The profound sense of loss is purely striking. Loss as a long and slow gruelling process, there is a timeline in its concept. The interconnected nature of it is present across scales – from personal to global, from human to non-human, from micro to the planetary – all of this makes the loss collective. The loss of the loved one, ecological catastrophe – the bodies reach their limits. Entanglement occurs when these bodies appear intangibly connected to each other and share a sort of same idea. Taking a perspective from quantum theory, one can even perceive the potential coherence between entities on a quantum scale.

This thesis explores the notions of material and matter through historical, ecological and geo-political perspectives, examining how they function as a resource influenced by colonialism in the landscape of South-eastern Ukraine. The microparticles, dust, gas atoms and metals are the forms of matter transforming into materials through the process of passive accumulation on both the land and in bodies. British anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that ‘materials do not exist; in the manner of objects, they rather occur, carry on, or perdure, through time’.^[1] Each material, in fact, represents a state of becoming—the potential to transform into something else. In this context, gas atoms, minerals can be seen as a material in the process of being transformed into commodity for the productions of technologies. Deleuze writes on materiality: 'whenever we encounter matter ‘it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation’, with the consequence that ‘this matter-flow can only be followed’. ^[2]

Some non-human dimensions are not accessible to the human eye without machine vision. Micro-particles exemplify a form of matter that eludes direct visibility. Despite their minuscule size, they wield power in capital and political competition when they are transformed into material. In this thesis, I explore layers of visibility and their intersection with the forces of power that control them. However, discussing visibility inevitably involves addressing its counterpart, obscurity, which I examine across its different dimensions. What are the invisibilities on micro and planetary scales? When does the invisible become visible?

The materiality of technology consists of the processes of creating these technologies based on colonial and imperial legacy: as a continuation of the conquest and accumulation of land and resources. The material composition of technologies includes minerals, metals, gases and various elements that are integrated into objects. We cannot imagine the future without looking into the past. In the first chapter, “Night Blankets the Landscape”, I use a 19th-century painting depicting a landscape at night as a lens to discuss resource extraction, exploitation, and imperial othering of southern-eastern Ukraine. Are there ways to trade materials without the cover of darkness? What is the materiality of labour and what role does it play in the material exchange?How does the relationship between technology's materiality and the physically demanding labour of a region's population lead to their exploitation and invisibility, and how does this affect the environment, society, and politics in the long term?

The second chapter, “Black Snow”, unfolds the story of how emissions from industrial enterprises on a winter morning in Mariupol, a city in eastern Ukraine, resulted in grey-tinted surfaces. Where micro-particles remain invisible in everyday situations, their presence becomes apparent when they interact with the white snow. Dust particles of the black snow carry political agency as well as lungs inhale dormant political ambition. Their accumulation over time inside Earth and bodies becomes a witness to the events that take place on this territory.

The third chapter “Neon Futures” delves into the political power of neon as a gas used to produce semi-conductors. It raises the history of investment into the manufacturing of this gas in south-eastern Ukraine, including the metallurgical plant in Mariupol. Neon particles gain their material power as a vibrant matter,revealing the workings of power structures – the control, exploitation and destruction of land in the relentless pursuit of value production

The moon, the clouds, and the dark distance. The painting by Mariupol-born artist Arkhip Kuindzhi depicts an innocent landscape – two shores of Ukraine in 1880, before their industrial transformation. In this essay, the landscape is not just a painting; it is a lens, a universal medium that denaturalizes the representational physicality of nature through the arts.^[1] I use the medium of the landscape to talk about its exploitation, depletion, geopolitical and ecological processes that are linked to the materiality of technologies produced within this region.

An image of a landscape can be defined as a particular tracing of the place at a very precise moment in time and history. The image serves as a representation of data through a particular form of analysis. The format of the landscape image is a classical mode of power that emerges through representation. In this case, the establishment of the notion of the territory or the landscape emerges through the technique of landscape painting. Everything depicted in the painting vanishes into the obscurity of an unstable blend of paint and pigments. The artist used aluminium dust to intensify the radiance and luminosity of the bright elements: the mood and light reflections. Within the mix of dark paints, bitumen or liquid asphalt, darkening with time, obscures the details of the landscape.^[2] Over time, the image transforms, gradually dissolving into an abstraction of darkness and invisibility. The process of pigments fading is intertwined with a historical context that voids the events of transformation of the landscape. What persists in invisibility of the industrial transformation? What constitutes the material essence of an industrial landscape? What is the landscape beyond the industrial transformation? How does the material power stay invisible?

