Spewing, hot, liquid planet. Celestial body with a core of solid iron, wearing a ductile mantle of minerals and solid rock. On this molten mineral fluid, we find its crust, and the lithosphere’s tectonic plates, slowly and sedulously moving. Its limbs collide and submerge underneath the skin, inexorably forming folds and slowly congealing into new geographies. The cracked face of today’s Earth resembles the body of Frankenstein’s monster. The script of how volcanoes erupt is embedded in the different layers of Earth: the crust, the mantle, and the core. From the outside, this lava-made creature, the volcano, appears to be peacefully asleep, slumbering for hundreds of years—in its intermediate depth, its organs are filled with mineral deposits, magma, and rocks. Heat rises, rocks melt, pressure builds; once again waiting to escape. Volcanic eruptions are born from this geothermic pressure and amplified by rare earth metals (REMs)—for example, tellurian neodymium isotopes—with such violence that the mountain decapitates itself. An extreme violence of heat and compressing force generates these metals as though designed by the god of fire and metalworking himself: Vulcan.

Four billion years ago, somewhere on land or in the ocean, life began. Inorganic elements of long dead stars mingled in the hostile volcanic depths of sea and earth. This violent theater of evolution was the ultimate genesis for organic molecules such as Methylacidiphilium fumariolicum SolV, a methanotrophic microbe found in a volcanic mud pot, feeding off rare earth metals to survive. Fumaroles are hydrothermal chimney-like structures, vents that emit geothermally heated water in the darkest depths of the sea, offering the extreme volcanic environments conducive to molecular reproduction, to DNA, the stuff of humanity. Humans are, then, in a sense nothing other than volcanic products.[1]

Humankind has been eager to replicate nature, sending electrical currents through mixtures of water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, producing amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Animating them into existence.[2] Is this hubris or human nature? “Animal electricity.” Violent contractions, nerves convulse, sparks discharge. Metal taps into the humming circuits buried in muscle. Unknown electric currents flow alongside the metallic lineages within blood and bone. Metal rods, vitrines of acrid chemicals, acids rubbed into the open incisions of severed (frog) limbs, electrodes attached to living skin.[3] Galvani, von Humboldt, Volta. Maniacal self-electrocution. Victorian, Gothic, demonic. Blumenbach discovering the “formative drive,” the Bildungstrieb. A force at work in living organisms, and the formation of bodies, essential for the creation of life.[4]

Neodymium, the sustenance of archaic organisms, is a superconductive element with the power to transcend its fiery genesis and thrive as the heartbeat of the sub-freezing cryosphere. From deeply churning mythos to the sub-zero circuits of tomorrow: rare earth metals animate the nervous systems of our computers and smartphones, the tissue of techno-metallic images, the skin of the heads and bodies still to come—flash-freezing the tissues of dead human bodies in cryo-tanks. Reanimating them “from a state of lifelessness.”[5] Rare earths and the vitalizing energy of volcanic eruptions run through this article, “lightning, primordial ooze, frogs, Frankenstein [...], virtual particles, [...] bioelectricity, Franken-frogs, [cryotanks], monstrous [metallic] re/generations.”[6]

Just as steam provides the electrical energy in a turbine machine, it is the presence of gases that extend and provide our energy. Power from volcanoes is still used to generate electricity. After all, we come to understand that volcanoes provide everything needed to mold fertile soil for living organisms to grow and to connect them with electrical circuits.

Volcanic eruptions reach toward the sky, their lava-transformed magma columns rising from beneath the Earth’s crust into the air. Matter spits from the mountain in a super-heated rain of toxic ash. The stratosphere is injected with aerosols, particulates, carbon dioxide, and rocks. Ascending dark volcanic clouds with sparks of electric lightning induce colored sunsets that testify to short-term climate change. Lava flows, sliding down mountain slopes miles from the crater lip, “shaping land, creating mountains, [...] new seafloor[s] [...] depositing minerals and nutrients that enrich soil.”[7] The rare earth metals (REMs), such as neodymium, that are found in these volcanic environments are the “food” needed by the organisms that exist in volcanic mud pots, which are now considered the origin of “earth’s first cellular life.”[8] These are hints of the possible lines of metallic connections found in Earth’s four layers. The Earth is a factory; in fact, “a giant fluid factory, with hot, rising plumes acting as giant pipes connecting the deeper portions of Earth with the surface.”[9] Steaming, heating, melting, forging, cooling. The eighteenth-century scientist James Hutton (known as the “Father of Geology”) saw volcanoes as the steam engines needed to run the machinery of Earth, a factory constructed according to chemical and mechanical principles.[10] He was also the first to recognize the profound importance of subterranean heat, the phenomenon that causes volcanoes, and he argued that it was the key to the uplifting of formerly submerged land.[11]

