular we take up "Khronos": a particular consortium that was set up in the late 90's to develop and implement technoecological practices of standardisation for the production and distribution of real-time representations on 3 dimensions. Khronos creates acceleration standards for 3D graphics, Augmented and Virtual Reality, vision [machine vision ?] and machine learning. The Khronos consortium was formed to standardise multispeed volumetrics across the industrial-continuum, making it possible to share practice from medical imaging to the optmisation of precious mineral mining. One of the areas it has drawn its standards into is what we call "volumetric geocomputation". Geocomputation is the use of software and computing power to solve complex space-time problems for measuring and exploitation of the inhuman earth (yusoff loc. 14). The computational processes include visualition, spatial regression, statistics and space-time modelling of the geological and the geographical. The Khronos consortium has become evidently responsible for how time is generated in geocomputation. Or to put it differently: the semiotic materialities of volu- and chron/khrono- metrics, are settled by a transnational technoscientific consortium named "Khronos". The time of the world and in particular of the underground has become the time of volumetric calculation due to the commited attunement to the set of standards like those of Khronos, which lay at the core of the techniques, technologies, infrastructures and protocols used at extracting projects. The infrastructures that enable the simultaneous melding of metrics of volume and of time could use some disclosure if we want to call into question their operations: What are then the specific organising forces at work that structure the production and mobilisation of this worlding regime and the melding of metrics? Being fiercely protective by being in company, uneasy alliances of perverse syncronicity and timely opportunism grow and expand sociotechnically. How  do they function? How might they be disrupted, intervened, transformed in the key spots where other nonstandard worldlings might emerge?

On their website the consortia of ally enterprises promises that the shared standards will enable products and resources to be "experienced realistically and consistently across all platforms and devices, such as mobile, Web and Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) solutions." The Khronos consortia mobilises in its very naming the greek mythological titan Khronos (Κρόνος: the same as Chronos or Cronus): the king of heaven who was associated with linear and destructive time (Boje 55). As a deity Khronos was one of the three titans that personify time and temporality (the others being Aion, and Kairos). In one version of the myth he was considered to have the shape of a three-headed serpent. The heads were those of a man, a bull and a lion. Along with his daughter Ananke, the goddess of inevitability who was also in the form of a snake, he revolved around the primordial world egg, until they split it apart to form the earth, the sea and the sky. According to the Orphic cult, Khronos gave birth to Aether and Chaos, and created a silver egg in Aether. Out of the egg enclosed the gods Phanes and Hydrus, who later gave birth to the first gods and the universe. There are many variations of the myth, however most recount Kronos as worldbuilding made possible through chronological, sequential, linear time ---a time that is figured as one that devours and consumes. Khronos is inextricably bound to Chaos, the greek notion of primordial matter, and in many versions of the story the reliance on linear time by Khronos as a mode of control is injuring to the chaos of complex systems (Boje 55). A form of time that sounds too familiar to us, due to the euro- and andro-centric process of naturalisation it has imposed to the places we are writing from. Afterall it is the same linear time that is characteristic of enlightenment projects positioned in social constructionism and empirical and scientific analysis (latour 1986). 

The naming of Khronos is not arbitary, and the consortium works together to make operational and enforce standard time for 3D computational processes, and just like the mythical story of Kronos these computational processes are worldbuilding. Worldbuilding as they form modes of spatialisation, measurement, standardisation and optimisation of bodies, tools, environments and global systems. As Katherine McKitrrick notes: 

• "[i]f we imagine that traditional geographies are upheld by their three-dimensionality, as well as a corresponding language of insides and outsides, borders and belongings, and inclusions and exclusions, we can expose domination as a visible spatial project that organizes, names, and sees social differences (such as black femininity) and determines where social order happens."