Art historian Hélène Valence explains how vision and technological progress intersect. She argues that nocturnes, or night paintings, serve as a response to the increased technological visibility of the age.^[3] These paintings consider two dimensions of visibility—the physically observable and that which is within the limits of the day's gaze. Seeking to distance themselves from the visibility imposed by technology, the artists found inspiration in an alternative, introspective form of vision. In their creations, they sought to establish a formal connection with this inward-looking perspective, directing their attention to the darkness opened by the remarkable discoveries of their time.^[4]

The transformation of the landscape involves a process of detachment and abstraction. Earth undergoes a sorting process, breaking down into minerals that eventually turn into refined dust, microparticles. As the landscape undergoes these changes, it retains evidence of events that occur within it. The discovery of coal and complex ore deposits from Donbas to the Dnipro River led to the transformation of this landscape. The demand for minerals from Donbas and neighbouring territory has consistently been a direct result of industrial developments, making this region’s soil the birthplace of sites of extraction and destruction that are actualised in other realities. Mining and industrialisation are an attempt to capitalise on the geologically depleted planetary body. Metallurgical plants, coal and iron ore mining, chemical and gas production like neon, krypton, xenon and helium, (see Neon Futures chapter) turned the landscape into a site where resource material was extracted and exploited for the purpose of capitalistic market interests and profit.

The industrialization is supported by specific narratives that abstract the landscape and fuel the colonial gaze on the region. Cartographically, the territory of south-eastern Ukraine depicted in the night painting is a steppe, it is a spacious plain, an ‘empty’ place – a vast field for imperial and industrial fantasies. Before the industrial transformation, the south-eastern region including Donbas was referred to as the Wild Field or “Dikoye Polye” is Russian, it was controlled by Cossaks and nomadic groups. The imagination of the land as an empty, lifeless region, is an excuse to ’justify settler colonialism and erase local human and non-human histories’ according to Darya Tsymbalyuk.^[5] The Ukrainian steppe has a vibrant ecology of rare plants, coal, minerals and fossils that form an archival memory of the place. It is more than just a mining site, presenting the region as a biodiverse and rich ecosystem and challenging the reductionist narrative. Victoria Donovan confronts ‘the black myth’ of Donbas, which reduces of the region within the cultural imagination to a mere extraction resource and component of material exchange.^[6] This process equates the human population and life at large to geological, agricultural, and other forms of matter with usable material capacities. This narrative embodies a form of slow violence ^[7] and environmental damage inflicted on the region, often characterised through the lens of the inhuman category.

During the 19th century the development of the field of geology in imperial nations and geological prospecting were applied in the south-eastern regions of Ukraine, establishing the regime of material power. In the second half of the 18th century, iron ore deposits were discovered in the Kryvyi Rih basin. The coal industry was intensified following the identification of the Donetsk coal basin, later known as Donbas, which spans the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.^[8] The discovery of coal and iron ore reserves contributed to the significant industrialisation of steel production, mainly through investment from European and Russian sources. By 1900, a "favourable investment climate" spurred the extensive extraction of coal and iron ore, along with the concurrent expansion of metallurgical and chemical industries, states Eugene Bersheda, mechanical engineering, and the growth of agro-industry in the region^[9] . Therefore, the Donbas region attracted foreign investments from Belgian, Dutch, British, and American industrialists, with a primary emphasis on mining activities that generated substantial profits, particularly benefiting the elite of the Russian Empire. Ukraine found itself subjected to a form of dual colonisation by both Western Europe and the Russian Empire, a condition that was further solidified during the Soviet era.^[10]

Classical power is often transmitted through landscape painting, and Kuindzhi's work serves as a vivid illustration of the assertion of ownership of the landscape. The painting, held in the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, itself signifies the authoritative appropriation of territory and reflects the colonial attitude toward Ukrainian land. This portrayal ties into Jason W. Moore's concept of "peak appropriation", emphasising the historical capitalist trends of enclosure and depletion of natural resources: coal seams, oil fields, aquifers and peasantries. Moore contends that the key issue faced by capital today is not abstract depletion but the diminishing opportunities to appropriate nature cheaply.^[11]

In addition to the Earth’s material, the human labour of the region’s population also participates in the material exchange. Materiality of technologies and immateriality of hard and physically exhausting labour are interlaced. Miners, factory workers, and employees of enterprises embody the tangible aspect, often reduced to mere instruments of production, living material or inhuman subject. For decades, the West Europeans and Russians have rendered Ukrainians as inexpensive labour, the resource — the bodies sustaining the environmental impact of their industries, exhausted by work-related injuries, the bodies whose cancer rates dictated by others’ business interests. These bodies are the buffer zone, the production site, a population whose voice is muted or falsified by political power. They are ‘invisible’ bodies belonging to inhuman category. Bodies in which the dust of industrialisation settles, which are now forced to migrate. They are not present in the landscape, both in the picture and in the deserted, ruined land.

