A deep place digital exploration

Abstract

We are surface tenants and we are more likely to feel closer to the stars in the sky, light-years away, than to the underground world concealed a few metres beneath our feet. As the saying goes, ‘out of sight, out of mind’. But there are exceptions. The urge to breach the earth’s crust remains alluring and many have dared to venture into the underland, to unearth stories and push them eagerly, or reluctantly, to the surface. It seems that humanity is gripped by a persistent fascination to investigate what might be lurking beneath the surface of the earth, underground, ensconced and forgotten deep down in the dark abysses. It is perhaps the unknown that attracts us to the hidden layers of the earth as we keep digging and lunging, in search of resources, history, mythology, and obscure stories from the deep. Robert Macfarlane (2019 p.11) claims that information about the worlds beneath the ground is very scant and similarly, Will Hunt (2019 p.12) notes that according to geologists more than half of the existing caves are still undiscovered. Land art pioneer Robert Smithson (1996 p.110) likened the strata of the earth to a jumbled museum where the layers of information are loaded with information awaiting to be unraveled. TAĦT | FUQ emerges from the deep; it enters the world’s insides endoscopically, to bring us images of the tissue aligning the suppressed passageways underneath the visible skin.