It was this fascination with the constantly shifting and emerging strata of the earth that led to the ascription of a new unit of measurement relative to the movement of the earth. This was the inspiration for the notion of geological time or deep time.[12] The mighty energetics of Earth’s inner tectonics reveal magmatic differentiation: magma creates diverse mineral formulations. No magma resembles another magma.[13] No one formation resembles another.

Magma itself exemplifies matter’s steadily yearning and “formatic drive” to connect in all ways possible, a physical and geological exploration of modes of coupling, colliding and submerging alliance.[14] In volcanoes we see neodymium (and other lanthanides) in action, creating new magmic geographies and leaving traces upon its work.

Scientists from Japan, Taiwan, and the United States have reported that the lavas of Mount Unzen are rich in neodymium. This isotope, the team says, is a tracer for molten rock from the Earth’s deep mantle, rather than the overlying crust, and is a harbinger of big eruptions and explosive activity.[15] The team’s analysis “showed that big eruptions had a higher ratio of neodymium 143 to neodymium 144, the latter isotope being most common in the Earth’s crust.”[16] The richness of neodymium 143 indicates that the lava stems from the earth’s deep interior, which is associated with a more violent episode. The resulting material provides nourishment for bacterial organisms feeding off the rare earth metals created from the conflagration.[17] Metal desires new spaces and engenders new desires across species boundaries.

Like the volcanic explosions and lightning that created lava landscapes, mountains (bodies), and islands, like exploding stars or merging neutron stars tirelessly transforming, parting and recoupling, this essay is an exploration of formations, charged biopolitics, and the sparking of new technological imaginaries. It is an experimental text about matter’s experimentalism. It deals with creators and electric bodies, animated dead bodies, and what I term “techno-colonial bodies” and “digital neodymium bodies”; in short, all forms of “metallic bodies.”

Following Barad’s “agential realism” and her statements on matter’s agential capacities and affectively charged forms of bodily engagement, I set out here to rethink “metallic bodies” as the articulation of body politics in times of technological augmentation and in the age of rare earth metals.

By explaining how the creation of (rare earth) metals in supernova star explosions enabled the occurrence of certain events on Earth, I hope to demonstrate their considerable role in a whole range of developments, from the mining of REMs, to metallic formations, pop cultural imaginations of metallic bodies, techno-colonial bodies, neodymium bodies—and, ultimately, the alteration of our very species itself.[18]

14–5 Billion Years BCE: Metallic Genesis

Between fourteen and five billion years ago, before the creation of our solar system, the process of creating metallic elements began in violence. Through nuclear fusion, metals were forged within the core of massive flaming balls of gas—that is, stars. These cores measure between 5,537 and 55,537 degrees Celsius and are, in essence, thermodynamic factories for the development of elements. Dizzying machinic vibrations, chemical elements rolling down the conveyor belt: the factory runs according to plan, creating its desired atoms, until it encounters systemic creation of one element in particular—iron. This common element is used for most of the infrastructural systems on which modernist capitalism runs, but in this case it is disobedient. A prisoner on the run, an anti-factory Luddite, perhaps absconding into the darkness of a cosmic nineteenth-century Nottinghamshire. Once the core of the star embarks on the process of creating iron, it realizes how much energy it costs to keep this element locked up. It comprehends that physical protest might jeopardize the factory’s production. And, only seconds after the creation of iron, a process which in astronomy is widely referred to as “the kiss of death” kicks in. The planetary support structures around the core of the star start to crumble and the star collapses.[19] The energy previously contained within the star explodes, an amount of energy comparable to an octillion (10²⁷) atomic bombs detonated at the same time. A single metallic atom, iron, fatally poisons large planetary stars, resulting in one of the most violent types of explosions—the so-called “supernova”’:

In that cataclysmic explosion, for the first time, atoms of gold were manufactured and then hurled out into the Universe. On Earth, gold finally reached us some 200 million years after the formation of the planet when meteorites packed with metals bombarded its surface. It is through the violent production process of supernovas that rare earth metals and their superconductivity exist.[20]

These events simultaneously generate a superconductive politics, which governs all matter in contact with REMs. The specific concern is the bodies that are affected by REMs—their labor, and, by extension, even their racial and sexual politics.

