Lost Volumes

LOST VOLUMES Taylor Blair

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LOST VOLUMES Taylor Blair

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I have always been fascinated by the artificial bluffs that dramatically rise and fall along the higway as it traverses the hills Wisconsin’s Driftless Region. As a child, I would crane my neck and press my small head against the cool glass of the rear passenger window, straining to see the top of the towering rockfaces as we passed.

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Their looming presence persists as a defining emotional experince of my childhood. I felt awe at their scale and precision. Excited by their implied destruction. Fear from the visible evidence of erosion betraying their clear urge to collapse: to go back to being unseen.

These are Lost Volumes.

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I grew up near Madison, Wisconsin, on the eastern edge of what is known geologically as the Driftless Region. This place is unique in that it remained untouched by the mile-thick ice sheets that, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, repeatedly scraped smooth the topography of the Upper Midwest.

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Taken from Lancaster-Mineral Point Folio U. S. Geological Survey No. 145, 1911.

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A map of Midwest glaciation from Popular Science Monthly, Volume 56, November 1899. The article, “Emigrant Diamonds in America,� discusses the surprisingly-placed diamonds deposited by the glaciers. Dark shaded areas are those unglaciated.

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More than once, the land we now call Driftless was an island entirely surrounded by ice flows. This name doesn’t refer to the glaciers themselves but to the debris deposited by their retreat: “drift.”

The Driftless Region, then, derives its name not from its own qualities, but from what it did not experience, and thereby does not possess.

Geologists do not know for certain why we were spared the apocalyptic march of these northern visitors, but it is theorized that our limestone bedrock played the leading role. Limestone’s permeability allowed it to swiftly drain the water that lubricated the glaciers’ underside, diverting the flow of ice around this region.

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As demonstrated in these two maps, the Driftless Region exists where limestone bedrock is closest to the surface. The same qualities of Driftless geology that averted glaciation gifts us with a nearly-endless natural aquifer—it also makes our groundwater particularly susceptible to pollution.

Center: The light yellow, light blue, nearly-black blue, and sage green colors represent limestone-related (carbonate) bedrock.

Bottom Left: Depth of bedrock.

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Millions of years before ice roamed the Midwest, on a continent we would not recognize today, the Driftless Region was submerged under a shallow inland sea teeming with fascinating, now-extinct organisms.

As these creatures died, their shells and carcasses accumulated on the seafloor. Over millions of years, corpses, corals, plants, and soil were transfigured into the limestone on which we built our cities. The limestone that stopped glaciers.

It is miraculous.

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Examples of Paleozoic marine fossils common in Platteville Group limestone.

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In elementary school, we learned that there are three types of rock: sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous. Limestone is sedimentary and humble. Red Granite, igneous and glittering, is Wisconsin’s state rock.

This official fact always felt wrong to me. Red Granite is handsome and strong, perfect for monumental buildings and tombstones—but it is not Wisconsin, and it is certainly not the Driftless Region. In southern Wisconsin, limestone is everywhere.

It is in the retaining walls of shopping center landscaping, in the foundations of alternatively dilapidated or perfectly maintained farmhouses, in the artificial canyons of the quarry within walking distance of my childhood home, and in my own yard, where every stab of the shovel ends with a sharp clang as steel meets stone.

Limestone is Wisconsin.

And so I find it ironic that perhaps the best place to experience it—to see it and to know Wisconsin’s history—is the site of so much of its destruction: the pleasant drive between Madison and Dubuque on U.S. Highway 151.

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Speeding automobiles demand wide lanes and straight lines; the power of modern excavation technology and the ferocity of postwar economic hubris delivered them. Shaping the world from the remote vantage point of tidy maps, civil engineers filled in alluvial valleys and bisected ancient hills.

This birds-eye design process defines the experience of highway driving. A highway is a void: an invisible tunnel used to get where you’re going.

Drivers ride shortcuts across space, through places unknown and unimportant. You can see where you are, but you are not actually there.

This void becomes visible only when it intersects an immovable piece of the landscape—the gentle hills our humble bedrock fought to save from glaciation. Too small to merit a tunnel, yet too large to be avoided, highways instead cut straight through.

The three-dimensional difference between landscape and highway-void is discarded: A Lost Volume.

Naming these places is a step towards recognizing their existence. Actively choosing to see them is the beginning of ending their officially-designated irrelevancy. The removal of these Volumes makes tangible how humans choose to move through the world: selfish, entitled, wasteful, arrogant. They demonstrate how our ephemeral requirements always supersede all other considerations, including the destruction of irretrievable landscapes. Millions of years of creation disassembled in days.

