Mining the Starfield & Clarissa Tossin's to take root among the stars

Before walking into the Frye Museum I’d been spending my days binging the recently released science fiction video game, Starfield. The game places the player in the near future where humanity has colonized the galaxy, and little did I know that Clarissa Tossin’s exhibit at the Frye, to take root among the stars, would be focused heavily on that same topic: space colonization.

What follows is a meandering journey through Tossin’s numerous exhibits and works, contextualized with quotes from Tossin herself, and further explored with my own clumsy musings. Eventually we’ll return to Starfield, but not before discussing consumerism, colonization, environmental collapse, and of course, the driving force behind all of these, the (catastrophic) accumulation of capital.

“A map is a representation of a place, and, as any form of representation, it’s very biased in what you decide to include.” - Clarissa Tossin via LA Times

Considering the Detritus of Consumerism and Mapping as a Colonial Practice

“The artist repurposes consumerist detritus—specifically Amazon delivery boxes—in her material investigations of the Amazon rainforest’s exploitation. In recent works, she envisions how the same ecologically disastrous cycles of human consumption on Earth will manifest in twenty-first-century space exploration.” - via Frye Museum (2023)

It’s even more fitting that this exhibit is in Seattle, Washington, the birthplace of the tech ecommerce behemoth, Amazon.com. (Bellevue is still within Seattle’s metropolitan area, so don’t get pedantic with me.) I hope employees and supporters of Amazon walk through the exhibit. I don’t think shaming is valuable nor intended in this situation, but I’m always happy to see art explicitly and blatantly calling out corporations.

“I started using Amazon packaging because I was interested in the relationship between the word Amazon for the e-retail store and Amazon for the forest — if you say “Amazon” today in the U.S., people will think about amazon.com and not the forest. I was also interested in how Amazon packaging — the ubiquitous remains of consumer society — stands for extractive cycles of production and consumption, which ultimately impact our environment.” - Clarissa Tossin via LA Times (2023)

Consumption is an integral part of a natural ecosystem, but that circle of life requires nutrients returning to the soil. The most common things returning to the soil today are contaminants. Our consumerist ecosystem is a closed loop: extraction, use, disposal, pollution. The oft-quoted analeptic, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” feels trite and fatalist, but then again, take a look at fast food, fast fashion, plastics, planned obsolescence, conflict minerals, oil and gas, recycling failures, and you’ll see waste upon waste upon waste.

Packaging and recycling is a particular headache because the plastics companies misled all of us into thinking recycling plastic was a viable strategy. This could be an article all by itself, and it’d be an all too familiar story: corporations making fools out of consumers and regulators.

“Tossin’s new works explore mapping and naming as colonial technologies of discovery and conquest on Earth and beyond.” - via Frye Museum (2023)

“I’ve been looking at Portolan charts, the European navigation maps from the 1500s and 1600s. The excessive colonial drive toward the environment started in that period.” - Clarissa Tossin via LA Times (2023)

It’s easy to look at technology and ignore its political aspects. Mapping is a great example because it feels innocent to sketch a coastline, but technology should never be examined without an investigation into its applications. It’s irresponsible to ignore mapping’s role in colonization, and while I acknowledge that maps find use in countless positive applications, there’s a deep connection between mapping and the politics of borders, manifest destiny, displacement, and more.

One can appreciate the beauty of a map while also understanding how they are so often tools of oppression.

“I’m curious to see how land use and territory play out in the 21st-century space race, and whether the abuses of land and people that have marked our time on Earth get perpetuated as we move out into the solar system.” - Clarissa Tossin via ARTNews (2022)

“There is a narrative in the media that space exploration will help us resolve problems on planet Earth. The thought behind 21st century space exploration seems very focused on extracting resources from other celestial bodies, which replicates the European navigation era that was all about getting to other places where you could find resources to bring back to Europe, be it people or gold or something else.” - Clarissa Tossin via LA Times (2023)

When I first walked through the exhibit I couldn’t help but have the predictable thought: No one lives on the moon, and it’s extremely unlikely that any life is there (life/bacteria that we haven’t brought ourselves, at least.) How then can Tossin draw a parallel between terran colonization and lunar colonization? If no people are bothered and no culture erased, what’s the problem with colonizing the moon? I was, of course, missing the point:

“...I wonder what will become of these celestial bodies and their relationship with geopolitical power plays on Earth. Will they become repositories of resources that benefit the few, yet rely on public money for their exploration? Moreover, if the end goal is profit, what’s to safeguard different forms of life—perhaps far beyond any understanding of life on Earth—that we may well encounter out there? And then there’s the military angle, space treaties notwithstanding, of defending territorial claims, and the potential for space wars that comes with that.” - Clarissa Tossin via ARTNews (2022)

Despite having consumed countless science fiction stories involving space colonization, I’d forgotten the blatantly obvious: colonization in an imperfect society is always a shitshow, no matter where it is: on Earth, or in space. History repeats itself, and Tossin’s work is connecting the past (the colonial maps of the Amazon), the present (Amazon.com’s packaging waste), and the future. It doesn’t matter if no one lives on the moon, the practices of colonization will still likely lead to suffering.

