Text page
Grant - Black Ice (Virtual Futures) (1998)
A Black Ice page that turns the earth into a hard, inhuman process of friction, ingestion, and hybrid circulation.
Contextual work page available
This support page stays public for provenance, file paths, and archival routing. The fuller contextual work page is Grant - Black Ice (Virtual Futures) (1998).
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
Black ice names an earth-process that is neither stable ground nor symbolic landscape. The page insists on a planetary materiality that absorbs and chews through critique, identity, and comfort.
The page works through visceral geological metaphor, cybercultural debris, and hybrid circulation. The earth becomes a stomach, a machine, and a traumatic outside at once.
That matters because Black Ice is one of the archive's clearest figures for an inhuman earth that actively processes human systems.
How to read this text
Read the opening material imagery closely. The conceptual stakes are already there in the stomach and circulation language.
Keep the page beside Barker and Demonology of the New Earth; together they define the core geotrauma problem.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Black Ice Iain Hamilton Grant Modern Oriental or Occidental society is a stomach carpeted with tungsten carbide a very expensive stomach where discourses and figures are used up turn to dust come to reinforce banter they claimed to erode…the stomach turns your words and your images into commodities and identity Critique even hate are incorporated. (J.F.Lyotard, De’sirevolution, 1973:31) “Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?” “A component?
Definition · paragraph 11
At what point is it possible to discriminate between black ice and its host system? Discrimination is impossible a priori. Ice dives in exponential darkness in impossible vectors of contamination, articulating the inconceivable as they mesh meat, biohydraulics, and omniphagic capital.
Definition · paragraph 11
The “overman” is a phase shift in the will-to-power, without program or project, indifferent to jackboots, the crest of an intensive wave driven by recurrence, the intensity engine that wipes humanity altogether. At what point is it possible to discriminate between black ice and its host system?
Definition · paragraph 11
At what point is it possible to discriminate between black ice and its host system? Discrimination is impossible a priori.
History · paragraph 6
Similarly, the efferent energies arising at the core of the system through the work/heat loss ratio of thermodynamics, are put into restricted circulation so as to be captured at a later stage, in exactly the same manner as excitations from the system’s BLACK ICE 137
Appears in sections
Geotrauma and the Outside Primary section
Molten earth, Barker, the inhuman Outside, and the archive's geological imagination.