Saline Operations is a work-in-progress exploring the Mojave Desert’s ancient salt lakes through the lens of machine vision and operational aesthetics. Over three months, I filmed six desiccated playas using drones and tripod-mounted cameras equipped with NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) filters, collecting extensive video material and photogrammetric data that transforms these landscapes into operational territories where geological deep time meets algorithmic perception.

The NDVI filter, originally developed in 1973 by NASA for satellite monitoring of global vegetation, operates by measuring the difference between near-infrared light (strongly reflected by vegetation at 700-1100 nanometers) and red light (absorbed by vegetation at 600-700 nanometers). This spectral analysis calculates values between -1 and +1 for every pixel, rendering the invisible visible through algorithmic color fields: healthy vegetation appears in vivid reds and magentas, stressed vegetation in yellows and greens, bare ground in blues and cyans. Through this computational lens, the desert transforms from empty wilderness into dense informational field.

This directly engages with Harun Farocki’s concept of operational images: pictures that are part of an operation, that don’t exist to be seen by human eyes but function as components within larger systems of measurement, tracking, and control. The NDVI imagery I capture doesn’t simply document the desert; it reveals landscape as operational system where satellites calculate mineral concentrations, algorithms track evaporation rates, and environmental monitoring becomes continuous automated surveillance.
Each playa embodies radically different temporal registers that collapse into a single operational present. These six basins form a network of resource reservoirs for the salt, chemical, and emerging lithium industries, each inscribed with distinct power dynamics and extraction logics:

Bristol Dry Lake

Bristol’s thousand-foot-deep salt strata preserve Pleistocene climate oscillations spanning millions of years: a paleoclimatic archive that descends through alternating layers of dense clay and massive halite beds. Today, these ancient evaporite formations yield lithium for battery storage and calcium chloride for road de-icing, dust suppression on unpaved mining roads, and drilling fluids in the oil and gas industry. The lake bed transforms from geological memory into active technological infrastructure, where extraction tunnels penetrate the same sediment layers that record ancient climate shifts.

Cadiz Dry Lake

Located in Cadiz Valley, separated from Bristol by a low alluvial divide rising only 52 feet, Cadiz operates as both hydrological twin and industrial sibling to Bristol. The playa’s subsurface brines are mined for lithium and calcium chloride, with large areas of „puffy ground“—self-rising efflorescent surfaces caused by evaporating capillary brine—indicating a geologically closed basin with no underground drainage. In the NDVI spectrum, these zones appear as distinct chromatic fields, mapping invisible hydrological boundaries.

Danby Dry Lake

Danby occupies the sump of Ward Valley, a separate drainage basin extending 50 miles north with a drainage area of approximately 1,000 square miles. Unlike Bristol and Cadiz, Danby’s primary resource is gypsum (calcium sulfate), extracted from thick sedimentary layers and processed into drywall, cement, and agricultural soil amendments. The lake bed displays salt crystal surfaces at both its north and south ends, with expanses of clay flats along its southeastern edge: surface typologies that the NDVI filter renders as stark geometric divisions in the operational grid.

Dale Dry Lake

Dale forms part of the interconnected chain of Mojave playas, primarily extracted for sodium chloride (table salt) but less extensively documented than its neighboring basins. Its relative obscurity within industrial mining discourse mirrors a broader pattern in how extractive operations selectively render certain territories legible while leaving others in the operational shadow: present in the supply chain, yet absent from the archival record.

Owens Lake

Owens Lake embodies perhaps the most acute inscription of power in landscape: desiccated in 1913 when the Owens River was diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct to supply water to a city 200 miles south, the dry lake bed became one of the largest sources of toxic dust pollution in North America. The NDVI filter here reveals a massive environmental mitigation effort—measuring how much salt grass (halophyte vegetation) grows on managed sections of the lake bed to prevent dust dispersion. This continuous orbital monitoring transforms the playa into a surveilled territory where vegetation indices directly track the success of dust control measures, a techno-ecological fix necessitated by colonial water extraction.

Searles Lake

Searles Lake presents the longest and most complex extraction history, with mineral operations beginning in 1873 for borax and expanding after 1914 to include potash, salt cake, and soda ash. Today, the lake yields lithium carbonate for batteries, borax for detergents and flame retardants, and trona (sodium carbonate) for glass manufacturing and water softening. Highly mineralized brines are pumped from the lake bed to processing facilities, then discharged back to Searles Lake for recharge in a closed-loop system. The basin contains sediment layers reaching over 3,000 feet deep: alternating strata of salines and carbonate muds that record multiple Pleistocene lake cycles.

The NDVI is but one member of a broader family of spectral vegetation indices developed over decades of remote sensing research. Following NDVI’s introduction in 1973, numerous derivative indices emerged: the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI, developed in the 1990s) corrects for atmospheric conditions and canopy background signals; the Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) accounts for varying soil brightness; the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) detects moisture stress in plants and open water bodies. Each index represents a specific „agential cut“ (to use Karen Barad’s term): a particular way of parsing electromagnetic spectra to produce determinate properties from the continuous phenomenon of reflected light.

These indices constitute an expanding vocabulary of machinic perception, transforming satellite sensors into specialized organs attuned to specific material properties: chlorophyll concentration, leaf area, water content, photosynthetic activity. Through these algorithmic lenses, the landscape performs itself as a data set, every pixel calculating its own classification within the operational framework.

This convergence of timescales (geological, industrial, computational) reveals what I understand through Karen Barad’s agential realism as the fundamental entanglement of matter and meaning. The salt lakes aren’t passive backgrounds for human activity but active participants in ongoing material-discursive practices. Through the NDVI filter, I create what might be called a speculative perspective of machinic vision, where the landscape performs itself through operational frameworks.

The salt crystals, extraction infrastructure, and spectral data aren’t separate entities observed from outside, but phenomena that emerge through specific apparatuses of observation. What Barad calls „agential cuts“ produce determinate boundaries and properties within phenomena. The operational aesthetic extends beyond representation to enact new realities: halophyte vegetation zones indicating subsurface brine appear as fluorescent halos in the near-infrared spectrum; salt crystallization patterns become topographic data fields; evaporation ponds, drainage canals, and solar arrays emerge as geometric inscriptions in the computational grid.
This isn’t landscape as seen but landscape as calculated: territory simultaneously existing as physical geography and algorithmic model, where measurement and phenomenon are inseparable.

Through this multisensory approach, Saline Operations aims to create an experiential understanding of how machine vision transforms both physical territories and our encounter with them. The installation reveals contemporary landscapes as sites where geological archives become operational futures, where ancient salt beds are parsed as data, and where the boundary between observation and intervention dissolves into what Barad calls „intra-action“: the mutual constitution of entangled agencies.