1815. A Freudian Slip of the Earth: Decapitated Mountain

The controversial neo-reactionary philosopher Nick Land developed the concept of “geotrauma” in the late 1990s to radicalize psychoanalysis beyond what Deleuze and Guattari had reimagined in Anti-Oedipus, with their concept of schizoanalysis.[21] Land radicalized Deleuze and Guattari’s project by materializing the unconscious all the way into the very body of the Earth. This concept of geotrauma can be understood as the geological formation of the Earth as a psychoanalytical process. The first time that a crust was formed over the Earth’s molten core was what Land would call a geotraumatic event, since the interior of the Earth thereby became a distinct exterior.[22] Moreover, he claims that the social surroundings of a specific agent (be it human or non-human) are what affects its subjective mental health. These scarred landscapes cause humans’ ecological grief, that is, a grief that comes with traumatic events such as volcanic catastrophes or climate change.[23]

So far, we have traced the rare earth metals from their forging within the core of stars toward their dispersion on Earth. But it is also crucial to examine the atom iron’s quasi-sexual desire (philia) for rocks (litho-), known in geochemistry as Lithophilia. Moreover, the “coupling” of the biosphere and noosphere is, for Deleuze and Guattari, a material issue of desire in mechanic relationships: “Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented.”[24] In the same manner, as the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote, metals in the stars have coupled themselves to humans: “The nitrogen in our DNA […] the iron in our blood […] were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.”[25] The exploding stars, the supernova and the geotraumatic understanding of the formation of the Earth all influence the taxonomical ranking of people’s relationship to metals.

Rare earth metals are aliens that escaped the cores of stars and invaded the crust of the Earth.[26] Human existence on Earth can, in astronomical terms, thus be understood as displaced star-matter: matter that was sent out into space, only for it to land and form (on) Earth (some 1.8 billion years ago). Like memories that inscribe themselves in the neurons of our brain, the events the Earth has undergone have left a trace, registered in its interior to then be exposed. Formed of cooled lava, volcanic rocks retain the ferromagnesian and iron particles from their time inside the earth. These metals record the dynamics and reversals of the Earth’s geomagnetic field (within the signature of cooled lava) and point backward to their previous existence; they are, then, memory embodied, a link between the past and future, the medium of the Earth’s memory and traumas. The metallic body of the Earth interprets the “metallic head”—the magnetic field—and humans can read these traumatic dynamics in rocks.

Yet even while facing the enormity of the first geotraumatic event, one cannot ignore other traumatic events witnessed by this territory. The layers of sediment that are peeled back in the process of mining for REMs and precious metals leave behind a perforated landscape. Layer upon layer, vectors of violence intersect with vectors of power; hollowing out the skeleton of earth’s body without “care,” capital leaves a planet suffering from “osteoporosis” or what I term “gaiaporosis.”[27]

Nowadays the colonizer comes disguised as a corporation or development agency. The ramifications of conflict minerals, mining’s hazardous and toxic working conditions, and the resulting impact on the bodies of its workers remind us, sadly, that for many worldwide the precarious neo-colonial working conditions today match those of the past.[28]

A fitting symbol of this recurring cycle of history is the ship Mount Tambora. Named after the volcano on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, it is shown here (Figs. 5.1, 5.2) en route from Rotterdam to what was then known as the East Indies, which remained under Dutch rule for over three centuries until 1811. It is this archipelago, as Gloria Wekker argues, that put a tiny country like Holland on the world map in the first place.[29]

And with this we arrive at (geo-)trauma at work: What happens if the subconscious of the Earth, comfortably tucked under its crust, away from the rays of the sun, comes gushing towards the surface? This is what happened on April 10, 1815, when Mount Tambora awakened from its millennium-long slumber on Sumbawa.[30] In the largest volcanic eruption hitherto recorded in the Earth’s history, the top third of the mountain was torn off by the blast: Tambora was figuratively beheaded. Earth’s body had decapitated itself. While the Earth rippled and the volcano shook off all of its material belongings, it would take the country another 130 years to liberate itself and shake off its colonizers.

