Infrastructures of Excess

In this single-channel video, an archiving machine traces the contours of human-produced excess across the surface of the Earth. Drawing on a global collection of satellite imagery from low Earth orbit, two dozen AI agents interpret landscapes of excess—from sites of heavy industry and factory farming to AI factories and luxury enclaves—for traces of the forces that brought them into being. Cast in the austere visual language of a preliminary report, the video invites viewers to consider the cost of comfort and to follow the agents as they struggle to infer, from open-pit mines or superyacht marinas, the human demands that gave those landscapes their form.