Configuration Drift is a collaborative investigation by Viktor Brim and Emerson Culurgioni, that emerges from extensive fieldwork across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, tracing the material foundations of contemporary technological infrastructure. The project reveals how Western and Chinese technological imperatives operate through hegemonic power structures that externalize both environmental costs and computational labor to Southeast Asia. Through documentation at four interconnected sites, the investigation exposes how the promises of green energy transition and cloud computing expansion converge through shared patterns of resource extraction and spatial displacement, serving distant centers of capital and technological development while transforming the ecologies and economies of the region that supplies them.

At IMIP, the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park on Sulawesi, vast open-pit nickel mines carve into tropical landscapes. Here, laterite ore is extracted and processed in Chinese-operated smelters that transform raw nickel into the refined material essential for lithium-ion battery production. This nickel flows primarily toward Chinese battery manufacturers and Western electric vehicle markets, materializing the promise of a green energy transition. But the extraction itself relies on immense energy inputs, much of it generated by burning palm oil waste from Malaysian plantations. This creates a strange loop where one form of resource extraction in Malaysia enables another in Indonesia, both serving the narrative of environmental salvation through electrification while concentrating the ecological consequences in the extractive zones themselves.

The LYNAS facility represents a parallel stream in this mineral geography, processing rare earth elements critical for the permanent magnets in wind turbines, electric motors, and countless electronic devices that power both Western consumer electronics and Chinese manufacturing dominance. Rare earth processing produces radioactive thorium waste, which gets reframed through industrial alchemy as agricultural fertilizer, dispersing low-level contamination across farming regions while maintaining the fiction of complete resource utilization. The facility demonstrates how extraction perpetually redefines its own byproducts to avoid confronting waste, turning every remainder into input for another system, a logic that allows hegemonic technological development to proceed without accounting for its remainders.

Forest City emerges as perhaps the most speculative node in this constellation. Built on reclaimed land off the coast of Johor, this Chinese-developed mega-project envisions a high-tech urban future complete with its own data infrastructure, smart city systems, and fiber optic connectivity. The development embodies aspirations of technological modernity while literally constructing new territory from the seabed. Forest City imagines itself as a destination for digital industries and tech-enabled lifestyles, positioning Malaysia as a site for computational futures. Yet its existence depends on the same patterns of capital flow and resource transformation visible at the mining and processing facilities. The city is both a customer for the technological systems enabled by mineral extraction and a physical manifestation of how computational infrastructure claims new space, importing Chinese developmental models while serving the broader ecosystem of global digital platforms headquartered in the West.

The data center facilities in Johor complete this geography of technological extraction. Operating at scales like 33 megawatts and expanding rapidly, these installations exist in direct response to Singapore’s spatial and energy constraints. As one of the world’s densest data center markets, Singapore faces physical limits on further expansion. Just across the causeway, Johor offers comparatively abundant land, lower electricity costs, and fewer regulatory barriers. The data centers migrate there while remaining tethered to Singapore’s financial district, its undersea cable landing stations, and its position as a regional internet exchange hub. Fiber optic cables physically link the Johor facilities to Singapore’s network infrastructure, allowing computational work to happen in Malaysia while serving Singaporean and global clients. This displacement creates a new geography of digital labor where processing, storage, and transmission occur in a different jurisdiction from the economic and political centers they serve, revealing how even the most immaterial-seeming cloud infrastructure requires physical space that gets pushed to wherever land and energy remain cheap.

These four locations form a system of mutual dependence and recursive logic. The nickel from IMIP enables the batteries that power data center backup systems and the vehicles marketed as ecological alternatives to fossil fuel consumption. The rare earths from LYNAS become components in the servers, switches, and storage arrays filling Johor’s facilities, the same components that enable Western tech platforms and Chinese electronics manufacturing to maintain their global dominance. Forest City aspires to attract the tech industries whose computational infrastructure is materializing in nearby data centers, while positioning itself through the same smart city technologies those data centers enable. Johor’s data centers rely on minerals extracted in Indonesia and processed in Malaysia, serving Singapore’s digital economy and global cloud platforms that depend on those same mineral supply chains. The palm oil waste fueling Indonesian nickel smelters comes from Malaysian plantations, linking Johor’s agricultural hinterland to Sulawesi’s mining operations in a circuit of transformed and repurposed extraction.

What binds these sites together is not simply geographic proximity but a shared logic of displacement and redefinition that characterizes how hegemonic powers organize their technological futures. Singapore’s success as a financial and technological hub generates demand that cannot be contained within its borders, pushing data infrastructure into Johor. That infrastructure requires rare earth components from facilities like LYNAS, which redefine toxic waste as agricultural input to maintain extraction’s social license. The batteries powering backup systems and marketed as green solutions depend on nickel from IMIP, where the extraction process burns waste from the same region’s palm oil industry, creating closed loops of resource utilization that obscure the one-way flow of refined materials toward centers of technological and economic power. Forest City represents the aspirational endpoint of this system, imagining a fully realized technological urbanism that depends on all these extraction and processing operations while presenting itself as a leap beyond them.

Through drone technology deployed both as investigative tool and artistic medium, the project creates a visual archive that examines how automated perception systems read and value territory. These aerial perspectives reveal patterns invisible from the ground: the geometric precision of mine terraces, the vast rectangles of data center roofs, the gridded artificiality of Forest City’s reclaimed islands. The work incorporates testimonies from union members working in these facilities and environmental documentation of contaminated waterways, deforested slopes, and displaced communities. Rather than aestheticizing destruction or evoking emotional responses to environmental damage, the investigation privileges operational representation, showing these sites as they function, as the machinery and logistics systems that actively structure profoundly asymmetrical technological futures.

What emerges is a portrait of how Western and Chinese technological progress materializes through systematic ecological and spatial transformation in Southeast Asia. The green transition and the cloud both extract resources and displace impacts to the same region, serving the same distant powers while promising development and modernization to the territories they transform. Each site in Configuration Drift both enables the others and depends upon them, forming not a linear supply chain but a dense web of extraction, processing, displacement, and redefinition where every promise of progress requires another landscape to absorb its material consequences.

Configuration Drift was developed within the Human Machine Fellowship, a scholarship program awarded annually by the JUNGE AKADEMIE in cooperation with E-WERK Luckenwalde and the VISIT program of the E.ON Foundation. The fellowship supports international emerging artists engaging with digital technologies, the anthropocene, and artificial intelligence, encouraging work that challenges narratives of technological progress and explores the embodied, material nature of computational systems. Following Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI, the program recognizes that intelligence does not exist independently of social, cultural, historical, or political forces, but emerges from natural resources, human labor, infrastructures, and specific historical circumstances.