Salar began with satellite images of the Atacama Desert that mesmerized me. From altitude, the lithium brine evaporation ponds look like Rothko paintings dropped into the driest place on earth. Vivid aquamarines, deep cobalts, and caustic yellows arranged in bands, separated by thin earthen berms. The fact that these are industrial extraction sites, some of the most chemically aggressive landscapes humans have ever made stood in stark contrast to their beauty.

That tension is what the piece is about. The lithium pulled from these ponds ends up in the batteries powering the devices we use every day, including the ones used to view this work. The beauty is real and the violence is real and they are the same thing.

Each output is generated from a single unique hash that determines the chemical state of each pond, the weight of the boundaries between them, and where in the evaporation cycle the composition sits. The colors come directly from the actual chromatic range of lithium carbonate precipitation, halite crust, and brine at varying mineral concentrations. Nothing is invented. The piece moves through four phases over time, emergence, infusion, saturation, and recession, tracing the full arc of concentration from fresh water to crystallized salt.

Salar is part of Disturbed Ground, a body of generative work made from industrial landscapes at the scale where extraction becomes abstraction.