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Gyrecene Temporality

The water column as a spatial-temporal structure & labor as a perpetually hidden abode

The Gyrecene is a swirling, chimerical vortex of four different ideas that illuminate the human era, namely voyage, capital, surveillance, and plastic. We have already explained the basics of these four dimensions, but there is an axis we have not elaborated upon yet: time. These four themes stack together temporally, tracing a story through the modern era. By starting with voyage and ending with plastic, new patterns emerge, and the one we have chosen to trace through the scenographic map below is labor.

Labor, especially forced labor, is a common thread throughout the four eras, from the dawn of colonization to the conditions in modern Amazon warehouse facilities. By probing the depths of forced labor throughout voyage, capital, surveillance, and plastic, we reveal the shipwreck narrative woven into the timeline.

One idea we wish to set up is that often, societies employ “shipwreck” narratives to characterize the ends of eras or moments of crisis. In other words, many of the stories we tell about ourselves — including those that have been key to the evolution of capitalism, plastic, colonization, and surveillance — emerge from what we tend to term watershed moments: think of the Columbian exchange, the 2008 financial crisis, the invention of the iPhone, or 9/11. But these instantaneous shipwrecks do not seem to tell the whole story when we observe the depths of history all at once.

Our project puts forth a more useful narrative: one that situates ourselves and our culture as in the midst of a crisis that unfolds without a clear beginning or end, with symptoms that latch onto and exacerbate socio-political and environmental processes that have occurred throughout recorded history: storms, illness, floods, extreme weather.

In keeping with the theme of gyres, we’ve chosen to organize this historical axis of labor using a water column. Oceanic water columns are separated into four zones, with the oldest debris at the bottom. We’ve matched our four concepts with the zones of the ocean to provide our piece with structure. This means that voyage is represented by the Abyssal Zone at the bottom, capital is the Midnight Zone above that, surveillance is the Twilight Zone, and plastic is the Sunlight Zone. Join us as we begin our descent into the maelstrom.

The Sunlight Zone: Our story ends at the top, in the shallow Sunlight Zone. The Sunlight Zone reflects the modern era of mass production reliant on low-wage or unpaid labor by disenfranchised groups. Here, we start at the bottom of the Zone with a pile of fish nets, meant to produce continuity with the Twilight Zone’s prison bars. Fish nets reflect plastic pollution, as much of modern marine pollution comes from fishing gear, but it is also a gesture at so-called “sea slavery,” another form of forced labor entangled in our Gyrecene. “Sea slavery” occurs on commercial fishing boats and involves kidnapping and often murder (Urbina 2015).

From the fishing nets emerge two representatives of another key labor source in the modern Gyrecene: Amazon employees, during a COVID-era protest against unsafe working conditions (Spencer Platt for The New York Times). They are set against blueprints for an Amazon building just outside of Seattle (Bishop 2016). Behind them is a piece of physical infrastructure that upholds Amazon’s distribution network: a conveyor belt pulled from an expose of working conditions in Amazons’ notorious fulfillment centers (Chang W. Lee for The New York Times).

Standing atop the conveyor belt is a young boy named Rahul (age 11), a talented student from southern India whose school closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and who now collects plastic to sell to a recycling company (Atul Loke for The New York Times). His presence in this image is intended to reflect the inextricable connection between unjust labor in the “developing” and “developed” worlds. Amazon’s mass production and distribution of plastic goods and packaging materials is directly tied to worldwide plastic pollution that children like Rahul then make a living collecting. In the upper background Rahul is a final key element: zebrafish cells containing visible nanoplastics, which scientists believe are now also present in the human bloodstream (Gopinath 2019, 1). They are overlaid with a water texture to create a more seamless visual transition, but also to reflect our ‘Cene’s oceanic theme and the key role of water as an avenue through which plastic pollution decays and is distributed worldwide. The very top of the image returns to shoreline, reflecting the end of our group’s scenographic collage and paralleling the sand at the ocean floor at the deepest recesses of the Abyssal Zone.

The Twilight Zone: Just below the Sunlight Zone, the Twilight Zone reflects how surveillance in its many forms accelerated the pace and severity of labor exploitation. The three major themes that define this part of the column are policing, the internet, and the carceral system. The zone transitions from the deeper Midnight Zone through the structure of the panopticon. The gaze of a factory overseer is paralleled by the omnipresent surveillance of the panopticon. Traversing one ring of the panopticon is a ghostly line of prison firefighters. Prison labor is a prime example of the overlap between surveillance, capitalism, and labor exploitation. These laborers make between $2–5 a day with an additional dollar per hour they are actively fighting a fire (Singh 2020). This egregious wage exploitation is exacerbated by the harrowing nature of the work of a firefighter.

