The project functions as an experimental navigation tool of the region of Ptolemaida, Greece and in particular the area of the lignite extraction and processing facilities. Its digital and interactive form allows the user to experience multiple scales simultaneously, thus enhancing both the loss of the traditional notion of scale as well as an urgent desire to reimagine it. The information is organized according to an expanded, circular, deformed ‘ecology’ of sorts: from the depths of the earth (the natural habitat of lignite) to the heights of the sky (the natural habitat of the byproducts of its consumption). In the middle lie all the material and immaterial agents that keep the wheel turning: institutions, equipment and machinery, flora and fauna, networks with nodes and connections, terrains with varying degrees of abandonment or retrieval. Persistent through all of the levels of this feedback loop is a request to reconsider the possibility of a newness: a new perspective, language or apparatus that will allow the understanding, grasping, withstanding of an equally new complexity.
The work has been produced as an interpretation of various themes discussed during a 4-week Seminar, titled “Navigating the Lost Scales”, organized by the The New Centre for Research & Practice and taught by the Posthuman Studies Lab. It has not been publicly exhibited yet.
