Five Body Problems 1: A speculative rare earth recovery model or the poetics of head bashing the steering wheel

A five body problem belongs to a class of problems which are very sensitive to initial conditions and often have unstable solutions. This animation does not attempt to solve a five body problem. Susan Sontag wrote that a photograph “is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask." In this way traces of the real are evident in 3D scans of objects and landscapes which dev Harlan encounters. He makes photogrammetry to share those traces. The real lesson of the anthropocene is that human societies and technology are not separate from the natural world, they are all entangled and embedded within each other. Dev Harlan depicts technological decay and disruption as the Earth System is also very sensitive to initial conditions. It is not clear if a stable solution exists for human societies and their existing technology.