Abstract
This paper examines the paradoxical role of digital visual culture in addressing the extinction crisis of the vaquita porpoise, a critically endangered species with fewer than ten individuals remaining in the Gulf of California. In 2023, the vaquita appeared in the digital metaverse as an NFT series titled Ghosts of the Gulf, depicting the species as ethereal avatars. While these projects claim to raise awareness and fund conservation, they obscure the ecological harms of blockchain infrastructure, such as Bitcoin mines in drought-stricken Chihuahua depleting aquifers vital to the vaquita's habitat. Drawing on Anthony Cross's "aesthetic complicity" and Ted Nannicelli's "media materialism," this chapter critiques how digital spectacles of extinction—such as AI-generated "vaquita songs" trained on bioacoustic data from dead specimens—echo colonial practices of taxidermy and taxonomic extraction, reducing ecosystems to consumable data.
The analysis foregrounds blockchain's hydrocolonial necropolitics, linking crypto's water wars to Mexico's ecological crises, while invoking Rob Nixon's "slow violence" to frame extinction as an invisibilized disaster. Amid this algorithmic necropolis, alternatives emerge. The paper highlights the Seri people (Comcaac), whose cocimito narratives revere the vaquita as a sacred ancestor and whose Comcaac Digital Archive tokenizes traditional ecological knowledge on low-energy blockchains. Rooted in Robin Wall Kimmerer's reciprocal ecology and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Indigenous futurisms, this approach challenges the neoliberal spectacle of NFTs, offering pathways to healing art.
Weaving feminist technoscience (Donna Haraway), postcolonial theory (Sylvia Wynter), and materialist critique (Jason W. Moore), the chapter rejects easy binaries, urging readers to heed the vaquita's echolocation, the Seri's songs, and silenced rivers. It advocates a shift from blockchain's deceptive permanence to the vulnerable act of guardianship. This analysis enriches environmental humanities, sensory studies, and visual culture by revealing sensory and affective dimensions of environmental distress while proposing cross-species solutions to technocapitalism's abstractions.
The analysis foregrounds blockchain's hydrocolonial necropolitics, linking crypto's water wars to Mexico's ecological crises, while invoking Rob Nixon's "slow violence" to frame extinction as an invisibilized disaster. Amid this algorithmic necropolis, alternatives emerge. The paper highlights the Seri people (Comcaac), whose cocimito narratives revere the vaquita as a sacred ancestor and whose Comcaac Digital Archive tokenizes traditional ecological knowledge on low-energy blockchains. Rooted in Robin Wall Kimmerer's reciprocal ecology and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Indigenous futurisms, this approach challenges the neoliberal spectacle of NFTs, offering pathways to healing art.
Weaving feminist technoscience (Donna Haraway), postcolonial theory (Sylvia Wynter), and materialist critique (Jason W. Moore), the chapter rejects easy binaries, urging readers to heed the vaquita's echolocation, the Seri's songs, and silenced rivers. It advocates a shift from blockchain's deceptive permanence to the vulnerable act of guardianship. This analysis enriches environmental humanities, sensory studies, and visual culture by revealing sensory and affective dimensions of environmental distress while proposing cross-species solutions to technocapitalism's abstractions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Sensory Aesthetics of More-Than-Human in Crisis |
| Publisher | University of Exeter Press |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - May 2025 |