When accounting for the destructiveness of a volcano, the ash cloud is often neglected. In this case, the volcanic ash travelled hundreds of kilometers across borderless skies, taking rocks and aerosols along with it (Figs. 4.1, 5.2). Once expelled into the stratosphere, these particles blocked out the sunlight, causing low temperatures throughout the following summer, and amounts of rainfall that destabilized the lives of many through famine, disease, and dislocation. All this was set against the backdrop of “strange, spectacular sunsets” that Thomas Forster observed in London five months after the event, in September 1815.[31] Caspar David Friedrich also recorded the spectacular sunsets following the volcano’s eruption, and delivered an ideal canvas for contemporary scientists to measure aerosol levels from the years after Mount Tambora’s decapitation (Fig. 13).[32]

As Gillen D'Arcy Wood concludes, of the aerosol particiles that lingered in the stratosphere for two years causing havoc for the Earth’s climate, this was “a tragedy of nations masquerading as a spectacular sunset.”[33] The Tambora climate emergency of 1815–18 therefore offers us a rare, clear window onto a world convulsed by weather extremes, with human communities everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden, radical shifts. It is a case study in the fragile interdependence of human and natural systems.[34] The catastrophe is therefore not just a single event, but, according to Jane Bennett’s reworking of Deleuze and Guattari, an “assemblage.” Which is to say a grouping of “diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts.” Tambora, as David Higgins writes, “can stand for the assemblage of energy and matter.”[35]

Conclusively, the unsettling, massive change in the color of the sky that Forster and other Romantic artists witnessed can be conceptualized as an event slipping through the crust of the Earth, manifesting the geotraumatic memory of the Earth into uncanny sunsets. Following Land’s theory that a geotraumatic object has a subconscious, one can equate the eruption of Mount Tambora with a kind of Freudian slip. Perhaps we could even call it a Freudian plate slip. The eruption of volcanoes occurs at irregular intervals through the movement of tectonic plates under great pressure, perhaps the most brutal instance of brute force possible. Meanwhile the Freudian slip, as the theory holds, results from the interference of an unconsciously subdued wish or internal train of thought: as the volcano erupts, so the human tongue slips. Consequently, volcanic activity can be read as either the speech of the earth (or error in the speech of the earth) or the stutter of the earth. A literal or embodied signature of this occurrence is also seen in Hutton’s angular unconformity, where there is a visible gap in the physical record of geological time (Fig. 7).

The Promethean Impulse

“One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld,” Mary Shelley wrote in a famous letter from Lake Geneva:[36]

The lake was lit up—the pines on Jura made visible and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.[37]

Shelley was one of the group of English writers who spent the summer of 1816 in Geneva, Switzerland. There, electrified by lightning, they wrote ghost stories to entertain one another, and she began her novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. As Gillen Wood has it, “The novel bears the imprint of Mount Tambora and the summer of 1816.”[38] Over two hundred years later, its characters provide an occasion for us to reconsider the body/mind split, and to rethink metallic bodies in relation to this severance. Perhaps, one could argue, Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s creature had already been inscribed deep into the memory of the planet (and magnetic magma) and was only waiting to be unearthed and reborn in a volcanic rain of ash.

In Mary Shelley’s gothic novel, her antihero, the chemist Dr Frankenstein, is figured as the “new Prometheus,” who brings a monstrous being to life and, by doing so, ultimately becomes the victim of his own creation.[39] Prometheus “created” humans, while Victor Frankenstein generated a monstrous character that is at once human and inhuman. In the novel, the doctor is compared to Prometheus because both were penalized for bringing beings to life. A second analogy is that Prometheus gave life to humankind from mud, while Frankenstein reanimates a “man” using dismembered dead bodies and electricity. Indeed Shelley was fascinated by the ideas of the Italian physician Luigi Galvani—from whom our term ‘Galvanize’ derives—suggesting links between the frog’s body and Frankenstein’s limbs, his muscles contracted by electricity.