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The Lost Volume, whose stone is a physical record of a previous age of evolution and the remnants of a unique, region-defining geologic capacity, is pulverized, laid, and compacted to form the new roadbed.

In the absence of these Lost Volumes, we are left with an undulating series of artificial chasms embracing the swift four-lane divided highway. The roadway is flat—it is the landscape that rises and falls around it. The natural world exists, but only in relation to human intervention.

We drive through history; we ride atop it.

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A recurring source of anxiety as a kid was how much there was in the world. On the highway, I would tap my toes and teeth in rhythmic acknowledgment of the passing road signs, mile markers, streetlights, and telephone poles. I struggled to believe that there was enough metal in the world to have made everything I saw. There certainly couldn’t be enough to endure making more.

Similarly, driving through the limestone chasms I could not make myself believe that there were enough places to put all the rock taken away. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but I mourned for what used to be there, the views of prairie and forest man and animal used to appreciate from those modest peaks. I imagined what it sounded like as these places were blasted away: the boreholes that fed charges into the Earth clearly visible.

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Within these channels, I was always fearful of collapse—the existence of fractures and previous falls evidenced by golden fresh limestone rubble lying roadside; inconsistencies in the strength of stone revealed in varied rates of decay. Further, the walls’ verticality meant traditional rockslides were not the true danger. I was sure these towering would imminently fold in on top of us.

So entering the limestone channels I remained vigilant for any sign of movement. In a twist of child logic, not seeing evidence of my worst fear made me certain that this was the moment it would come. In town, my brother and I would hold our breath together as we passed cemeteries.

Alone, in the shadow of the void, I waited for the crushing force of collapse.

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Chasm wall, seen at high-speed from a car.

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Clearly, I survived, but my experience from the backseat of the car left a lasting impact. Lost Volumes are not meant to be seen, let alone the subject of thought.

These limestone channels are not places in their own right, but implications, affordances. They exist only to allow the highway to pass unencumbered by nature’s bothersome inconsistencies. Like the Driftless Region—to which they belonged before vanishing—these non-places exist only as what they are not. The residue of Lost Volumes along U.S. Highway 151 are exactly what they do not experience: undisrupted existence.

Examining the geologic record dissects time and gleans information about our planet available nowhere else. Core samples pulled from the ground and studied in sterile labs remain hidden from the public, but their careful analysis tells us of dramatic extinction events, volcanic episodes, and the machinations of tectonic plates.

Out West, Earth’s geology is thrust upwards by shifting continents. The ground intermittently shifts underfoot, just in case you forgot that the Earth is still forming—that in a lifetime you will see only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its steady progress. You will always be small and young.

Midwest landscapes, however, provide very few clues that humans are small and unneeded in the sweeping narrative of planetary history. So benign, charming, and mild is the Midwest that it seems nearly custom-made for humanity to inhabit and exploit. This persuasive myth, internalized, defines our relationship with the land.

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But it is a myth. Just beneath the pristine Midwestern monocultures lay a complex and violent narrative. Random natural outcroppings and creviced bluffs framing meandering waterways have told parts of this narrative, but only to those with a boat or sturdy hiking boots. Now unearthed, the synthetic Lost Volume outcroppings challenge this mythological stasis of destructive entitlement. On year-round highway-side exhibition they democratize access to our collective geologic history.

Or do they?

Traveling rapidly, parallel to these faces in our sealed automobile environments, we are denied meaningful access. Existing along a dangerous interstate highway, these open-air geology museums are not accessible by foot unless one is willing 22

to risk their safety or a run-in with the Wisconsin State Patrol. Impractical to examine in-person, I searched for another way.

Unsurprising in retrospect, given their status as the omniscient and omnipresent overseers, organizers, and purveyors of all the world’s data, I soon found myself on the digital doorstep of Google.

Since 2007, Google Street View’s geotagging camera-festooned cars and artificial intelligence-powered image-stitching technology have surreptitiously generated 360-degree panoramas of the entire of American roadside. Consequently—and accidentally—Google’s inescapable data vortex contains the only comprehensive documentation of the Lost Volume outcroppings.

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That we can only visit Lost Volumes through a corporate channel—that the only exhaustive catalogue of these public places of geologic importance is the dominion of one of the largest technology conglomerates on the planet (with whom to gain access you tacitly agree to be surveilled and have your private data monetized)—is an issue to which at this point has no good solutions. But as large as they are, problems with this arrangement do not only concern ownership, access, and privacy rights, but the basic representation of reality too.