The specific social order and standardisation that the transnational consortium operates and promotes according to their website is glTF™ (GL Transmission Format):

•  
• glTF™ is a royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models by applications. glTF minimizes both the size of 3D assets, and the runtime processing needed to unpack and use those assets. glTF defines an extensible, common publishing format for 3D content tools and services that streamlines authoring workflows and enables interoperable use of content across the industry. [Runtime 3D Asset Delivery]

The Khronos glTF™ is a format for 3D models, described as the "jpeg of 3D". Designed to make the sharing of 3D assests easier for consortium members... so they'll industrially fabricate and distribute the paradigm, all the way down till the final user. However, we argue that the Khronos glTF™ is specifically designed and promoted as an agreement on what time is and how it is made present by 3D rendering. Technically, this places Khronos in the position of reigning timekeeper in all (or most) 3D worldlings. It's industrial consortium executes its protocols a way to enforce the continued standardisation of time through a standardisation of rendering (understanding as such, the live computational arrangement of polygonal elements in a 3D object). In most narrative standards pe stasis is the benchmark or standard that must be met before a voice can even have an audience in most narrative structures [cite]. And the Khronos glTF™ standardisation demonstrates how standardisation relies upon consortium consensus, not just to agree on a technical format but to use thier shared corportate power to force others to conform in order to participate in worldbuilding. This writing in of standard time into the 3D format of Kornos glTF™ means that it becomes diffucult to propose other types of world building outside of the consortium -- “The time of the world thus becomes the time of economic calculation”.

The Khronos consortium is the organised tying together and forming of alliances through agreements of telos between hardware and software companies to concretise standards and to control the flow of processes ("connecting software to silicon" is the main consortium's motto). The tieing together is crucial for understanding how the figure of consortia, [example of controlling flow in khronos]. The controlling of flow is a characteristic of the extrativism at work in volumetric regimes. This is because extractivist volumetrics are not tied to specific locations or even resources but jump thorugh time and space, and as the these jumps  they are able to do this by the standardisation of time and In that sense, Khronos can be called "a stakeholder of the technocolonial regime". Of course "Through their control over resource-combination and resource-use, extractivist systems are able to generate a huge value flow towards the operational centre."                                                     

The material conditions that form the Khronos consortium are currently established by 150 self-appointed corporate Big Tech hardware and software companies, scientific (academic) instiutions, public services/institutional structures (both intra-nation-state and transnational agreements) and a developmentist and innovation-oriented mediatic echo chamber. They represent the most economically powerful and largest big tech companies globally [see fig xx - include the image of the ecosystem] including Google, Apple, EPIC games, Intel, Nivida. As a member of the consortium Khronos members "contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, and vote at various stages before public deployment and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge accelerated platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests." The control over this access constitutes the monopoly position. Other actors (not part of the consortium) do not have access to the most acclerrated standards, this imposes the developmentalist logic together with standard, linear time as at the heart of the consotium is a logic which the members will always be ahead in technological development. 

Delimiting insides and outsides, nows and laters, dos and don'ts, accountability and degrees of dissent is a distribution of power that is far from neutral. 3D (and 4D, the time-inclusive version of 3D, dimensionally speaking) computing is (are) not standard at all, and we argue this enforcement of linear time on the world is where violence resides.  As Boje suggests, an over reliance on linear time management or practice produces unintended consequences injuring again to chaos for complex systems.  The consortium demonstrates how volumetric violence takes place when the 3D polygonization of the world happens behind closed, northern, expensive and complicit doors. We call this Khronometric/Khronologic violence-- that is the imposing of metrics of linear time over inhuman complexities and interoperabilities. Khronometric/Khronologic violence counts the rythms, sets the limits, delimits moments and establishes beginings as well as ends. A standarisation of a very specific material constellation through the mechanisms of modern time-keeping.

But what if time(s) could be grabbed back? If time measurements and arrangements did not necesaarily unfold from the starightness of a commercial and for-profit alliance but from the situated messiness of an alloy, then a non-linear set of violences is what needs to be attended... and partially repaired. Symultaneity, recursion and ongoingness of damage along and through time is what needs to be accounted for interrupting the smooth continuation of technocolonial capitalist exploitation and contemporary totalitarian innovation.

Time-keeping and the imposition of timing standards has been a core practice of power. The artifacts designed and cared by cultures along history have been charged with full worldlings, in the sense of actively intervenening in the opportune setting of the material conditions of possibility at a particular ecology of practice. Soviet calendar erradicated judeo-christian weekends to optimize time, arranging it around guilds. Zapatista calendar has a very different underlying purpose, and other figures of power are legitimized for such purpose:

• The oldest of the old in our villages tell us that in the early days time went by just like that, all in a mess and stumbling around like a bolus on the feast of the Holy Cross. Men and women lost a lot because time did not walk evenly, but sometimes it hurried and sometimes it walked slowly, crawling like a little old reindeer, and sometimes the sun was a great skin that covered everything, and sometimes just pure water, water up, water down and water in between, because before it didn't rain only from the bottom up, but it also rained from the sides and sometimes it even rained from the bottom up. In other words, it was all just a lull and perhaps one could sow, hunt or fix the zacatón roof or the rod and mud walls.
• And the gods looked and looked at everything, because these gods, who were the first ones, the ones who gave birth to the world, just kept walking and grabbing macabiles in the river and sucking cane and sometimes they also helped to shell the corn for tortillas. So everything was watched by these gods, those who were born the world, the first ones. And they thought, but they did not think quickly, but they took a while because these gods were not very light, so it was a good time when they only looked at the time passing by stumbling on the earth and then they expanded, because then they did think. [Zapatista revolutionary calendar stories]

If we want to think about time-space practices otherwise, we need to invent ways to challenge them. Which anti-colonial chronologies and/or chronotopies might be unfolded from the problematisation of depolitized linearity and/or a certain aligned of policies? How to widen the timetracks to do both a theory and a praxis of non-developmentist, non-fungible co-habiting? How to not let go of an accute monitorization of damaging timestamps while at the same time switching the focus to other (space-)time matterings?

*Consortium-Amalgamate
The second figure of timely extraction we want to introduce is the amalgamate. Amalgamation refers to a process of change which happens due to different materials being in contact, a transformative blending that changes all agents involved. The amalgam is a figure that crosses between alchemy, contempory chemistry and mineralogy. And it is also commontly used to name "any" mixture, any blend: it is a specific worldling that emerges from the mollifying operation of some materials onto others. It's etymology refers to 'malassein' or 'malakos', "to soften," and more precisely to the softening effect achieved by applying a warm ointment on a cut; the substance might soften pain, or soften flesh, or both at the same time. Chemically speaking, the amalgam appears as a mercurial melting; a mixing of metals, and the extraction of gold from ores. As a technopolitical cut, amalgamation proposes a particular mixing of elements: situated gatherings, heterogenous togetherness, differentiated stuff, semiotic-material composition and specific gatherings.

By bringing 'amalgam' and 'consortium' together, we want to test how the praxis of figuration could work without separating the figure from its background. The introduction of the amalgam turns our attention from the meta operations of the consortium to the intricate micro-politics of alloys and alliances, and to the mercurial materials that bind them molecularly. In her work on protein modelling, Natasha Myers [REF] suggests attending to the molecular might open up a kind of ‘molecular intiution’ which attends to life possibilies at the moment of molecule binding. Indeed research on molecular modelling reminds us of the fact that bindings are never permanent, and also that they were not already there. For instance in the process of alloying gold from mined ore, both the formation of more-or-less stable materialities and their dissolution, produces toxic waste and somewhat pure substances.

From the mythical El Dorado's golden aura to the Akan Goldweights [REF], precious mineral objects have been used to tell and impose telluric stories of value through the inhuman temporalities of gold. Whether they corrupt values and inorganic temporalities in the bloody capital of Cuban poet Alejo Carpentier's version of El Dorado, cohabit with the figurative imagery of temporal bonds of ancestors and the earth (the memory only carried by rocks), or act as standard units of measurement for trading gold – inhuman temporal conditions arrange the interpretation of these objects. These inhuman temporal conditions were also the process through which as Yusoff notes, slave owners attempted to void their subjects as inhuman "bodies become gold, emptied of the sign of the human". (p.38). These are the material histories of volumetric time-space in the geology-extraction sociotechnical continuum.

Both El Dorado and the Akan Goldweights share an important but often overlooked quality. They both are mediations of the almagamation of volume, value and time that set the mythical conditions for volumetric regimes in contemporary precious mineral extraction as they are melting chrono- and volu-metrics together. This amalgamation of time and volume is quite a different story than Barbara Smith's well known concept "double-discourse value" and the separation of aesthetic-use value and exchange-value of Marx. [xxxxxxx no idea how to explain this difference, but needs a phrase to close this paragraph]

Computation has configured the cultural expectation for information as continuous, standardised and increasing in equivalence. Geocomputation in particular combines volume as a resource with ‘objective time’ or rather enlightenment's secular time: modern time, scientific time, measurable and infinitely calculable time; and the highspeed time of hyper-computational turbo-capitalist operations too. The ability to quantify volumes and the time needed to extract them efficiently and speedily through automated calculation, is one vector through which time becomes money in contemporary extraction industries (others being the tagging of "sustainable" practices used for extraction, "durable" adjective adhered to components and/or the "renewable" tale of energy).