Dr Frankenstein revised the work of his mentors to discover the secret of breathing life into “dead” matter, with the similar goal of attaining immortality by transmutation of the physical body.[40] While his creature demanded a female companion, his inventor feared that the two creatures would reproduce themselves. He destroyed the almost-assembled body of the monster’s partner, and, with it, the future of a family of metallo-animated creatures. This moment of course amplified Frankenstein’s identity crisis: its “Otherness” is so thorough that the creature is never named in the novel, and only referred to as “creature,” “monster,” “daemon,” “wretch,” or “abortion.”[41] Denied integration into society, the creature is rendered desperate as “it,” as something/one that can’t be assimilated to human society.[42]

Today, the conditions of labor as well as production—and thus human and non-human relationships—are affected and accelerated by the advent of speedfactories as part of Industry 4.0, accompanied by engineering advances, and research into biomimetic robotics such as Boston Dynamics’ “Robotsoldier” or “Big Dog.”[43] This paradigmatic shift is accelerated by REMs, which provide the necessary functions. It is within this context that elemental arteries are formed and combined with the artificial intelligence needed by the “metallic head” to reign over new formations of metallic bodies and synthetic creatures. Arterial infrastructures such as telecommunications and the fiber-optic network are also based on rare earth metals. Thus, following Reza Negarestani’s logic, I would argue that rare earth metals use capitalism to leave their tellurian subterranean existence and come to life as commodities in different states.[44]

Alien Totalities

Following the logic of fiction at large (and the logic of life), I wish to now turn to contemporary digital figurines, and, with them, to examine what I term “digital colonialism” or “techno-colonialism.” The 3-D digital supermodel “Shudu” presents an ideal example of REM-based exploitation of the black female body and of new formations that come into being when metals meet humankind (Fig. 12).[45] Her creator, Cameron-James Wilson, has started a digital modelling agency called “The Diigitals,” and naively referred to the creation of Shudu as a “labour of love.”[46] Shudu comes equipped with a biography, a name, a nationality—Wilson located her in South Africa—as well as an Instagram account, from which she emerged to the digital surface of “the wretched of the screen.”[47] Wilson refers to Shudu as aesthetically “the most beautiful woman” he can think of, and he dressed her with jewelry that resembles traditional “ethnic” necklaces. The disturbing, non-reflective dimension of his own work is apparent in his description of his creature in the online Dubai Fashion Forum:

“Shudu is a digital supermodel, a very glamorous and amazing woman. But she’s 3-D,” [...] Wilson made Shudu in the beginning of 2017 using a program called Daz 3-D. The model was just one of many creations he made—“aliens, planets, everything”—[...] then he shared her first Instagram post. Shudu now has more than 120,000 followers [...] Wilson himself has more than 14,000.[48] 

Thinking of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and Shudu as one and the same category of creatures, one can argue that they are both dreamt up by the ghosts of a colonial phantasma. Both depend on electricity, circuits, and conductivity—in fact, it is through metal that these colonial fantasies rise again, now as digital commodities in circulation. As Fiona Hovenden clarifies:

The cyborg can be reclaimed again and again, from patriarchal image-making. It can keep a foot in silicon and a foot in carbon; it can run on blood and electricity. It can walk any street in the hope that it will be protected by its ambiguity. It may be wrong, and the risks are great, but it is an agent for fusing embodied, situated knowledge, and powerful fantasy.[49] 

Shudu’s impressive number of followers on Instagram is a moneymaker for her creator, who denies having created her for his own benefit. The technoid body of Shudu, like any other female body, is gazed at, fetishized. I’d like to think that Shudu is the late arrival, the partner that the spurned creature so desperately demanded from Dr Victor Frankenstein; one of his own kind. (Victor feared that Frankenstein would procreate and form a new, posthuman species).[50] More than two hundred years after Tambora, the new generation of metallic creatures has arrived. Successfully animated, they walk towards us in Graphic Interchange Formats (GIFs), and emancipate themselves from their creators; leading metallic computer-generated image (CGI) lives that complement and mingle with human lives, they populate screens made of black liquid crystals.[51] Soon they will be equipped with more than just their precious metals; they will also acquire affect—what Frankenstein’s figure so missed. Once the metallic androids are equipped with love and other affects, once they are as integrated into society as Alexa, Siri, and Shudu, they will finally create their own kin.[52]