In their digital form, captured by the multi-lens of a Google Street View car, Lost Volumes undergo further subtle transformations. Street View utilizes artificial intelligence and other state-of-the-art automated digital methods to clean up and make continuous the images before user access.

Until recently, for example, every Street View image contained two voids: one from the lack of an upwards-facing camera, and another below from the car itself. Now, the generative power of AI is used to augment reality and fill in these discontinuities. The area above is knitted together from pieces

An example of the AI-generated space directly beneath the Google Street View Car. This piece of U.S. Highway 151 pavement was not captured with the rest of the 360-degree image—it is not possible to do so. It is a forgery, passed off as truth.

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of the surrounding sky, and the void beneath the car is speculatively realized using similar images captured along the route, neighboring space, and intelligent stitching and pixel cloning processes.

With the car made invisible, its shadow must also be expunged from view or the fiction will be broken. In earlier iterations of Street View, the shadow of the camera cupola was nearly always visible.

Now, these realities are seen only by mistake.

These changes alter these representations of reality by inserting details not present in the original, of course—but there is more to these seemingly innocuous alterations. The two voids and the car’s shadow told a human story about the origin of the image; a vehicle traveled down the road, and a person was driving it. With these realities altered—not just erased and left void, but filled-in with an ersatz hypothetical posing as fact—we peruse perfectly disembodied floating image-orbs: Sourceless, impersonal, inevitable.

But this is not the only area where Google warps reality. At 65 miles per hour, even small pauses

The AI-generated space directly above the Google Street View Car. A radial blur is visible at center, the apex of the blind spot. This image is from the same location as to the left.

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A custom Google map of all 91 exposed cut rock faces along U.S. Highway 151 from Madison, WI to Dubuque, IA. There are other cut-through hills clearly visible, but for the sake of this map, only those with visible limestone outcroppings were counted. The numbering system starts at 1 in the north, and increases southbound.

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between captures result in images of substantially-changed perspective. As AI stitches together images of slightly different perspectives, conflicts at the edges are generatively “solved.” In a comical twist, the human brain’s superior capacity to detect patterns—an area that continues to vex computer minds—allows us to catch AI’s mistakes. In nearly every rockface captured along U.S. Highway 151, it is easy to find fudged realities, cloned sections repeated two or three times—a falsified sense of visual continuity.

Through digitization, these non-places have passed onto another level of non-reality. Telling a superficially compelling story of post-human technological prowess, Google’s software actually invents new topographies and overwrites the original. Google has indeed democratized access to these places— but on their terms and within their curatorial discretion.

Users have no choice but to relinquish their privacy to gain access to a private hoard of algorithmically-derived interventions into the record of these public places. Accessed through Google’s servers, we blissfully consume a cleansed continuity, a tasteful gate-keeping, and a highly-accessible non-reality.

The next pages contain Street View images along the U.S. Highway 151 roadside and a small sample of the discontinuities found through my research.

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An (almost) erased car in the bottom-right corner: pixels appear stretched to fill a gap; white line has been accidentally obscured. The sweep of a bluish tinge could have been mistakenly pulled from another part of the image, or is actually a “shadow� of the erased shadow.

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An errant, partially erased camera shadow. The AI was likely confused by the complexities of recreating the rumble strip, tar line, and lane paint. What happens when the AI ceases to make mistakes? Is a perfect forgery a truth?

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A few examples of Street Vier’s AI-generated repetitions. Look for instances of exact du30

plications: cloned plants, roots, crevices, cracks. They exist on nearly every digital rockface.

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Using Google’s proprietary imagery and topographical data, I set myself the task of reconstructing these places through two elements: a hand-drawn reconstruction of a Lost Volume, and a digitally-rendered reversion to a speculative un-altered, pre-highway landscape. In so doing, I appropriate technology designed to surveil the contemporary world to discern the shape of longlost places and interpret inaccessible history.

This page contains some of the initial analysis for Lost Volume 44, shown on the following pages.

Using Google Earth, I took two transect elevation measurements of the current topography, one parallel and one perpendicular. To imagine the removed stone face I stitched together the entire north wall from a series of Street View images (far right).

Note the visible AI-generated continuity mistakes in the center-left image on the adjacent page.

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Lost Volume 44: Located about one-half mile south of Dodgeville Exit 46, this Volume is 1261 feet long, 142 feet wide, and at its maximum is 64 feet tall. Its absence represents approximately 6,417,582 cubic feet of dolomitic limestone, belonging to the upper Galena Deposit of the Sinnipee Formation (mid-Ordovician, Paleozoic, 458-462Mya). It features a single setback at 26 feet. Three prominent horizontal fractures, and numerous vertical fissures indicate it is highly hydrologically active.