Moving further upwards, the panopticon dissolves into a map of the internet. The branching tendrils of the map represent regional loci of internet use. Notably this map represents the state of the internet in 2004, representations using the same methods are incomprehensible when applied to the scope of the current internet. The internet is the primary conduit through which modern surveillance occurs. This representation of its connections also conceptually illustrates how it permeates all aspects of our lives.

Ensnared in the connections of the internet are a united front of police officers in riot gear bombarding unseen protests with a fire hose during a Black Lives Matter march in 2020. Police are the physical force that enact carceral logic. This image also demonstrates how pervasive military technology has become embedded in local police departments. The self-perpetuating cycling of over-policing, crime, and imprisonment is of particular importance to understanding the exploitation of prison labor. The map of the internet transitions into a hallway of modern prison cells. The stark efficiency of modern prisons is visually paralleled by the image. The Twilight Zone feeds into the Sunlight Zone above it as prison bars transition into the coils of fishing nets.

The Midnight Zone: Here we continue the narrative into early capitalism and its exploitation of labor. The map of southern colonies from the Abyssal Zone below transitions smoothly into the Midnight Zone, reflecting the colonial condition under which capitalism first developed. At the very center is a little girl employed as child labor by a textile factory. This invites the viewers to think about the various forms of forced labor — and the stories behind them — that developed when capitalism began to gain on scale. The textile equipment on the two sides extends and disappears behind the girl, indicative of the sheer scale and magnitude of industrialized factory production lines and reflecting the power of capital. Again, the girl is centered to bring attention to the intimate everyday struggles of individuals born into capitalism, and put them in contrast with the grander discourses that celebrate the massive progress made under capitalism as civilizational achievements.

The textile equipment on the sides blends into images of ocean trenches. This is not only an aesthetic choice. Ocean trenches are not only where old and new plates converge, but also where the most violent volcanic and tectonic activities are found. With the help of its rocky texture, we want to emphasize that the development from early capitalism to industrial capitalism to modern-day capitalism is not a tranquil process. The very conditions of capitalism’s existence and gradual evolution is characterized by constant unrest, violent dispossession, and systematic subjugation. It is “born in blood and fire”, through a historical and ongoing process of original accumulation facilitated by violent force, whether visible or not. We should not take our modern condition for granted. At the very top of the Midnight Zone, we put an image of people on the second floor of a factory gazing down at the production lines — an invitation for even the well-off portions of capitalist society to meditate on its violent history and implications. These factory gawkers transiton smoothly into the panopticon above in the Twilight Zone.

The Abyssal Zone: Our narrative begins in the early 1600s, with the dawn of the Age of Exploration. The seafloor of the Abyssal Zone is made from a map of historically significant expeditions, like Columbus’ 1492 voyage and Magellan’s circumnavigation. Connections between the Old and New World facilitated exploitation, both of natural resources and of people. Perhaps the most salient example of this is the Transatlantic slave trade, in which over 15 million enslaved Africans were transported to the New World during the 15th through 19th centuries (“Slave Trade”, n.d.). This transferral enabled the growth of the plantation economy in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas. We chose to focus on the plantations in the Southern US (shown behind the wreck of Magellan’s ship) since plantation production–dominated by cotton–fueled the industrial North, leading to brutal factory labor conditions in the 1800s. This included child labor, which is the transition into the Midnight Zone, era of capital.

Foregrounding the archival images while using the maps as background elements was a conscious decision to prioritize the human experience over data-based abstractions. Centering the narrative and human experience was a priority throughout this scenographic map, such as with the Amazon workers in the Sunlight Zone or the textile girl in the Midnight Zone, as too often, the lives of forced laborers have gone ignored or been erased. Thus, instead of the map of slave-holding southern plantations, the depiction of enslaved Africans on a ship gets the spotlight. Overall, the Abyssal Zone represents the roots of forced labor–the murky depths that lie below modern mass incarceration, bloodstream pollution, and all other processes that comprise our world today.

Gyre-of-Life Diagram. By guiding you through a vertical representation of the Gyrecene, we have presented an organized historical narrative of forced labor. However, in reality, these themes are much more interconnected. Voyage didn’t end with the Atlantic slave trade, and capitalism didn’t end with textile mills. If the scenographic map above is the side-view of the Gyrecene, then the Gyre-of-life diagram below is the top-down view.

