Stuxnet is a malicious computer virus first uncovered in 2010 and targets supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. It is believed to be responsible for causing substantial damage to the nuclear program of Iran and was reputedly developed as a cyberweapon jointly by the United States government and Israel.

In 2011, the Tōhoku undersea earthquake and tsunami caused damage to the electrical infrastructure of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, compromising containment and resulting in the release of radioactive contaminants into the surrounding environment. It is regarded as the worst nuclear incident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and there is presently a 180 square mile exclusion zone surrounding the plant.

Geo Cymatic Infiltrator simulates an alignment between these two events through a sonic materialisation at an infrasonic level. Appropriated geoacoustic data from the Tōhoku earthquake was subjected to digital infection by the Stuxnet virus, effecting a contagious ontology with a geological and nuclear resolution. The resulting mutant data was transmitted auditorily and hosted on a pair of custom designed trumpet speakers. The speakers (Phat Man & Tallboy) resonate at frequencies of 16Hz and 19Hz, with infrasound being a detection technique for seismic activity and nuclear detonation. Vibrating at frequencies typically too low for human audibility, sound becomes pressure to be felt rather than heard. The installation stimulates an immersive experience for the user, situating the human in a nonhuman condition with a geologic and contagious affectivity.

The simulation proposes the territorialisation of the real by the digital, whereby the virus parasitically attaches itself to the earthquake, or more precisely, the virtual infects the geologic. The virus becomes an agent, not of a virtual machination in the mining of big data, but a linguistic proponent in the action of planetary movement and sedimentation. Code resonates materially, gaining an affective significance. Propagation occurs by means of the viral, the sonic, the linguistic and the geologic. The impetus of this simulation is to speculate what I designate a geo-linguistic condition; strategies which engage or instrumentalise nonlinear aesthetics at a geologic resolution. Through such praxis the Anthropocene can be rendered more authentically, made present. But also, through the deliberation of a nonhuman capacity for language, it is possible to reify a semiotics of the geologic, and a means of writing nonlinearly and speaking to the future-to-come.

Geo Cymatic Infiltrator (Phat Man & Tallboy) (2017) was commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry-Londonderry, for the Tiny deaths exhibition (curated by Alissa Kliest and Matt Packer).