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View looking south.

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At highway speeds, you detect these non-places only as momentary fragments, brief daydreams interrupted as soon as you return your attention to the business of driving. But what if we choose to notice them, study them, and think about them?

Looking at a Lost Volume in person or online: What do they mean? What do they tell us?

That these exposed rockfaces allow us to glimpse the archive of life that used to be and the geologic history of the region has already been discussed: they are a slice of time made visible. But I believe that this engagement does more than look backwards. As a product of humanity, the act of investigating Lost Volumes and the physical characteristics of the non-places left behind function as a mirror through which we can better see ourselves.

Paleoclimatologists have named our current geological epoch the “Anthropocene.” It is defined by the impact of humanity, hence the prefix. Humans have so comprehensively altered the face of the Earth, its climate, native ecologies, oceans, and even the immediate reaches of outer space, that we—like the accumulated bodies of the extinct inhabitants of the shallow sea that used to cover this region—will leave an indelible mark on the geologic record for ages to come.

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Our epoch may also prove to be Earth’s shortest.

Human-caused climate change, political instability, and weapons of mass destruction: most epochs last millions of years, humanity will be lucky if the Anthropocene lasts a few thousand. If humanity does survive, it will be because Earth has left the Anthropocene.

The inhabitants of this post-Anthropocene epoch will be able to look back on it—on us and the physical changes we wrought upon the planet. Perhaps they will study what they find, as we now study the layers and composition of bedrock.

They will see what remains of our houses and stadiums, power-plants and playgrounds, factories and schools. The geologic record of the Anthropocene will include landfills that tell a story of our culture. Depressions left by long-eroded foundations arrayed in grid-bound voids will show where we lived. And vast highways slicing wantonly across landscapes will explain how we moved.

Perhaps they will find in dusty servers millions of augmented panoramic images depicting a dubious version of 21st-century daily life. To understand us they will have exactly what we leave them, and nothing else.

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In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold implores us to “think like a mountain� and in so doing come to an understanding of the Earth from a position outside of humanity and unshackled from the myopic understanding of time imposed by our fleeting individual existences. In a small way, this is what we are doing when we zoom in on a Street View panorama of a Lost Volume or lean against the car window to study blurred-invisible rock as we fly by on our way to somewhere.

Existing at the nexus of past, present, and future, Lost Volumes are different than other human creations in that they automatically contextualize themselves in relation to future retrospection.

Looking at a highway rockface allows us to see ourselves as we will be seen by future people, in epochs yet unnamed or imagined.

The Lost Volumes that defined the road trips of my childhood through the Driftless Region are more than pieces of infrastructure. We fly through them, unknowing and unnoticed, but for a brief moment, we exist through time, connected to our past and our future. And in between, if we choose, we can study who we are from a position outside ourselves.

Stone speaks only the truth.

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Some further/future thoughts...

Much has been left out in this small text. One of the most obvious is the original act of destruction and erasure: that of the indigenous peoples of Wisconsin and North America. Southern Wisconsin is the ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk Nation, who have called this land Teejop for millennia. Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, our federal and state government sought to completely and violently displace the Ho-Chunk from their Wisconsin homeland. Despite these attempts, the Ho-Chunk people returned and still reside in their home in present-day Wisconsin. The Ho-Chunk Nation and the other eleven First Nations residing in the boundaries of present-day Wisconsin remain vibrant and strong.

A strategy of colonization, theft, slavery, and mass murder forms the foundation of this nation, of which the construction of U.S. Highway 151 itself is but one manifestation.

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Along with this being an essential part of the story of this single highway, the falsification of Google’s visual records mirrors the idealization of this nation’s violent history of

genocide and exploitation into one of freedom and democracy.

Also left out of this text is that Lost Volumes are only one-half of U.S. Highway 151’s transformation of the Driftless landscape. The thin ribbon of asphalt follows a mathematical mean of the pre-existing topography. If hills were cut through, then their inverse must have been filled-in. If one extracted this entire altered volume from the Wisconsin landscape, it might look something like the graphic across this spread.

If I had endless time, I would like to make digital models of both these positive and negative volumes. Imagine if they were 3D-printed, and the entire highway was hung in an exploded-view from the ceiling, filling an entire room.

I focused only on the Lost Volumes because they are more visible than filled-in valleys and because of the role they played in my childhood imagination.

But the lost places beneath the roadbed are just as impressive and possibly more ecologically impactful alterations to the region. I also skipped Lost Volumes too small to leave sheer rock walls. There

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are numerous hills, clearly torn in half by the highway that were instead carefully sloped to the pavement and covered with grass. These more humble Lost Volumes deserve recognition too!

