The hard landscape and clear, cloudless, big skies of rural Oklahoma and Nevada are executed and programmed in Gerrard’s simulations like a color-field painting in an expanse of emptiness. The familiar landscape and the indispensable horizon are something like a Mark Rothko or Andrew Wyeth painting, or a photograph of Dorothea Lange or Arthur Rothstein. It is an unforgiving and ungiving dustbowl, a space whose history conjures many ghosts. The fields depicted appear once ripened with grain, once inhabited by Native American nations, and once abandoned by tenant farmers in the 1930s. Now, in the sheen of the computer generated simulation is a place that is pristine, perhaps desolate, certainly isolated, a depopulated terrain. There is little movement. Monotonous. Meticulous. The virtual camera of the simulation circles at eye level around the buildings as a witness of the stillness. Silence. It is an America that remains unseen in readiness. There is a palpable foreboding, yet the buildings and environments stand as non-events. Although we are present in a real time simulation nothing happens in or around the buildings. Nothing but nothing. There is no entrance or exit. There is no input or output save a gentle exhaust exhaled from the vents of the ‘Farm’. There is an incredible depth in the landscape, but a shallow flatness pervades. Time flows, but any historical circumstance is absent. There is no sign of life. The buildings’ silver surfaces shine in the sunlight but what is inside? Why are the actions concealed? What is happening? What banalities? What traumas? Outside the Farm are empty parking lots with vacant electric car recharging stations. In ancient Greece the theatres built into the landscape included a circular orchestra (like the circling virtual camera) in which the action of the tragedies took place. Behind the orchestra was the scene building which operated as a site for entrances and exits and it was there that the scenes of trauma, Clytemnestra’s murder, Oedipus’ enucleated eyes, Antigone’s suicide, were enacted, but unseen. However, the scenes, the non-scenes, the ob-scene tragedies taking place in these scene buildings and sites are unwitnessed. Unseen is the industrialisation of animal life, the fattening, the growing, the finishing of the animal for market. There is a silence. There are no animal grunts, no shuffling of caged hoofs, nor the waste products expelled and washed away. The energy of the sun is unlocked and transformed, stored up and distributed. On the farm there is the harvesting of big data, a digitising of the things of the earth, of the human, into the construction of the world as virtual. The circle of the implied viewer around the buildings outlines the perimeter of an orchestra in which the scene building is now centre-stage. Everything is hidden in a tragic site without event or catharsis or sacrifice. The circular site of the Solar Reserve appears as a sublimated ritual event. The mirrors following the path of the sun reflect to a source radiating in the centre. The ritual enacted is one not for sacrifice but for efficiency, productivity, and capital. In this very particular way, the industrialisation of information and data, agriculture and animal life, and the human and the environment presents the gathering and distribution of the earth’s resources as virtual.