In the industries of Big Tech and Engineering, gold counts as the most stable metal, the most resistant to corrosion, the best at keeping computational time. Time is money, time is gold: calculable time abstracts the relation between gold and time as equivalent for exchange-value. Gold trade values travelling at lightspeed through fiberoptics, the use of gold doping for binary computing, the wicked profits made in so-called Urban Mining where gold from cheap broken phones is re-imported from the Congos to be reclaimed by Umicore, descendant of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga and calculable time being kept constant in computers and smart phones through the use of electrical conductors – yet again – made of gold. Could this continuous loop be the “golden double-bound" [REF] of amalgam-consortium? Again and again, time becomes material through gold; time is both figured by and figures gold.

While the historical present of geocomputation relies on Enlightenment's stable and continous time, it also holds a peculiar position as it actively generates the "end of time" through the modelling of melting volumes of ice, carbon and methane and other figures of climate crisis and the anthropocene. The techno- and geological material-discourse of extraction relies on and produces colonial temporalities of progress and improvement. The unstable but continuous alliance of automated, glossy, spinning, clean textures, highspeeds, gold conductors, and 5G networked nonhuman figures of geocomputation begins to replace the (inhuman) temporalities of "traditional" imperial devastation, settler exploitation and commercial routes. Mechanical and human scale figures of goldmining such as the open pit, the toiling body, the Northern prospector, el código del virreinado again and again establish themselves as progressive values and scientific objective temporalities contrasting with the fleshy, subjective and unruly temporalities of the local protestors. Deaths caused by landslides, pollution and lack of water, crushing landscapes and rocks is the material prize to pay for the continuation of both extraction and of too-known developmentist progress and time itself.

Contemporary extraction relies heavily on normative temporal modalities that themselves depend upon individualized and stable bodies. The continuum of geology and extraction is amalgamated with consortia of industries, militarized nationstates and Big Tech. Their shared interest is to construct objective time as an extractive temporality against the backdrop of Indiginous time of nowadays and the ancestral protests it carries along. Local vs global time, resources vs unresources/grounded time. Where as (euro-andro-anthropocentric) Modern time was also the invention of its erasure, in extractive temporalities it is perhaps not so much the construction of time and its absence but instead the absence of volumes which mark the passing of time, which lay in wait for the return of volumised time [hence, consider here the possibility of those times not being past=absent, but present/latent instead]. Giving matter time or optimising matter through time as a resource algorithmically processed, can bring together time to operate upon matter to optimize it for extraction whether this is the extraction of a rare metal such as gold or the extraction of (re)productive labour to mine the material needed for continous computational time for the modelling of bodies to the most optimised needs and production of capital.

In technoscientific stories of gold mining or fossil fuel extraction, temporal figurations inhabit a volumetric regime to organise the time-space-matter of geocomputing techniques. Theories of computational time have depended on cleaving of computational processes from their operations and from their chemical elements. Whereas much postanthropocentric thinking on time has attended to how nonhuman and inhuman temporalities are entangled in conflicting ways with human time (c. fXX and XX), we attune to these almagamated figures that rely on inhuman temporalities and capacities for temporal arranagements which make extraction possible through computation and at the expense of the local, indigineous lives. And it is these figures that have historically and temporally generated regimes of technological, biological, geological, ideological and mythical praxis-- regimes that are not often in isolation, yet combined in deep complexity and we argue, almagamate. 

Consortium and amalgam tend to figure productively arranged whens, how-oftens and for-how-longs. Both figures count confidently on timely projections, setting futures in motion and owning time's trajectories which produce certain irreversibilities and exclude other possibillities. We propose a counter-reading of the combinatory potential of amalgam-consortium, to invite active considerations of simultaneous material-semiotic arrangements, persistence of damage, partial reparations and non-standard coincidences. Attending to the other temporalities of the amalgam-consortium is an attempt to reclaim non-linear processes through a coming together otherwise, away from opportunistically synchronized progressive timeframes. Almagams and consortia might also be and are being rethought as a space of alterity and possibilies "animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities. And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms." [Wynter]

*Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole
In this section, the Consortium-Amalgam conjoins with the Borehole to form an even more complex space-time-matter joint. Through their different volumetrics and transformative materialities, the consortium-amalgam-borehole figures unstable grounds for timely extraction.
The borehole is a deep wound but also a wormhole, and hence a very specific kind of shortcut for understanding damage. A borehole is by definition a persistent passage which is always just wide enough to make extraction flow easily, again and again. Boreholes are drilled down or sideways, sometimes at great depth, to penetrate gravel, bedrock or aquifers. The downwards and circular movement of the drill forces openings in matter formations, turning them into always-available resource or storage.