With Shudu and other digital figures (such as Li’l Miquela or the digital bodies of hypercapitalist desire created by the artist Kate Cooper) staring back at us from Instagram accounts (and gallery walls), it seems that the World Wide Web has prolonged, or at least revived, some conquests over territory and black bodies. It is here that the lines blur between the technoid and humanoid flesh which can be exploited. As Hito Steyerl states:

The creative realm that includes both art and technology acts as a vast mine of labour extraction and passionate commitment, of structural violence, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their expressions.[53]

The mechanical flies buzz around the eyes of the wretched of the screen, and the metropolitan populations consume suffering greedily. The question to come is whether a new machinic phylum that acknowledges their humanity can emerge.

Cryocult(ure)

The narrative of Frankenstein is framed by ice and the extreme settings of the Arctic—which like all supposed terra nullius, was a landscape that sparked greedy colonial expeditions and phantasmagoric fantasies. The epitome of the human “death drive”—a notion most commonly associated with Freud but in fact coined by the Russian psychologist Sabina Spielrein—was experienced in an “[...] empire of ice [that] had the capacity to override all traces of the human.”[54] Dr. Victor Frankenstein feared the arrival of a new, posthuman species capable of surviving climate conditions that humans could not. As the creature floats away upon an ice-raft to end his existence in the “inequalities of the ice,” vanishing into the cryosphere, uncertain of its future, we come full circle to present-day technologies of the cold that form our bodies: cryoculture and the practice of cryonic human preservation. Through this specific technology, humankind embarks on the journey to conquer the final frontier: mortality. Back in 1964, Robert Ettinger advocated freezing the newly deceased for possible future reanimation. The wide-ranging implications of this are significant: the human stays human by becoming metallic. In 1967, Dr James Bedford was the first person to become cryopreserved in the United States. As futuristic as the novel Frankenstein might have sounded in 1815, on that day in 1967, the idea of animating an assemblage of cadaver parts and shocking life into its muscles left the realm of pure fiction. The ingredients needed for the procedure known as “cryonics” are the materials of the modern age; once more it is neodymium, a superconductive material at extremely low temperatures, which is used in the production of cryotanks.[55] In this technology the promise of a possible, resuscitated future life is embedded, reminiscent of the alchemist’s dream of finding the elixir of life to achieve immortality. Needless to say, the paradox of this procedure is that cryonics requires a dead body in the first place and takes clinical death as its starting point. Legally speaking, cryopreserved humans are nevertheless considered dead. Following legal logic, therefore, cryonics represents the revival of the dead. A decade ago, David Shaw investigated the ethical aspect of cryonics, and concluded that inscribed in this technology is the change of the concept of death itself.[56]

In this sense, metal once more becomes the conduit for a set of intentions and hopes that are more alchemical than empirical. Metal becomes a vector rather than an end in and of itself. From the neodymium-eating molecular organisms found in the volcanic mud pots to human and non-human bodies, metals—and especially REMs—meander between and across desires for life, death, and the afterlife. Considering the role of digital supermodels, one could argue their arrival heralded the kiss of death; metal minerals come from the death of a star and facilitate death on the battlefields; just as REMs can feed back into human suffering at every moment from their extraction to the sharing of images that propagate racist, colonialist standards. The question of cryonics is a cybergothic idea but also a quasi-or digital colonial idea, rendering death as one more territory to be conquered by metal and human desire acting in tandem. The metallic body may still be headless, but it nevertheless straddles the boundary between life and death—and what it means to be human.

Trailer for Füsun Türetken, Neodymium. Superconductive Bio and Metallopolitics, 2019, 02:53. The film highlights the role of Rare Earth Metals, and specifically the lanthanide Neodymium.

[1] Jelle Zelinga de Boer, "Volcanoes and Earthquakes - Inside the Volcano," documentary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eHi2NGw-a4, accessed November 30, 2022.

[2] Karen Barad, ‘TransMaTerialiTies: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings’, GLQ, vol. 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): pp. 387–422.

