MOVEMENT CHANGES MATTER

The Choreography of Automation in the Age of Extractivism

Samir Bhowmik

Meson Press (forthcoming) https://meson.press

This book primarily investigates movement and the matter and materiality transformed by movement. More specifically, it offers a critical rethinking of movement in the age of automation, infrastructure, and ecological crisis. Tracing and juxtaposing the origins of extraction, ritual and performance, the book argues that extractivism and choreography are deeply entangled systems of control, abstraction, and optimization. Movement, it contends, is not only a form of cultural expression but also a critical historical archive: embodied patterns of motion have long shaped how labor, land and resources are exploited and reorganized. Understanding the historical entanglements of extractivism and choreography is therefore essential to rethinking how automation inherits, repeats, or resists those same logics.