Power over bodies can be invisible when these bodies are absorbed into the system that defines their existence. When power becomes embedded in everyday life, each subject becomes an auxiliary element of its functioning and stops noticing the violence over the body. It is an unconscious norm; all actions are predetermined. For those who are held hostage, there is no alternative, no possibility of imagining something else.

Now the landscape transformed into post-industrial, empty site reclaiming the space abandoned by people after mining operations have ceased because of the invasion of the region by Russian Federation. This space is marked by dust, rocks, mines, destruction, entropy and the will to resist it—the will to pull and grasp something that is continually dissipating. The destruction, ecological damage and war invented the longing and distance – the unknowability of the day we might return, and the world will return to the point when there was no ‘before’. The imperial ambitions of Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia shrink cities remaining abolishment and destruction on the south-eastern Ukraine and other former Soviet countries and sights. The occupation and exploitation of the territories, soils, mineral deposits, and populations into material between colonial powers fostered regimes of material power that still present today.

Black snow has fallen in the Donbas every winter, though the first officially documented occurrence dates back to January 21, 2009. It emerged on a morning in the industrial region in various cities of Eastern Ukraine: Mariupol, Kramatorsk and Donetsk. It has no taste or smell, its flakes do not weigh much, they cannot be embraced or counted. You can't grab them with your hands, you can't feel them tactilely. Black snow’s presence only discernible through its interaction with the white snow or the bright light otherwise remaining imperceptible.

This essay is about black snow as a metaphor for the impact of industrialisation, post-industrialisation and depletion as an attempt to capitalise the planetary body. The physical extraction of resources in the regions of Donbas through industrial production, colonial mechanisms combined with the conceptualisation of the region as a site of extraction and has led to the resourcification of the territory. In this essay, I use black snow to talk about the media materiality, components used to produce contemporary technologies, in this case the neon gas produced on the steel factory. The black snow in Mariupol witnessed a collision of environmental violence and geopolitics resulting in humanitarian and ecological catastrophe.

Black snow particles are everywhere forming unseen and unheard colonies. These obscure snowflakes coats artifacts, covering landscapes and memories. It settles into the body, leaving an intangible presence expressed in its gradual transformation. Black snow reflects the temporary nature of matter—it may gather in sludge over time, turn into a solid, freeze into ice, or melt into water. Black snow operates through the effect of slow violence, instantly unseen, gradual process of degradation. It occurs in the passive voice in long term durations and deep time of geopolitics.

Methods by which metals are extracted for heavy metal products bridges, spaceships, armour for tanks as well as metals for technologies such as chips, circuit boards, including motherboards are very harmful for the workforce due to the fumes emitted during their burning and melting. Mariupol has perpetually been overshadowed by a distant black cloud, a consequence of emissions from a local steel plant's blast furnace. The dense clouds of toxic ash that ascend into the sky includes sulfur antihydrogen, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, lead, phenol, ammonia, soot, toxic oxides of iron, silicon, aluminium, manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, chromium, calcium compounds^[1] . Originating as a byproduct of the steel and iron industry, these materials are composed of iron and carbon with others additives such as nickel, chromium, vanadium, tungsten and manganese. Within Mariupol (as of 2007) there are areas of the territory, the soils of which contain significantly higher than average concentrations of heavy metals in the region: manganese, chromium, lead, zinc, copper and mercury.

Since the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine in 2014, a persistent black cloud has loomed over Donbas, darkening the sky with smog. This cloud is composed of trace amounts of carbon black particles and aluminium dust resulting from combustion of missile fuel. In May 2022, the Russian army levelled Azovstal, the steel and iron plant, reducing it to a ghost composed of black soot. This dust has contributed to a new layer on the soil, combining remnants from the plant's exhaust, mining, missile emissions, chemical weapons, and the charred remnants of the factory. These particles seep deep into the ground, contaminating the water and accumulating in deposits, turning the Earth into an archival witness to these violations. As snow blankets the landscape on winter mornings, it conceals the evidence of these events, blending with the existing black material deposits.