In the company of the straight damage-on-the-spot of the borehole, the amalgam has a different relation to extraction. Volatile mercury is put to use again and again to attract specific metallic particles, separating them from the background of their carrier rocks. For now they form a stable golden bond of solid, paste-like, fluid, spongy, hard or soft material. The amalgam is there as an in-between stage, as a step in a process towards evaporation and separation, form slug to nugget. The borehole is quite a different gesture of flow management, a physical driving vertically into the ground that produces access for some, and depletion for others.

The timely operation of the borehole imposes a never-ending feeling backwards, through the many layers of the earth, drilling deep down to make repetitive upward movements possible: energy, resources, fluids end up in the dirty and rough hands of already-powerful agents. And this is how we know the consortium has already entered. That potential profit and possible extraction has been scoped. That locations were targeted and conditions were negotiated. The consortium has arrived but not situated itself; it is there to manage the taking but not there to hold.

With the Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole setting the scene, we can move to "Conga", a place that is located in the South hemisphere. Now we are in Cajamarca. We are *also* in a webrowser, rendering a 3D amalgamate over a g$$gle maps's street view; satellite tiles, images appear of a past moment, are stitched together as we move. This is the temporality of capitalist turbocomputation. A representation of a region of Cajamarca is being rendered in a web-browser. Satellite view. Meaning: cenital. A cenital representation of a wound is now being rendered on a smooth surface. And now. Hypercomputation, it's called. For how long. Rock-like textures overlay on compressed  polygonal geometries over Cajamarca. Seamlessly rotating, triangulating. Sometimes these generated textures dissolve, like impossible mineralised shatterings, as they move outside of the designated viewpoint. Conga is located within Cajamarca. Cajamarca is located in the North part of the Peruvian country and shares a border with Ecuador (the seam of the nationstate this time, not so much the dividing axis of the equator). It is located at heights reaching 2,700 metres (8,900 ft) above sea level in the Andes Mountain Range, the longest mountain range in the world. Part of its territory includes the Amazon Rainforest, in total the largest on Earth. Take those as the wound's modern coordinates. This wound fills the screen with solid rendered black, any timely movement flattened in the image until refreshed. The movement is as smooth as a fiction repeated too many times. Right now we are mousing over a g$$gle map. This is not Conga, this is a very specific representational take of it. Cartography-is-not-reality. But still, it shows a damage. And the damage is for real. Looking down from the satellite view we spot the wound at the Conga Mine site.

The wound has particular characteristics, it is black, with steeped edges. Or the wound is blue, with artificial terraces. Or grey, with digging areas. Or brown, with track parking slots. This particular logistic wound is called the Minera Yanacocha. Minera Yanacoha is also the name of the a company mainly owned by Newmont Mining Corporation and Buenaventura, a Peruvian mining company, and the International Finance Corporation, the private-lending arm of the World Bank. 

Mousing over to the nearby the Las Bambas mine we now see below us telecoms construction work at the open pit mine a borehole. In a site right in front of us we see that Espoo, Finland – Nokia and Telefónica Peru have signed a contract with Minera Las Bambas, the world’s ninth largest copper mine, to enable digitization and automation projects at its site in Apurimac, Peru. Nokia provides a private LTE network for the mine 4,600 meters above sea level, high-capacity, low-latency and multi-services network that enable connectivity for several thousands of workers, mine devices and applications. Las Bambas is owned by the Minerals and Metals Group, whose major shareholder is China Minmetals Corporation (CMC), a Chinese state-owned enterprise. MMG acquired Las Bambas copper project from British Glencore Xstrata plc. for US$5.85 billion. Back at Conga, there is a different latency.