Considering Interstellar Strip-Mining

“The patterns are my creation, and I was very much thinking about trajectories of spaceships and rockets crisscrossing the sky and getting to other planets, other celestial bodies, and maps of journeys that are yet to be made.” - Clarissa Tossin via MCA Denver

In Starfield, the player can land their spaceship on hundreds of different planets and moons. The player can then set up settlements or “outposts,” complete with living arrangements and highly technical resource-gathering equipment.

There are different “extraction” machines for nearly every resource: alkanes, aluminum, antimony, argon, benzene – and skipping through the alphabet several hundred more – vanadium, water, and ytterbium. The player needs to create generators to power these extractors, equipment for storage of the resources, and then they need to satisfy further logistics for shipping and selling the resources across the galaxy.

“As climate change and widespread environmental degradation register the long-term impacts of global capitalism, the privatization of space exploration in the 21st century announces itself as a panacea—one predicated upon the same colonial, extractive program that led to the crisis on Earth, now applied to other worlds and the resources they harbor.” - Clarissa Tossin via Instagram (2022)

Space mining might arrive sooner than we realize; there's already interest in extracting resources on the moon.

In the previous carousel, Tossin has a piece depicting Shackleton Crater, a location on the moon that might become a mining location for frozen water. There was an American company by the name of Shackleton Energy seeking funding for proposed ice mining at that location, but (as of 2023) it seems they couldn’t reach their funding. NASA is also going forward with the PRIME-1 operation to send a probe to the crater for purposes of drilling and learning more about the ice.

“I learned it’s really the Moon’s water ice that holds the greatest mining potential, as it’s crucial for producing hydrogen rocket fuel for NASA’s Artemis program.” - Clarissa Tossin via ARTNews (2022)

“It’s poetic and disturbing that our presence on the Moon will begin with water (ice deposits) and sunlight (harvested by solar arrays to power the machinery necessary for extraction)—the same two elements that fostered biological life on Earth, billions of years ago. What’s about to happen on the Moon will most likely begin to push humanity toward a different kind of life beyond Earth.” - Clarissa Tossin via ARTNews (2022)

In this interview with ARTNews, Tossin discusses the legality of mining the moon. There were UN treaties/resolutions in 1967 and 1979 that broadly aimed to establish peace in space, (among other things that didn’t work), but the legality of moon mining wasn’t agreed upon, nor ratified. Years later, President Obama enacted legislation that granted corporations the ability to mine the moon, and then Trump passed an executive order allowing the government to mine the moon as well. Other countries have recently done the same. The “high frontier” is open for business, and despite the UN attempts, no international body will oversee the protection or regulation of its resources. It’s all looking a bit familiar.

I mention Starfield in this conversation because the design of its “outpost and resource extraction” gameplay is largely without a crucial element: player incentive. Gameplay design typically utilizes a simple gameplay loop:

1. Challenge the player to accomplish something
2. Player must then invest time and skill toward challenge
3. Game rewards player for accomplishing said challenge
4. Start back at 1 with a different challenge

Starfield’s outpost system is baffling because the player already has all of the things that outpost building rewards the player with for completion. Building an outpost requires tons of resources, a spacesuit, and weapons, and when you finish the outpost, all you get is more of those things. There’s speculation that an earlier, unreleased version of the game forced the player to refuel their spaceship through these outposts, a clear nod to the aspirations for Shackleton Crater, but this was removed before the game's release, and instead, space travel paradoxically requires fuel but gives an infinite amount to the player.

The pointlessness of this outpost gameplay underscores an often made statement about capitalism: constant accumulation is mandatory, self-destructive, and pointless.

“Expansion becomes a condition of existence.” - Rosa Luxemberg via The Accumulation of Capital

“For the individual capitalist, failure to keep abreast of this expansion means quitting the competitive struggle, economic death.” - Rosa Luxemberg via The Accumulation of Capital

As an economic system, capitalism leads to a never ending quest for accumulation not because the resources are needed by people, but because economic “growth” and “competition” requires it. Capitalism, by definition, requires and creates cycles of overproduction and underproduction, overspeculation and rapid devaluation.

“This periodical fluctuation between the largest volume of reproduction and its contraction to partial suspension, this cycle of slump, boom, and crisis, as it has been called, is the most striking peculiarity of capitalist reproduction.” - Rosa Luxemberg via The Accumulation of Capital

With the exception of simulating a cycle of crashing markets, Starfield, potentially by accident, perfectly replicates the pointlessness of capitalist accumulation. Unceasing extraction of resources, however, has one more important side-effect: imperialism.

“the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.” - Vladimir Lenin via Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism

Capitalism leads to imperialism, and imperialism leads to colonization. Luckily in Starfield, the player isn’t setting out to conquer and steal capital from independent, self-sustaining communities, (the player does raid numerous pirate settlements, so that’s morally fine?) but the game certainly is obsessed with glamorizing the same capitalist extraction fantasy that Tossin’s work so clearly sets out to criticize. Starfield isn’t the only game that does this, and my bringing this up is mostly to demonstrate how our media repeats the same myths used by colonizers: there’s a frontier out there, why not exploit it?

If we go to space, why must we carry the weight of capitalism with us?

Tossin’s exhibit to take root among the stars is a quote from the wonderful author, Octavia Butler. There's also plenty more discussed and presented in Tossin's work, including critical conversations concerning Indigenous Knowledge. I've only just begun to scratch the surface of her works. If you can, please check out this exhibit before it closes on January 7th, 2024.

Follow Clarissa Tossin on social media.