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Terra Analytica

Terra analytica or Finis terra is an art-led inquiry into the subjection of terrestrial sense data and movements to mathematical formulae. It asks: what onto-epistemologies are modes of geospatial analytics mobilizing?

Comprised of a set of hammocks, each is woven with silk and wool patterns that depict crop yield prediction through the Descartes software. The latter couples satellite imagery and machine learning–based pattern recognition to identify crop segmentation and forecast crop yield, indicating “real time” value. These prognostications inform live commodity trading and insurance valuation.

Figures which informed Finis terra include the Spring Carpet, which introduces the expression of ordering nature as individuated elements from which greater generalizations can be inferred, and the hammock, which bridges the colonial capture of space and peoples made possible through the Cartesian separation between observer and observed inherent in environmental analysis.

Finis terra(e) is a Latin term which designates 'a payment in settlement, fine or tax', as well as the land's end, thus a coupling with the historic-material process of the 'frontier thesis'. With what is now called geospatial intelligence, space emerges as the last frontier of capture, actuated by technical and financial systems.

In some respects, Finis-terra also refers to the end of the earth as a habitable planet, not as an inevitable scenario, but rather a cautionary tale. Fatalism poisons the nourishment of practices capable of restoring the world and as such, it is paramount to refute the inevitability of planetary crisis.

The installation and performance of Finis terra has aimed to thread possible anti-colonial epistemologies that explore alternative modes of understanding the world through the body, guided by the Andean philosopher Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's call for an embodied-earth-thinking.

The project has received the support of the European Investment Bank and is part of the EIB Institute's permanent collection.

Exhibited at the European Investment Bank [Luxembourg, LU] and the Illingworth Kerr Gallery (Alberta, CA).

Performance: Whitechapel Gallery [London, UK]

Further information: https://finisterra.fraud.la/

Publication: Terra Analytica: The Automated Gaze of Corn and Soy (2023). Afterimage (2023) 50 (2): 24–44. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2023.50.2.24