Drilling, drying, adulterating and washing away: the story of Conga is a story of damage, lead by a transnational consortium with the aim to continue extracting amalgamating ores for profit. The extend of the damage occurs because of the amalgamated temporalities of the borehole-consortium. Across the Conga site hundreds of boreholes drilled during the decades of exploration activities remain inadequately plugged or abandoned. These boreholes arethe material wounds of scanning for Gold undertaken by stakeholders. The Conga mine has many stakeholders who emerge around the wound including mobile network providers, smart phone manufacuters, microchips industries, state officials, water companies, transport companies, international investors. As we observe the extraction of gold in the Conga mine, we see consortia emerging with the borehole as processes of amalgamations take place. The intersecting layerings of time and extraction that hold this story together are also what keeps on breaking the earth: the explicit and implicit pre-planning consortia that agree to share profits, but not the damages are necessitating and necessitated by the direct damage visible in the wound. On the one hand, the consortium, amalgam and borehole have their timely imposition and hence multiplication of damage in common. On the other hand, their repetitive modes show the recursive temporality of exploitation without end. Now we fall through time.

In the years that led up to the closure of the Conga Mine, local protestors lined the streets chanting:"¡Agua sí! ¡Oro no! ¡Agua sí! ¡Oro no!” [Water yes! Gold no!], exposing the communities urgency due to the conga=death. Thousands of residents of Cajamarca gathered at the Laguna Azul, one of many high-altitude lakes on the Conga Mine site, in effort to protect their water resources from exploitation and contamination. Ana Bueno Abanto, director of La Casa de las Lagunas, clenched a handful of soil and asked the audience to remember the violence. “Rifles have been used against people that have tried to defend this land that I hold here in my hand,” she said. “This land, our land, was disrespected on that day of violence and no matter how many metals and precious minerals are beneath this land, we as a community will always protect it and make sure it is respected.” Protesters walked to shores of Laguna Azul, cupped the water in their hands, and drank it down. Speakers rallied up the crowd, vowing for a long fight to protect their land and water from another gold mining operations, and then, finally, the protest ended as it had begun, with the singing of the Tinkari band’s, “¡Agua sí! ¡Oro no!”

Since the Conga mine was closed in response to fierce local protests, its temporality is made present through endless delays and blurry waiting for it’s exploitation to actually end. There are different latencies involved in these processes, for instance the electromagnetic low latency regarding the fabrication needs at Nokia devices [not sure what this points at exactly?]. Or the continued pollution seeping slowly into the neigbouring areas. The other latency is the one of the exploitation regimes themselves, that have not ceased to exist with the closing of this particular mine. Currently, they are neither active nor absent in this wound, but somehow frozen and waiting confidently for the moment sooner or later that conditions will change, and extraction can be resumed. In Bhaktin's chronotopes, one of the tropes is the "threshold": a spacetime of quiet evaluation, measuring forces and making both a revision of what happened and a plot for what is yet to come. In understanding the Conga mine through the Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole its possible to see how colonial temporality is not just active but also latent, held at thresholds of power. The infrastructures still remains ready to leap back into action, a passive-aggressive waiting to be active again by any violent means. At the Conga mine, volumetric time-space lays latent, the protestors are no longer on the streets and machinery is halted at the mine, however the trucks are still circling the wound, cyanide leaking from unplugged boreholes and metals will be present in strands of hair and breast milk for years to come. There are many latent pathways for the migration of contaminants into local Conga waters: permeability of the rock due to fractures and faults; increased fracturing due to mine blasting; open and leaking boreholes and blastholes; high permeability in the nearby sediments; long-term degradation of tailings and other mine structures; and seismic activity. 

Latency, vibration, pulse: the most basic signal of what is popularly [generally] considered to be "alive" (vs. inert) or life vs non-life . However as Povinelli notes the forumla of life vs nonlife is now unravelling. The complexity of the Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole produces a powerful impression of the ability to freeze life and nonlife, and that temporality is not tied to a seperation of life or nonlife. In any case, full realms kept locally latent. The intricate interplay between fullness and emptiness produces an unliveable lapse of violent quietness. While the eroding of forces and matter makes it work across time, it seems to reduce the potential levels to fight, react or re-invent to the bare minimum.


*No water, no life - no gold, no time



[BRIDGE: from NO GOLD TO NO TIME? AND THEN HOW TO GET TO OUR AMALGAMATE]

Working our way down and up from the Consortium, through the Consortium-Borehole and into the Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole, discloses that the mattering of time-space will be a violent almagamation as long as it is figured within patriarcho-colonial capitalism and its continuous unfolding of hyperproductive, timely extractions.