The presence of the iron and steel industry and mining activities in the region leaves a noticeable imprint in the air, materialising as dust settling on surfaces and permeating bodies. Black snow serves as a memory archive, documenting events and transforming both the environment and bodies into artifacts. Black snow gains material significance when it has a physical effect and transformation of bodies. The artist-researcher Susan Schuppli has coined the term ‘material witness’ to refer to those materials that might serve as witnesses to violent acts or catastrophes that have happened in the past, and whose consequences continue to unfold^[2] . Settling on the surface, the snow records evidence of the post-industrial black chemical deposits. Bodies affected by black snow disrupt the conventional passage of time, embodying its destructive impact as a form of memory and witness.

The air of technological and industrial culture is one that is heavy with metals and chemicals. Metals form the infrastructure of societies, the bodies and technologies. We exist within metallic naturecultures according to Donna Haraway’s term, and our bodies are “walking, talking minerals” ^[3] quoting Vladimir Vernadsky, a founder and first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Although black snow is not graspable, it is a tangible material consisting of toxic metal and chemical elements that, like the air we breathe, is gaseous. Human bodies absorbing toxic exhausts are unwittingly part of inscription systems: they register the materiality of technology production. The effect of the toxic emissions settles down in lungs, brains, nervous systems, and more. For example, hexavalent Chromium/Chromium VI discharged at production facilities passes through cell membranes, causing a variety of toxic effects in contaminated cells. The emissions of lead damages the central and peripheral nervous systems, blood systems, kidney and reproductive system.^[4] Mercury affects the brain and kidneys, as the foetus in pregnant women.

Take a deep breath, exhale. The lack of air resulting from an accumulation of black particles signifies the material depletion of nature's bodies. Micro-particles of metals and chemicals cannot be detectable by the human eye, but they are equally not entirely invisible—often, microscopes are needed to see them. Image technologies are the prothesis here to our human eye. Black dust conveys its materiality through its impact on the natural environment and human bodies. An effect of slow violent progression makes the black dust visible. Black snow is a phenomenon that unravels invisible, making the imperceptible tangible.

The measurement of time's progression is marked by сhaos. The future is comparable to gas, where in the vastness of time every movement entails decay. Entropy permeates meaning which may not endure. Flemish chemist and alchemist Jan Baptist van Helmont in the 16th century, coined the term “gas", a neologism intentionally referring to “chaos”, both pronounced similarly in Dutch^[1] . Neon is crystallized chaos and embodies this connection. In this colourless and odourless noble gas, ecology, technology, and its material essence come together. Originating as a byproduct of steel production in the southeastern Ukraine region, neon plays a crucial role in the supply chain for contemporary microchip production. I ask: what is the (geo-)political capacity of neon as a material?

Under normal conditions, neon gas is colourless and remains invisible to the human eye. However, when electricity is applied, it exhibits a bright red-orange glow. Neon's inherent invisibility intersects with the power dynamics of politics. The translation from invisibility to visibility prompts questions about what other forms of visibility might be constructed as layers of control within material production. How does the invisible transition into visible? For whom does it remain invisible, and on which layer does invisibility persist?

In October 1986, amid Cold War tensions, Gorbachev and Reagan met in Reykjavik to discuss the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) – also known as Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme – wrestling with the decision to eliminate nuclear weapons. Despite shared aspirations for disarmament, their summit meeting reached a critical impasse over Gorbachev's insistence that SDI “be confined to research and testing to the laboratories” preventing a historic breakthrough.^[2] Gorbachev went back to Moscow, convinced that all things 'Star Wars' were the future of great power competition. He strategically invested in the production of materials such as neon, crucial to the supply chain for the manufacturing of the future giant space laser capable of destroying certain targets. A few years later The Soviet Union collapsed, but the neon infrastructure in southern Ukraine and Russia remained.

