Evaporative Subjugation / 3656m

The acceleration of decarbonized mobility in the Global North strictly requires a proportionate volumetric dehydration of high-altitude Andean aquifers, making clean energy a literal spatial transfer of drought.

Simulated lithium extraction pans violently discharge as spot prices and drawdown surge. · motion: slowly precipitating while violently discharging

wall text

High-altitude Andean salars yield battery-grade lithium through fractional crystallization, evaporating millions of liters of hypersaline groundwater. This installation mechanizes that spatial transfer of drought. Live telemetry from California grid demand controls extraction pump flow, while submerged heaters slaved to London Metal Exchange lithium spot prices accelerate brine evaporation in open pans. As waste salts encrust the system's copper busbars and degrade its conductivity, concentrated lithium liquor triggers a dead-short circuit discharge. The resulting electrical arc and steam plume physically bridge Northern decarbonization metrics with the violent hydrological depletion of remote desert aquifers.

shown: Installed as a parasitic extraction rig directly on the periphery of the YLB pilot plant in Llipi, Bolivia, running continuously until local aquifer depletion physically forces a system shutdown.

anchor facts used

The Salar is located at an extreme altitude of 3,656 meters, subjecting it to intense solar radiation.
Extraction by Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) requires pumping subsurface brine into massive shallow pools for 12 to 18 months of solar evaporation.
Before lithium can be isolated, heavy impurities like magnesium and potassium must precipitate out of the brine as waste salts.

mechanism

Piezometric surface drawdown — Live API data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) grid demand dictates the RPM of industrial pumps extracting brine from a simulated closed-loop Salar aquifer.
1. Telemetric Extraction
Fractional crystallization — Extracted brine is forced into shallow geometric pans where submerged heating coils accelerate evaporation, their temperature strictly slaved to the real-time London Metal Exchange spot price of Lithium Carbonate.
2. Algorithmic Evaporation
Halite and sylvite precipitation — As the accelerated water evaporates, discarded magnesium and potassium salts crystallize directly onto the system's exposed copper busbars, actively degrading the electrical efficiency of the installation over time.
3. Impurity Accumulation
Dead-short circuit discharge — Once the remaining brine reaches a target lithium concentration, the system instantly bridges the yield in a dead-short circuit, vaporizing the liquid in a fraction of a second via a 10,000-lumen arc flash.
4. Kinetic Liquidation

lineage

Unknown Fields Division, 'The Rare Earthenware' (2015) — Both works trace the physical materiality of clean tech supply chains, but this piece operates as a destructive kinetic mechanism rather than a static ceramic artifact.
Michael Najjar, 'high altitude' (2008-2010) — Contrasts Najjar's visual mapping of stock market charts onto Andean peaks by physically weaponizing market data to drive the hydrologic degradation of the landscape.
London Metal Exchange (LME) Lithium Hydroxide CIF Fastmarkets — Serves not as inspiration, but as the literal cryptographic control signal whose abstract pricing fluctuations mechanically drive the physical dehydration of the installation.

curatorial qa (machine verdict, unedited)

SCORE 4/5 after 2 attempt(s)
READS: The fractional crystallization pools, violent high-voltage discharge, and the salt-corroded instrumentation linking metal spot pricing to aquifer drawdown.
FAILS: The direct telemetric tie between Northern grid load and pump rate requires reading the support gauges rather than being visually obvious in the landscape.

spec: antigravity agent · keyframe/artifact: gemini-3.1-flash-image · video: veo-3.1 image-to-video · qa+wall text: gemini-3.7-flash watching the render · 38.9s total