In this paper we have attempted to think with volumetrics and the time-space telling of stories of volumetric geocomputation and its grounded calculations, generating new figures for unfolding their complexities. We present complexity in ways that keep with matter, space and time, understanding that volumetric thinking and praxis is in urgent need of different figures, but also that figuration might need to operate differently. As we learned from feminist technosciences work, figures have the potential of not operating towards representational tricks, by commiting to a presentational attitude.

How to re-make volumetric practices that might make time and space present in other ways, that tell the stories of amalgmates-consortium-boreholes damages without apprproating or extracting these further? Each of the elements in the figure-combination Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole offers it's own handles on how to draw the maps of timely extraction differently. The borehole can also be a passage, a shortcut for understanding damage. It is also a wormhole, a portal for drilling down the chronotope of the threshold. The consortium as transnational alliance does not have to be organised to rule the earth, but can be thought of as a promiscuous practice of organising accomplice for transformation, maybe. The amalgamate is a way to say entanglement with implicancy and might offer a view on what response-ability with materiality might look like.

The Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole is presented as a set of interdependent tools to be taken up to tell different stories of the mediations of time-space in computational practices. To engage with Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole means to present the complexity of volumetric-geocomputation from the Khronos consortium to the Conga mine, from the board rooms to the boreholes. Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole discloses the relationalities that make possible telluric mediations and computational practices for volumetrics and the relationalities that are made possible. So, we might need to ask the question as practitioners and designers of how to intervene on these figures of capitalism, what types of activism can addresss amalagmam-consortium-borehole? How to do this in ways which does not repeat the flip into normative modes of repair and reparation, which often perpetuate the violences of timely extraction by keeping the basis of the regime untouched and not accounting for the complexities of the time-space, and their transformative potential. So instead to open up the boreholes into other time-spaces that are already there, actively piercing the most deadly crusts of the technocolonial apparatus. As Tiffany Lethabo King suggests, that through errant and out-of-sync time and space coordinates we might "disrupt the movement of modern thought, time, and space to enable something else to form, coalesce, and emerge" (p. 11).

What are the potentials of the Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole as a technocultural figuration? How does it recall a sense of and for complexity, a rejection of flatness and flattening, for joy of awkward co-constitution? What it would mean to be in consortia with others, to consort with others. differently "holding together"? We present complexity from a position of love for alliances and gatherings, amalgamating fact, fiction, care and concern as a collective attempt to resist making new boreholes of coloniality, invasiveness and appropriation that is present in telling telluric stories of the global souths. It is through these practices of speculation that fictioning face and imagination becomes folded into our analysis of volumetric time-space, as an attempt to resist overly rational, linear and knowable time-space patterning. To consider the temporality take on how --as Katherine Mckitrrick writes calling on Octavia Butler-- "our engagement with place, and three-dimensionality, can inspire a different spatial story, one that is unresolved but also caught up in the flexible, sometimes disturbing, demands of geography". Hence, the question could mutate into something like "our engagement with moments and three-dimensionality, can inspire a different temporal story, one that is unresolved but also caught up in the flexible, sometimes disturbing, demands of geography".

If you have made it this far, you must have noticed that it is not easy to write of the timespaces that amalgamate through the Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole because it stretches simultaneously across paradigms, scales of concern and fields of operation. This text and the practice of the Underground Division is an unscoping study, in which clarity is out of reach and the task of writing about complexity  seems almost impossible within our current scholarly and artistic context. However by making the complexity through which time-space emerges present via specific stories, demonstrates the power relations that operate on and are made operative by volumetrics: always and again technically conflating the dimensions of time and space. Through these figures, their tales and material histories, we study the production of time-space within volumetric geocomputation and the ways it enforces how long something takes, the keeping track of things, the violence that depends on who keeps the time and how time is kept. As an opportune study on the latent forces of contemporary industrial, colonial, commercial, settler, extractivist capitalism, the figure of the Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole became a device for recognising and accounting timely extraction differently. While time and time-space made by volumetric geocomputation is usually deadly, it also has an affirmative side that may provide openings for otherwises.

We end by entering into our own device for studying the temporalities of volumetric-geocomputaiton, the ROCK REPO [link to project]. 

*The warm mecury is poured onto the minerals, softening and dissolving the hardned minderals into softened gloopy and viscose liquid form. 
As the computation hits the mineral what does it dissolve? 
When the minerals of hardware mix with geometries what almagamates?

