Colloquium with Helen V. Pritchard

The contemporary infrastructural complex of mining, measuring and trading undergrounds depends on software tools for geological data handling, interpretation, and subsurface 3D-vizualisation. Such tools power techno-colonial subsurface exploration with computational techniques and paradigms. In this talk I will present the collaborative work of the *Underground Division* (Helen V. Pritchard, Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha) on the volumetric renderings that figure the so-called earth. Through speculative storying, queer infrastructural analysis and art-based inquiries I will discuss how these volumetrics are made operative by geocomputation, where geocomputation refers to the computational processes that measure, quantify, historicize, visualize, predict, classify, model, and tell stories of spatial and temporal geologic processes. In particular I will discuss what affirmative forms of queering damage, responsibility-taking or not, might be possible within these processes and practices of volumetric regimes.