[3] Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science, London: John Murray, 2015, p. 24.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Barad, “TransMaTerialiTies,” pp. 387–422.

[7] “Volcanoes,” National Geographic, online https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/volcanoes, accessed November 30, 2022.

[8] Dave Mosher, “Life on Earth Began on Land, Not on Sea,” National Geographic (2012), online news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120213-first-life-land-mud-darwin-evolution-animals-science, accessed November 30, 2022; A. Y. Mulkidjanian et al., “Origin of first cells at terrestrial, anoxic geothermal fields,” PNAS, vol. 109, no. 14 (2012): E821–E830, online doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117774109, accessed December 1, 2022.

[9] Geological Society of America, “Earth Structure: Fluid Factory in Solid Earth,” ScienceDaily (2009), online www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090226093425.htm, accessed November 30, 2022.

[10] James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, e-version on Project Gutenberg, 1792/2004, online www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12861.

[11] Jack Repcheck, The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity, New York: Basic Books, 2009, p. 8.

[12] John McPhee, Annals of the Former World, Part 1: Basin & Range, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

[13] Magma forms diverse mineral formulations which derive from a single parent magma. The solidified lava rock is created through a crystallization of the silicate-based magma. It is constituted of crystals of diverse minerals, of which many are metal minerals: silicium, iron, aluminium, magnesium, titan, phosphor, biotite, etc.

[14] Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, Der Bildungstrieb der Stoffe, ed. Judith Schalansky, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 2014.

[15] William J. Broad, “Scientists Find Clue to Peril of Volcanic Eruptions,” New York Times (1993), online www.nytimes.com/1993/04/29/world/scientists-find-clue-to-peril-of-volcanic-eruptions.html, accessed December 1, 2020.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Radboud University Nijmegen, “Rare Earth Metal Essential Element for Methane-munching Acid-volcano Microbe,” ScienceDaily (2013), online www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130905085640.htm, accessed December 1, 2020.

[18] The term “supernova” was coined by the German astronomer Walter Baade and the Czech-Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1931 to designate the event that follows upon the death of certain types of stars.

[19] Michel Cassé, Stellar Alchemy: The Celestial Origin of Matter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 153.

[20] Tibi Puiu, “How Gold is Made and How it Got to our Planet,” ZMEScience (2019), online www.zmescience.com/science/how-gold-is-made-science-064654, accessed September 2018.

[21] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, introduced by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, Chacewater: Urbanomic, 2018.

[22] Ibid. p. 498.

[23] Glenn Albrecht, “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change,” Australasian Psychiatry, vol. 15 Suppl 1(1) (February 2007): pp. 95–8.

[24] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 6.

[25] Ausenco, “M&M Commodities Iron Ore,” Port Design and Management Considerations, Ausenco Insights, accessed 1 September 2018, www.ausenco.com/en/commodity-iron-ore, accessed November 30, 2022.

[26] Using infrared telescopes, astronomers studied the spectra—the chemical composition of cosmic objects—of the collision and found that the plume ejected by the merger contained a host of newly formed heavy chemical elements, including gold, silver, platinum, and others. Marina Koren, “The Plume of Gold Ejected by a Cosmic Collision,” The Atlantic, October 16, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/the-making-of-cosmic-bling/543030/, accessed November 30, 2022.

[27] María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. The idea and term of “Gaiaporosis” was only recently developed in collaboration with Natalie Konopelski as a collaborative endeavor; it is not yet published.

[28] In an interview with Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison explained how slavery took a toll on the white (man’s) psyche: 

Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke Europe. It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy. You can’t do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves. They have had to reconstruct everything in order to make that system appear true.

Quoted in Paul Gilroy, “Living Memory: An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent’s Tale, 1993, p. 178.

[29] Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

[30] Mount Tambora is part of the explosive geological territory of the “Pacific Ring of Fire” in which Indonesia is situated. The archipelago is thus prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The geothermal heat that comes with it attracts capital interest nowadays.

[31] Akhyari Hananto, “An Eruption That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster,” Seasia, www.seasia.co/2018/04/06/an-eruption-that-shrouded-the-earth-and-gave-birth-to-a-monster, accessed November 30, 2022.