In The ROCK REPO amalgams mix and merge models, backgrounds and animated texts, accentuating and sometimes blurring their diverse materialities, making their differences collide, blend and contrast with each other. Let's start with Amalgam number one for example, which is called 'Attractions'. Oil spills erupt inside a 3D particle of rock, rendered in purple rejection, and text connectors juxtapose polarized terms on magnetic forces, in two moving planes. Or: a 3D-object cuts open sharply when hitting a virtual horizon, a sharp-lined window reveals for some time a pixelated recording of an uncontrolled oilspill, sending particles upwards and sideways. The hole opens and closes, but text keeps scrolling ideways: 'IF SO - WHAT IF - KIND OF - AS LONG AS', slowly disintegrating sentences and re-compositing phrases. Or: a text circulates on an endeless forward manner along a horizontal set of lines, sometimes occluded by one drop of modelled lava, and then another, and then another... while in the background the spilling force is reproduced in its peak and played all over again.

For the ROCK REPO, Consortium-Amalgamate-Borehole becames a way to describe the digital gatherings that together attempt to address what is going on in volumetric-geocomputation. Placed next to other amalgamates in the ROCK REPO, currently eight clusterings of digital objects bring together elements that are gleaned from different worlds. As chemical solvents, substances of different cultural order are merged together to punctually convoke attention to a specific aspect of volumetric-geocomputation and its implicancies*.


References
Being Quantum: Ontological Storytelling in the Age of Antenarrative
https://www.imwa.info/docs/imwa_2015/IMWA2015_Fernandez-Rubio_275.pdf
https://www.business-humanrights.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/peru-conga-rem-rept-english-march-8-2012.pdf

Images
1. Khronos consortium ecosystem = consortium
2. a collection of Akan Gold weights = Consortium-Amalgamate (???)
3. Gold conga wound = Consortium-Amalgamation-Borehole

-------------

4. Pipeline or Protest photo


1. a text only moment from Violent amalgamations (try to make it relate to the consortium)
2. gold model + text moment
3. image of hole + gold model + text moment




Conclusion notes: 

*/On latent violences at volumetric geocomputation
*/Mobilising the mattering of time-space
*/Making the production of time-space present
*/No Gold, no time
/ latent golden times at volumetric geocomputation

The That the mattering of time-space is another violent almagamation 
it will be violent as long as capitalism exists.

- how long something takes
- keeping track of things
- super violent thing that depends on who keeps the time and how time is kept
- if the tale is on timelessness it has a deadly and affirmtaive side 

It is not easy to write this because of the many temporalities and scales. Colliding different stories.
Interesting to not have written explicitly about activists. Avoiding the coloniality/invasiveness/appropriation of it.
Presenting complexity through fact and fiction


- present complexity in a particular way
- try to talk about Conga and Khronos at the same time
- how to present the complexity of geocomputation and modelling from the consortium to the conga 
- making present the relationalities that make possible the algorithm 
- and the relationalities that are made possible by the algorithm 
- only way to act to intervene is make a target
- only begnning to think about what can be done in these spaces without doing seperative moves, what types of activism can addresss amalagmar-consortium-borehole - which is a very different figure to oncomouse or panopticon 
- time: material history/cultures of temporality and the relation to extraction and calculation
- collision of the turbo capitalism speeding up of time and optimization and the ongoingness of extractive damage 
- latency of colonial extractivism that is present in both computation and extraction, the presence in all corners, the whole regime the apparatus actively waiting, the active fights, people are not out in the streets and trucks are not out in the mine.. 

The borehole as a passage, a shortcut for understanding damage. Borehole as a wormhole, drilling down / a portal / the chronotope of the threshold.

How to remake 3D practices that might make time present in other ways, that might tell the stories of amalgmates-consortium-boreholes damages without apprproating or extracting these further
which out making furthrer boreholes.. 
how might as Octavia Butler says - 
love of alliances, gatherings, 
Different times/timings, different spaces/spatialities (and other computation).

...But what was there before consortium? What can we say about pre-consortia times?

other calculations, other validations, 

Borehole flip: an entrance for the repetition of damage -- partiality (not totality) flipping. Localized, partial. Not to flip into repair / reparation.

Amalgamate 


Fungible fugitivity

 1" pp35