The camera quivers as it slowly lifts up over the Illinois landscape. Soon, we look down on a familiar pattern of chequered land, rectangular fields in a pallet of browns and greens and ochres of all shades, shaped by industrial agriculture's need for efficiency. The geometric pattern is cut through by streets and broken up by patches of forest and lakes. A bit further, grids of residential areas are framed by industrial parks. The suburban structure of single-family home subdivisions is laid out in roads leading through parcels of land. Straight lines with branches ending in circles, that, at least from above, look not unlike geoglyphs or ancient ground drawings, prehistoric inscriptions onto the land, especially in those places where roads lie waiting for homes that have yet to be built. The sound of cello music sets in, half-foreboding and half-melancholic. Image and sound are severed. While the natural movement of the camera draws us into the image, the music shuts us out. Up above the land – not quite disconnected but not integrated either – we are floating in between earthly and spiritual spheres. Dusted in mist, the horizon is slightly curved. The view conjures an image of the discrete object that, in English, is referred to as Earth.

The flight seems to set the tone and to reveal the premise. Landscape appears as ‘a “social hieroglyph”’, as W. J. T. Mitchell has put it elsewhere, channelling Marx, ‘an emblem of the social relations it conceals’.