[32] Sarah Zielinski, “200 Years After Tambura Volcanic Eruption Unusual Effects Linger,” Smithsonian, April 9, 2015, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/200-years-after-tambora-volcano-eruption-unusual-effects-linger-180954918/, accessed November 30, 2022. Susan Schuppli’s inspiring video work Atmospheric Feedback Loops (2017) describes among other aspects the phenomenon of a change in Dutch light and how scientists engage with paintings to analyze changes. See: .

[33] Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

[34] Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster,” Nautilus, December 14, 2015, accessed November 30, 2022.

[35] David Higgins, “Tambora and British Romantic Writing,” in Dehlia Hannah (ed.), A Year Without a Winter, New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018. Higgins refers to Jane Bennett’s concept of new materialist thinking and Vibrant Matter in which she argues that an assemblage also possibly includes humankind with its social, legal, and linguistic conditions. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

[36] Mary Wollstencraft Shelley, History of a Six Week Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, Letter 1, from Hôtel de Secheron, Geneva, May 17, 1816, accessed November 30, 2022.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster.”

[39] See Hans-Jürgen Schings, “Aufstieg und Krise des modernen Prometheus,” in Julia Bertschik, Elisabeth Emter and Johannes Graf, Produktivität des Gegensätzlichen, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000, pp. 55–68, here pp. 58–61; Christian Kreutz, Das Prometheussymbol in der Dichtung der englischen Romantik, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963, pp. 136–52.

[40] Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, London: Bloomsbury, 2011.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid.

[43] The US military has invested in biomimetic robotics. One example is Boston Dynamics’ “Big Dog” robot, a rough-terrain robot that uses animal-like mobility. Roshenac Mitchell, “Overview of Biomimetic Robotics,” accessed April 2019, www.roshenac.mitchell.ch/portfolio/papers/advancetopicformat.pdf.

[44] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, Complicity with Anonymous Material, Melbourne: re.press: 2008, p. 29.

[45] Shudu is the first digital supermodel, a computer-generated body with an account followed by 238,000 users on Instagram, at the time of writing. The existence of Shudu is the manifestation of the paradigmatic shift toward new forms of labor. It comes with the promise of the “perfect” artificial body visually superior to other female models. The enhanced image technology allows for the creation of the new laborer: Instagram would not exist without metallic wires, or salt mineral screens. Perhaps most significantly, the artificial body would not exist without the formation of a metallic body that exploits the understanding of the female and black body—a new form of exploitation superconducted by rare earth metals.

[46] Mulan Itoje, “The Digital Modelling Agency Fetishising Black Women,” gal-dem, July 15, 2018, accessed August 2018, http://gal-dem.com/digital-model-agency-fetishing-black-women/, accessed November 30, 2022. Shudu's instagram is: https://www.instagram.com/shudu.gram/.

[47] Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.

[48] Dubai Fashion Forum, “Shudu: Fashion’s First Avatar Supermodel?,” June 13, 2018, http://dubaifashionforum.com/shudu-fashions-first-avatar-supermodel, accessed November 30, 2022.

[49] Fiona Hovenden, “Introduction to Part Four: Refractions (women, technology and cyborgs),” in Gill Kirkup et al. (eds.), The Gendered Cyborg, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 260.

[50] David Higgins, “Tambora and British Romantic Writing,” p. 50.

[51] Alexa Tietjen, “Shudu: Fashion’s First Avatar Supermodel?,” June 13, 2018, accessed November 30, 2022.

[52] As already noted, in Shelley’s novel Dr Frankenstein does not allow his creature to have a partner, as he fears that they might be able to create life themselves and raise and foster a generation of creatures of their own. A posthuman species able to survive any extreme climate condition that humans could not. The narrative can be read as the creator dominating class and race.

[53] E-flux, “The Wretched of the Screen book launch at Pro qm,” November 30, 2012, www.e-flux.com/announcements/33376/the-wretched-of-the-screen-book-launch-at-pro-qm/.

[54] Higgins, “Tambora and British Romantic Writing,” p. 50.

[55] In cryotanks, the metal is employed as an alloy with erbium, in low-temperature procedures down to -269°C, which are needed for the freezing of human bodies or endangered livestock breeds.

[56] David Shaw, “Cryoethics: Seeking Life After Death,” Bioethics, vol. 23, no. 9 (2009): pp. 515–21.