Configuration Drift explores how contemporary technological regimes manifest materially, based on field studies in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The work uncovers structural parallels between nickel extraction for global energy markets and digital infrastructure expansion – both processes function as mechanisms for appropriating Southeast Asian resources through external technological imperatives.

As Singapore’s constraints push computational capacity across the border into Johor’s 33 MW facilities, a recurring pattern appears: both green-transition minerals and cloud architectures extract Southeast Asian resources while serving distant technological imperatives. Our research maps landscapes where extraction continually reframes itself — nickel mining cast as agricultural precursor, palm-oil residues burned in smelters, radioactive by-products marketed as fertilizer.

Using drones as scanning apparatus and artistic instrument, we probe how automated perception parses territorial value. The evolving visual archive — including union testimony and environmental documentation — privileges operational over affective imagery. Silent infrastructures, machinery, and logistics networks emerge as primary actors shaping asymmetrical technological futures, where notions of progress materialize through ecological transformation elsewhere.

CONFIGURATION DRIFT (AT)

In Configuration Drift we examine the often-hidden material foundations that shape today’s (Western) technology and energy regimes. The project traces the entanglements of resource extraction, supply chains, infrastructure projects, financial flows, and the high-tech production of digital networks. It focuses on interconnected chains of critical minerals and resources—particularly nickel extraction in Indonesia, rare-earth refining in Malaysia, semiconductor manufacturing, and the expansion of hyperscale digital infrastructure from Singapore into the Johor Special Economic Zone (SEZ).

Repeatedly, our research confronts the dilemma between technological progress in the West and ecological devastation in Southeast Asia—intensified by China’s significant economic influence in the region that manifests predominantly through extractivist impacts on landscapes, communities, climate and the leverage exerted through economic dependency.

Through on-the-ground fieldwork and collaborations with research institutions and cultural organizations, we generated visual archive as part of our investigation. This open body of work provides material for exhibitions, films, and video installations curated to reflect the shifting conditions of our global context. Just as geopolitical and economic circumstances continuously change, our visual constellations also remain dynamic, responsive, and reflective of these developments.

One visual finding is the vast palm-oil plantations arranged around nickel mining zones in Indonesia, rare-earth refineries and tech-hubs in Malaysia—landscapes that are intricately interwoven with the greenwashing strategies of industrial sites. Our investigation also uncovered multiple forms of reframing: nickel mining cast as a supposed precursor to palm-oil monocultures; palm-oil residues repurposed to “sustainably” power nickel smelters; and even radioactive by-products from rare-earth processing marketed as cement or fertilizer for palm-oil plantations.

Calm drone footage—revealing the structures of industrial parks and the logistics behind palm-oil plantations—acts simultaneously as camera, investigative tool, and sensor. It is complemented by images captured from a human perspective at the investigated sites—not for comparison but as an anchoring counterpoint, preserving ground-level context and enabling a critical, if often constrained, gaze. Through our artistic intervention, using simulated machine vision systems, the camera becomes an extension of the authors’ viewpoint and a forensic instrument for examining places where Western faith in progress exacts significant ecological costs. Always present, too, is the question: what do the machines “see” when they scan landscapes for particular resources and values?

Part of our image- and structurally driven research are expert interviews, including a union leader of the EFP in Morowali, Sulawesi (IMIP), as well as the chairman of the NGO Save Malaysia, Stop Lynas and the environmental consequences of radioactive waste in Kuantan. We aim to illuminate, rather than dramatize, economic and political entanglements. Maintaining a critical yet factual approach, we privilege operational images over emotionally charged representations. Our “protagonists” are not human actors but machinery, logistics networks, technical infrastructures, industrial sites, cameras, and sensors—entities whose silent yet decisive roles structure our contemporary technological landscape.