The map at the center of the diagram is based on a map of actual oceanic gyres, but the oceans have been replaced with images of our four themes: voyage, capital, surveillance, and plastic, which are identifiable via the dotted white lines on the left of the diagram. To show the interconnections between these ideas, we look to the gyres overlaying the four images. All the scenes a gyre touches are connected by a singular process; for example, Gyre III represents the private prison industry (identified using the key on the bottom right), and accordingly, it overlays capital and surveillance. These inter-thematic processes are shown visually in the rings surrounding the gyre map using spatial data.

Contrasting the use of illustrations for the four main themes (voyage, capital, etc.) with spatial mapping for the processes (slave trade, oil tankers, etc.) was a conscious decision to show the distinction between expectation and reality; the idealism of early capitalism or miracle tupperware fails to translate to the real world, instead manifesting with traceable repercussions like plastic pollution and prison labor.

Surveillance Map. While on the subject of prisons, it is worth diving deeper into some of the processes that comprise our broader narrative of forced labor through time. One such process is the Stop-and-Frisk policy in NYC. As seen in the Twilight Zone of the scenographic map, policing is deeply interwoven throughout the gyrecene. Carceral logic is central to an understanding of the modern shipwreck narrative. In order to interrogate these aspects of the gyrecene, the maps below bring policing, surveillance, and labor exploitation into conversation, visualizing the spatial correlation between surveillance cameras and Stop-and-Frisk stops. Stop-and-Frisk was a policy that allowed police to stop, interrogate, and search New Yorkers on the sole basis of “reasonable suspicion.” Black and Latine New Yorkers were disproportionately stopped and arrested, which caused Stop-and-Frisk to be declared unconstitutional in 2013. These stops are well documented and offer insight into policing practices in the 2000s and early 2010s.

A heatmap of surveillance density was created using data from the Amnesty International campaign Ban The Scan, (Fig. 1). The basemap displays the percentage of non-white residents per census tract. The local concentration of security cameras is depicted in a red gradient, where a more saturated color corresponds to a greater density of cameras. Contrasting this heat map is another which displays 2011 Stop-and-Frisk stops in yellow (Fig. 2). The year 2011 was the peak of Stop-and-Frisk in terms of number of stops per year with 685,724 people being stopped, so it provided the most robust dataset. It is immediately apparent that there is a general trend that both surveillance and stops are spatially concentrated in non-white neighborhoods. A notable exception to this is lower Manhattan around SoHo, which surveillance and stops most likely correspond to the high density of street commerce.

A crucial dimension to Stop-and-Frisk stops is the race of the stopped New Yorker. To visualize this added level of information, an additional sequence of four heat maps that overlay security camera density with stops by race (Fig. 3). The NYDP data classifies race into Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Black-Hispanic, White-Hispanic, White, unknown, and other (“Stop, Question and Frisk Data”, 2011). The data for American Indian/Alaskan Native, unknown, and other categories was too small to be visible on a heat map, so Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, White, and Hispanic stops are individually isolated. The choice to combine Black-Hispanic and White-Hispanic reflects data convention used by the NYPD, though this choice merits future analysis.

Cash or Credit? A Genealogy of the Credit Card in 3 Gyres. Another process that probes the depths of the Gyrecene is the life cycle of a credit card. The systems diagram below traces the credit card as a fundamental artifact of the Gyrecene and is intended to illustrate three ways in which the humble credit card engages with our constituent ‘cenes.

First, we have the glitch (top), which reflects the digital life of credit in today’s online world. The glitch illustrates the cycle between Internet commerce, new platforms for transactions, surveillance via algorithms and data collection of people’s consumption behavior and preferences, and the innovation of new forms of currency that ultimately have tremendous environmental costs.

The glitch leads us to the breakdown (bottom right), which reflects the physical life of a credit card. The constituent technology of the glitch uniformly includes plastic components, which become a part of this physical life cycle (in fact, any plastic from any phone or computer you’ve ever used still exists today), and the glitch also enables e-commerce corporations like Amazon, which produce unbelievable amounts of plastic waste, which then break down into microplastics and nanoplastics and wind up in our food, water, soil, and bloodstream. This ubiquity of plastic means that the first “synthetic humans” won’t be cyborgs — they’ll be you and me, awash in synthetic plastic ingredients like endocrine disruptors. But it is this ubiquity that leads us to total reliance on plastic as a building block of our epoch — and hence, leads to the creation of more microplastics, nanoplastics, and so on.

