Lukas Marxt: How Do We Mediate Haunted Toxicity?
By Juntao Yang
Still from Lukas Marxt, Among The Palms The Bomb (2024). The cowboy figure, an icon of the American frontier myth, is set against the desolate and toxic landscape of a former military testing ground.
A moving image work that engages with the multi-layered histories of land, lake water, and toxicity—histories of remnants and ghosts—must itself be stratified.¹ It must attempt to navigate multiple spatiotemporal scales without losing orientation and attune to mediating what are, in essence, invisible elemental specters.
In his experimental documentary Among The Palms The Bomb, or: Looking for Reflections in the Toxic Field of Plenty (2024), Lukas Marxt surveys the Salton Sea’s landscape to excavate layered histories of toxicity produced by military testing and large-scale agriculture. Through embodied observation and media-archaeological methods, the film probes the region’s historical–geographical strata and distills how multiple interventions have sedimented harm. Chemical pollutants, concentrated in the waters or buried in shallow soils, have devastated the ecosystem and, carried as dust by the wind, extended their reach to distant human settlements. These toxins are residues of multiple human interventions: bomb tests and military maneuvers from World War II and the Cold War to the present day. Freshwater depletion and soil salinization from large-scale agricultural development on Indigenous lands further exacerbate the situation. These practices are entangled with processes of nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism, even as they in turn shape the very forms those processes take. Toxicity becomes not merely a narrative thread but a persistent and lethal presence.
The artist wrestles with a central question: how can one mediate a toxicity that is spectral—difficult to apprehend, yet ever-present and materially destructive?² This spectrality takes form in a recurring figure, a blurred-faced soldier who alternates between drilling and watching, a cipher for the hidden histories of violence and contamination. Media technologies here must assume the responsibility of mediation, rendering the invisible perceptible. Perceptibility and intelligibility, however, unfold in generative ways; Karen Barad would describe the vitality within such an assemblage as “intra-action,” even while resisting the vocabulary of “mediation.”³
As the preeminent technology of witness, the camera is considered a uniquely privileged medium, combining the material-causal force of indexicality with perceptually verifiable visual accuracy.⁴ This privilege constitutes a powerful claim to objective truth, appearing to offer what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have termed “mechanical objectivity”—an epistemic virtue that arose in the mid-nineteenth century with the goal to “aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower.”⁵ Yet, this “willed willessness” must also be visually legible. The automation of photography (and cinema) thus functions in two ways: its indexical nature serves to suppress the observer’s subjective projections, theoretical biases, and aesthetic preferences, while simultaneously ensuring the image’s self-evident reception.
However, when alongside the camera, the artist mobilizes his background in environmental science to incorporate instruments such as the metal detector, sonar, drill, and total station, this is not merely a gesture stemming from his engineering background. Rather, it represents a profound hesitation toward and complication of the camera’s power to witness. In fact, indexicality should be understood as the agency of matter itself. This implies that for our perception to attune to matter’s own enunciation, we cannot grant privilege solely to sight and visuality, or at least not to a merely superficial truthfulness. In other words, the question that must be considered is: when vision itself is untrustworthy or powerless, what other material witnesses can we rely on to understand toxicity and, in turn, to enable political accountability?⁶
In an extended sequence, bomb fragments are excavated with the aid of these non-visual technologies. At times, these techniques mobilize senses beyond the visual, but more often they rely on a synthesis with more subtle, embodied perceptions⁷ , manifesting in their operation as a kind of technical intuition. In fact, it is in these passages that the juxtaposition of scenes and a tight montage reveal how the presence of the observer—their labor, sweat, and breath—is inseparably intertwined with the mediating power of these technologies. It is impossible to overstate this intimacy. Such technological interventions, deployed across contexts, negotiate submerged histories and deadly substances with a pronounced media-ethical awareness: drilling here becomes less an extractivist gesture than an invitation. It is a way to create knowledge with the landscape, not simply from it.
The artist’s critical engagement with media technologies also provokes reflection on (dis)embodiment, manifested in designs that appear contradictory or uncanny. A gimbal erases the trace of the handheld camera while the sound of footsteps is amplified. It is in this context—given our (impossible) pursuit of objective truth on the one hand, and the capacity to discover truth in the intimacy between embodied human labor and media technology on the other—that we can understand the artist’s deliberate move to simultaneously erase and locate human presence in the frame. The paradox finds sharper articulation in a later scene: in the rented ballroom of a local museum, where wartime popular music loops endlessly and atomic bomb replicas are absurdly displayed, the artist dances with the camera hoisted on his shoulder. Beyond satire of nationalism and military ardor, this scene foregrounds the porosity between human and medium. To some degree, the work suggests that the human–media–geology nexus should be apprehended as a continuum, entangled and indivisible across scales. It is precisely by embodying this quality of entanglement that we apprehend the film’s audiovisual elements as situated knowledge, rather than as irrefutable objectivity.⁸
Yet, while the artist treats toxicity as a spatiotemporal residue or spectral element, his conceptualization still tends to collapse it into the malevolent legacies of human violence—war, nationalist fervor, internal colonialism, or capitalism—rather than apprehending it as a flow traversing bodies, environments, and temporalities.⁹ The problem persists: how do toxicity, geology, or matter more broadly speak themselves?
This limitation brings us to another, thornier passage in which ghost matter is conjured through complex practices of technical mediation. On a windless lake, a local guide invites the artist to board a small motorboat retrofitted with a quasi-military sonar to probe the lake’s unfathomable depths. The guide—almost obsessively—believes that this former nuclear testing ground must have left active missiles hidden beneath the placid surface. Soon the sonar appears to register something. Lacking visual legibility, and with imprecise information about scale and distance, the guide cannot hide his excitement: they may indeed have found it. Yet could it be a wrecked boat, a massive boulder, or something else entirely? The question remains open. The artist deliberately preserves this near-paranoid forensic desire¹⁰, sharpening the tension between a human will-to- know and the withdrawal of nonhuman things.¹¹ Technical mediation does not collapse here, but neither does it secure truth; it induces an interpretive pressure. The pursuit of toxicity’s truth persists, though the guide’s hermeneutic impulse drifts uncomfortably close to extraction, a kind of epistemological toxicity.
This intractable question lies beyond the remit of any single film; more precisely, it presses upon the field of media studies as an urgent task, where, at the horizon, projects of witnessing and forensics appear oriented toward undoing the very need for mediation. Even so, the film offers an ethical stance and ventures tentative, exploratory efforts. The gestures toward this recognition, particularly in the opening sequences where extended landscape shots linger after human actors exit the frame, instead of being inserted abruptly. In those moments, matter itself seems to stir, albeit on scales of time and space beyond human comprehension.
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¹ Thanks to a complimentary ticket from the dear Ava Witonsky, I was able to see this film at the Anthology Film Archives.
² The concept of hauntology is drawn from Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), and is complemented by Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
³ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
⁴ Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs,” in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 210–227.
⁵ Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
⁶ Susan Schuppli, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020).
⁷ Nicholas Shapiro, “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime," Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 3 (2015): 368–93.
⁸ Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599.
⁹ Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
¹⁰ Greg Siegel, Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
¹¹ Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018).
Juntao Yang is a writer and artist.
