Sinkhole

Imagine something actively existing in the absence. But at the same time very material. Imagine something that is unimaginably big or unimaginably small. Something painfully hard or painfully soft. I used to have these recurrent dreams about intangible material, somehow psychologically unbearable. It is rather strange to dream so precisely about material, its shapes and sizes.

(Excerpt from the video Sinkhole)

When I included a narration about a dream I had repeatedly experienced in the video work Sinkhole (2021), others reacted with surprise – they had also had similar dreams. Reflecting on geological processes, rock erosion, and the constant transformation of matter brought that dream experience back. Underground cave formations especially reminded me of it: from afar, they looked as if, on touching them, your fingers would sink into a viscous substance – yet the impression was deceptive, for they were made of the hardest rock. Perhaps a similar frustration emerges when thinking about the (im)materiality of the digital image.

In Sinkhole, I devoted much attention to the juxtaposition of the earth’s surface and the image’s surface, and to the question of the materiality of digital imagery. The geological phenomenon of a sinkhole – when the ground ‘ruptures’ – becomes a fitting prism through which to explore the image’s surface and its instability.

An analog image is easier to perceive as material, while a digital medium immediately grants it a more elusive form. With advancing technologies, an illusion is created that the digital image is detached from matter. In media theory and contemporary art, this issue is examined by emphasizing the close relationship between technology and geology. Jussi Parikka (in A Geology of Media (2015)) reminds us that ‘invisible’ technologies rely on very concrete resources, while Jennifer Gabrys (in Digital Rubbish (2011)) points out that they become waste and pollute the environment. Paradoxically, these ‘light’ technologies exist only thanks to infrastructures that exhaust the environment. High-resolution streaming and artificial intelligence require enormous amounts of energy, while the materiality of digital images lies in cobalt, steel, and other minerals.

In the same book, Parikka introduces the concept of ‘psychogeophysics’, derived from ‘psychogeography’ – the exploration of urban environments through wandering. The difference is that psychogeophysics focuses on the geological and geophysical aspects of space. It is another way of experiencing the environment, paying attention to the entanglement of geological matter and everyday life. While creating Sinkhole, I often felt that it was a kind of psychogeophysical journey. Yet it is one thing to walk through space in reality and another to convey that experience through image.

Artist and filmmaker Sasha Litvintseva proposes both a conceptual tool and an artistic practice she calls ’geological cinema’. She examines how cinema – its form, material, and temporality – is closely intertwined with geological materiality, and vice versa. The central idea is to think about three geological aspects (material, form, temporality) through three aspects of cinema (image and sound, medium, viewing experience). Every film image is geological, she argues, because as a technology it is inseparable from metals and minerals extracted from the earth. Litvintseva suggests that geological processes can be imagined as a slowed-down film: matter changes over time, transforms into new forms, leaving traces behind.

This resonates with a thought shared with me by geologist Vytautas Puronas – that rocks are like GPS devices, recording the movement of continents in relation to the magnetic pole. Geological formations become systems of memory, similar to hard drives. I often recall filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha’s idea in her film Forgetting Vietnam (2016), that high and low-resolution imaging technologies are like different memory systems. I also believe that images of different origins contain different emotions and bring out each other’s materiality. Drawing on these ideas and Litvintseva’s notion of ‘geological cinema’, in Sinkhole I aimed to perceive the image not only as a tool of recording, but as a way to experience geological processes as tactilely as possible.

In another work, faults and folds (2025), materiality becomes even more crucial – both in image and in content. It is inspired by the geological phenomenon of the formation of a dyke, when solidifying magma infiltrates between already existing rocks. In the video, rocks intertwine with urban details, denim patchworks, and hands attempting to explore surfaces by touch. In the accompanying exhibition text, I likened this interweaving to the mixture of various objects in a pocket, when a hand tries to understand the nature of materials by feeling what is inside.

In this video, I used not only digital imagery but also analog photography, which I later processed with computer programs and artificial-intelligence animation. In this way, photography seemingly lost its ‘authenticity’, yet the intersection of these different imaging technologies became the most interesting element to me. The video is dominated by transformations of the image. Digital manipulation is not only intended to convey geological processes, but also to highlight our relationship with the image – one where desire and frustration are intertwined.

Recently, while walking through Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, at an exhibition dedicated to Turkish artist Ömer Uluç, I read his words: I have tried every possible way a painting can break free from the canvas, at least in my dreams. I realized that his desire to break free from the frame of the canvas echoes my own reflections on the image gliding across a surface, trapped within the flatness of the screen. Now that an increasingly large part of the visual field is occupied by a new type of imagery – artificial-intelligence generated images – their nature becomes ever harder to grasp, like that unnameable substance appearing in a dream.