The breakdown then flows to the distortion (bottom left), which reflects the role of credit and debt in creating global economic inequity. The connection between these two systems is poignant: both the creation of new plastics and the scattering and recollection of plastic waste disproportionately harm low-income and unpaid laborers in the Global South. The distortion starts with how credit is fundamentally a question of trust, and illustrates how the answer to that question creates global economic winners and losers. This serves to fortify the racist and colonial systems that led to “distrust” of countries in the Global South in the first place. All the while, countries in the Global North go into tremendous debt, but maintain the “trust” of allied colonial nations and as a result suffer no meaningful consequences.

The distortion then leads us back to the glitch, by way of two key connections: how the distortion produces inequitable access to internet and technology related to the glitch, and how the glitch relies on low-wage labor in the Global South to operate call centers, tech support, and information scams.

Anatomy of Natural Extraction. It has been mentioned briefly throughout this journey into the Gyrecene, but it is important to remember that forced labor has societal impacts beyond the individuals involved. One of these impacted third-parties is the natural world.

The Anatomy of Natural Extraction diagram above brings to light this forced labor of nature. It is not enough to look merely at the different forms of human labor exploited by colonialism, capitalism, and the police state. The exploitation of nature, we argue, is also both engendered by and serves as a precondition for those forms of power. All the epochs of the Gyrecene take a similar attitude towards nature, one which this anatomy attempts to dissect.

Modern society views nature exactly as it views exploited human populations. Nature is the inessential Other that exists to serve the interest of human beings as Subjects. It is the passive, non-human object whose value is only realized through human use. The Anatomy is centered around a ring of hexagons that depict six different moments in natural extraction, and show how they connect together. In particular, we highlight how the extraction of nature is not merely a technical matter, but is contingent upon and deeply intertwined with particular social, economic, and political processes. In addition, we also highlight their destructive impacts.

One thing to notice is that the graphs and charts in this visualization are all drawn to scale. The Global Inequality graph, for example, is an original global Lorenz curve that we composed using per-country expenditure data obtained from the World Bank. Along with the unequal global distributions of nuclear power <5> and air pollution <6>, we want to highlight that global asymmetries of power give rise to global patterns of eco-unfriendly industrial production. Even though nuclear power is celebrated as clean energy, for example, its history is intertwined with colonial conditions and can be traced back to historical testings that obliterated the ecologies and indigenous societies of entire Pacific islands. Along with the influence of economic crises on crude oil production and the intensity of (the more profitable) fossil fuel use, we want to highlight that modern patterns of natural extraction are deeply embedded within social power structures.

At the bottom of Anatomy we explore different attempts to rationalize nature. Methods traditionally used for organizing human settlements are now used to organize the entire natural territory. Yet territorial planning forces nature into our rational frameworks of conception in order for it to be better understood, made use of, and controlled. Widespread attempts to organize the natural environment into plots are exemplified by plantations. Then, the 20th century witnessed elaborate alternative plans to partition territory that promised to fix previous ills. Yet those plans do not change the fundamental paradigm of rationalizing nature. The third image shows New York City’s Central Park as part of a bigger much-celebrated but also much-critiqued park movement. Everywhere in the park, nature is carefully engineered. Here, nature is no longer only involved in capitalist production, but it enters capitalist re-production, as recreation and an imagined “wilderness” is needed to sustain laborers through high-intensity work weeks. The final image depicts the Hoover Dam and the age of “megastructures”, in which human-engineered natural transformations take place on scales never imagined before.

Among the depictions of the consequences of natural extraction, one interesting design choice to notice is the visualization of logistical growth. Instead of using traditional lines or gyres (spirals), we chose to visualize logistical values as colors. For block n, we set its RGB values to 2n-1. There are eight blocks because the RGB range is capped at 255 = 28 -1. Greater values cannot be visualized. This reminds the viewers that logistical growth is unsustainable — there has to be a point at which environmental threshold is reached. Just as it is impossible to imagine a color of RGB (512, 512, 512), we intend to convey that the disasters that would take place after we reached the threshold might be completely beyond what we dare to imagine. The visualization, therefore, serves as a call to action to stop the forced labor of nature.

CITATIONS

The Sunlight Zone (+ Genealogy of the Credit Card)

Gopinath, Ponnusamy Manogaran, et al. “Assessment on interactive prospectives of nanoplastics with plasma proteins and the toxicological impacts of virgin, coronated and environmentally released-nanoplastics.” Scientific reports 9.1 (2019): 1–15.

The Twilight Zone

The Midnight Zone

The Doubling Room, Dean Mills, 1851 (colour litho). Author Unknown

The Abyssal Zone

J. W. Buel, Heroes of the Dark Continent (New York, 1890), p. 66; also, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62–32008.

Gyre-of-Life Diagram

Surveillance Map

Census tracts: class data

Anatomy of Natural Extraction

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