I originally included a section on railroads. They have a similar relationship as highways on a landscape, and their story can offer valuable insights.

Many rail lines were built during a speculation boom in the mid-to-late-19th century. Thousands of rail miles proved bad investments; many more were made obsolete by the interstate highway system. Who is to say that some new form of transportation won’t make at least some fraction of the United States’ 4.2 million miles of highways unneeded?

“Rails-to-trails” systems have found recreational use for 24,472 miles of disused U.S. railways. A popular rails-to-trails path runs near my house (of course, the trail is made of compacted limestone gravel). These sorts of trails are usually about 8-12 feet wide—the width of an average single-lane railroad—and facilitate comfortable two-way traffic for bicyclists and pedestrians. But if highways faced a similar fate, what could we possibly do with a space 140-feet-wide running for thousands of miles? Restoring the natural flow of water over the landscape by excavating the blockaded valleys could be a valuable undertaking. But what would be the value of doing the same for the Lost Volumes? Reconstructing them with newly-quarried limestone poses its own intriguing set of questions.

Considering future uses for disused highways could fill a whole separate volume.

Another element undiscussed in this text is the role limestone and other carbonate rocks play in

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the global carbon cycle. The limestone of Wisconsin’s Driftless Region is sequestered Paleozoic-era carbon, meaning the highway cuts through an ancient carbon sink to build a pathway for the movement of vehicles propelled by the combustion of a different (liquefied) ancient carbon sink. Further, limestone is an essential ingredient of Portland cement, another material used in the construction of highways. The mining, manufacture, and transport of Portland cement contribute approximately 10% of world carbon dioxide emissions. I would like to dig further into the carbon cycle of limestone in a future version of this project.

I have always been fascinated by the infinite scalability of history.

One could write a multi-volume history of a particular city block or a single sentence that tells the universe’s entire history. A similar phenomenon can be seen when looking at the scale of human interventions on Earth. Within the global picture, a single U.S. Highway seems insignificant—but it is not. Studying in detail the history and impact of this single route honors the real, overlooked effects it has locally—those completely invisible at the macro-scale.

Along this line of thinking, it would be interesting to deeply explore the ecological, political, and human history of Lost Volumes. What was the name of the farmer whose land was bisected? How does water flow differently now? What about the movement of animals? Did the local municipality support or fight the highway’s construction? Questions like these could be further expanded and integrated into the project.

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A final area that could use more exploration is the role of Google Street View in documenting the Lost Volumes, and in particular how their visual archive differs from reality. While the moral and philosophical implications of their algorithmically-driven alterations are interesting to analyze, they are for the most part not intentional—yet.

This reminds me of how the Old Town of Warsaw, Poland was rebuilt after being leveled in WWII. In the post-war decades, it became a matter of national pride to rebuild this culturally-important neighborhood, but it was also a logistical and political opportunity. Planners widened and straightened crooked old-world streets. Along these streets they chose which buildings were worth reconstructing, and filled in the gaps with a state-approved Polish pastiche.

But what is especially interesting is that they did not simply rebuild what was there immediately before the war—which was documented in photographs—but chose to rebuild to a style from 120 years before, the last time Poland was an independent country. In this mission, they relied heavily on paintings from the Italian artist Bernardo Bellotto, who was known to “fix” aspects of buildings he didn’t like and add decoration, floors, windows, and doors to his liking. In other words, the rebuilt reality was refracted through politics, subjective taste, and the economic and logistical constraints of the time.

With this in mind, it is not at all far-fetched to think Google could undertake a similar “improvement” of the digital realm. With ever-improving AI capabilities, how long until Google begins to seamlessly alter their presentation of reality to suit a corporate

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or political agenda—are we sure they haven’t already?

I have thoroughly enjoyed spending time working on this project. As usual with my projects, I have found myself spirited away to unexpected intellectual places: the contemporary role of technology as cataloging and gate-keeping access to public spaces; the role of humanity in studying and shaping the geologic history of the Earth; the politics of ephemeral need that drives highway (and other) construction; speculative daydreams of a post-Anthropocene world; and many more.

And why did I do this? An uncontrollable melancholy overtakes me when something irreplaceable is corrupted. This project is perhaps an attempt to come to some sort of closure with one representation of this inexorable process—to find a silver lining to guild my growing dismay at humans’ collective capacity to destructively create at such scale. I think this feeling of melancholic loss is the defining emotional experience of the Anthropocene.

I guess we should become friends.

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