Purification is the removal of impurities from a material, leaving only the element.

I think about matter the way one can think about a soul, through its states, its modifications, its movement toward perfection.

Immaterial Sublime is a speculative essay film that follows quartz silica from mountain to microchip. Sand is lifted from the floor of the quarry, melted, reduced, refined into polysilicon, drawn into a single crystal, sliced into the wafer that exists inside each technological device.

Quartz comes apart from granite slowly. Water works at the rock for hundreds of millions of years, carrying off whatever will dissolve, until what survives is the mineral least willing to change. Sand is what remains after everything softer has gone. A grain is already a record of that patience. Purity is a condition industry produces, one the ground has no reason to arrive at on its own. To purify the stone, we destroy it first. The furnace reduces it, the silicon becomes a gas, and it returns as a solid at one foreign atom in ten billion. It stops being a stone in order to become an element. Melted again, drawn upward from a seed and turning as it rises, it gathers into a single crystal, sliced into wafers and polished until the surface reflects. The ground turns into a mirror.

In The Marvelous Clouds, Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, John Durham Peters writes that the elements themselves are media. Earth, water, fire uphold meaning before any technological apparatus. The stone is already a medium in the ground. Purification, then, is the passage from one kind of medium to another. I see it as a gesture of the spirit, control as longing, perfection as erasure.

Sand loses its name one step at a time. Quartz, silica, trichlorosilane, polysilicon, ingot, wafer. What eons made becomes a commodity, valued for what it can carry. Every grain keeps eons in its crystal lattice, devices speak in the duration of an electronic impulse. The film exists within the interstice, a space between, in the interval between the geological and the technological.

The flaws have the mountain in their memory.

What is lost, and what is only transformed, in the meeting between deep mineral history and technological production?

« Through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite: the eternal within the finite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form. »

Work presented at Radica Cultures of Change, 2026.