This banner evokes the tremendous environmental toll exacted by digital technology, from the mining of minerals to the disposal of e-waste. The seeming immateriality of information and the Internet belie the resources it takes to manufacture computer components (e.g., a two-gram microchip requires 1.3 kilograms of fossil fuels and materials).

The Silicon Valley motherboard and Death Valley viewing stone present a stark contrast in storage devices or modes of material memory:the former an intense spatio-temporal compression of instantaneously accessible information in the age of ‘great acceleration’; the latter a shard in the rock record, a memory chip registering untraceable events and complex processes in deep time.

Yet the piece also situates digital media in geologic time, by casting the motherboard as antagonist in a planetary story. The passage of motherboard into stone evokes the deposition of digital memory in the stratigraphic record. “Gaia Under Siege” is not only an ecological story of our time; it provides a proleptic image of data in strata, of a future geology in which a “layer of fossils of electronics” would be excavated.