Today, neon has found other uses in technology, in the supply chain for the microchip production used in phones, computers, servers and cars making it a crucial material for the microchipped technological society. Neon emerged as a key element used to focus the apertures of the excimer lasers, facilitating semiconductor lithography. In the argon-krypton lasers required for today's widely used 14 nm chip architecture, neon, which makes up 95% of the gas mixture inside the laser.^[3] Neon production is limited to air separation plants, and due to its low concentration, economic recovery is feasible only in significant steel plants. The production process involves a two-step process: the initial phase in Southern Russian steel foundries and the subsequent phase in Odessa and Mariupol. Due to sanctions, Russian aggression against Ukraine and the destruction of Azovstal, the steel and iron plant in Mariupol in 2022, 80% of the global neon supply is lost. The remaining 20% of global neon is sourced from China.^[4] Peter Zeihan brought his point of view on the uncertain future of micro-chips in his lecture “The Future of Global Energy At The Edge Of Disorder”. He states that the imminent shortage of a crucial gas in the global chip industry could potentially strand the sector, prompting upcoming decisions regarding chip prioritization.

The shift from an industrial to a service-oriented, technological society brings about the emergence of new power sources. Investing in strategic sites that produce the materials essential for digital culture signifies the rise of novel sources of influence. When neon is in shortage, geopolitics undergoes a heightened emotive state, with the West and China competing for a material source for prioritization in chip manufacturing. The high end of which is used for servers and computers produced in the West, and the low end performing simple yes-no equations, produced in China. ^[5] The US is trying to restrict China in the production of high- and mid-end chips by announcing sanctions in the supply of other components in this complex chain. Netherlands joins sanctions by cancelling shipments of some of lithography machines to China produced by ASML.^[6] Microchips are the physical form of globalization; the process of its creation is complex: material sourcing, lithography, manufacturing and design takes place in different locations all over the world. If you take one player out of the story, everything falls apart and we are stuck in a crisis.

The chain of materials breaks down into individual links, each holding its own measure of political power. Both non-human and human bodies share common features and, according to Jane Bennett, political power on different scales is inherent in both. In her book "Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things," she argues that non-human entities, including materials, embody a vitality capable of influencing both human and political life^[7] . The political capacity of neon, as a vibrant material, influences a power dynamic rooted in material exchange for production of technologies. The human conception of power controls certain layers of visibility revealing the interaction between both human and non-human elements showing their capacity in matter. Hidden infrastructures operate on various scales, much like power: from global to individual, from political to environmental systems, the lack of visibility and chaos are common aspects present in both. Visibility can be understood as an ability to see, visibilities are the layers of control, the matter of political urgency. Invisibility becomes a political tool in the escalation of military weaponry, disinformation in the media, and the ecological crises. The digital environment where the world is currently visualized provides the vision of control, power and profit. The material aspect of technologies makes some digital visibilities technically possible, thus having control over these visibilities. Those who control the material also control visibility.

The economic model and political tension refuses to acknowledge their devastating powers that turned the landscape into ruins. In “Entropy Made Visible”, Smithson states that mining industry's neglect for the post-operation state of a landscape reflects "a sort of blindness." In case of southern-eastern Ukraine, including the Donbas region, part of which has been occupied since 2014 by the Russian Federation and is inaccessible due to ongoing military operations in the region, the data on the occupied mines and plants and other sources of material origin are hidden by the occupier, and therefore removed from public visibility. Data from the occupied territories is invisible to politics when the occupier refuses to acknowledge the damage and consequences.

On the contrary, the vision of the ecological state of the landscape is currently accessible thought the lens of military operations and drone vision. The video reports taken by drone and published by researchers, Ukrainian military groups and the Ministry of Internal Affairs witness the crimes against humanity, displaying violations happening on the apocalyptic post-industrial landscape. The landscape is still the lens accessible through the drone vision. Can we still recognise it as we saw it in the night painting? These images are visible to perception, the operational drone images become symbolic and refined objects in the collective memory within timeless perspective.

***

The material visibility includes the complex chain of processes of its creation including mining, production and transportation. By going through this complex process, the material gains political power. Neon atoms are comparable to political entities entangled in entropy. On a non-human scale, the quantum-classical dynamics of neon atoms is an invisible reality as the processes of material production controlled by political forces. Nevertheless, the lack of direct vision is compensated by knowledge of fundaments of basic physics, allowing us to predict and anticipate on different scales: from micro to global. Similar to the predictable movements in the dynamics of gases, political mechanisms share some calculable patterns. Entropy is the metric for the progression of time, the chaos intensifies as we move forward.^[8] “We orbit in groundless space” is proclaimed in Chaos Theory by Metahaven. This space is characterized by the lack of agency, with uncertainty defining the state of todayness.