Tiny Mining

Sunday 22nd was the last day of the Tiny Mining remote sweatshop. All of the participants met online to share results and impressions of the week’s mining actions, to collectively sweat for last collection, and to conduct a heavy metal screen test together. I have edited a short video documenting the group heavy metal test. Dennis (copper) wins the tiny mining challenge, having already been contacted by a scrap metal broker during the sweatshop. They can smell the heavy metals. He is a hyper-accumulator, just like the oysters.

I’m still searching for that connection between the everydayness and the failures of technology, this limping fog, the crashing graphics card of a worn-out laptop, which surrounds us, and the “fantastic voyage” of Tiny Mining, that descent into the interior in which we look down on ourselves not as selves, but as resources, as matters.  I decided that the samples I received have been too long in storage to be processed and analysed by a lab but I will try these myself with the potentiostat next week. I bought what are called “urine monovettes” for sending to the lab (microtrace minerals in Germany). I will possibly repeat some of the mining steps next week and use EDTA for chelation again – to provoke one sample for the lab. I’m not sure why I didn’t send one earlier but I guess I lacked the monovettes. I also have samples of urine, sweat and hair from Kat (iron). Delivered by cycle and hand.

It remains to say thanks to all the participants of the first Tiny Mining remote sweatshop: Theun Karelse, v2_labs, Dennis de Bel, Kat Austen, Martin Howse, Aniara Rodado and Alfonso Borragan. The package intended for v2 made it’s way back to me in Berlin, unopened. I picked it up from the local spaeti!