This is a contribution to the LETHE MACHINA SERIES curated by Sasha Shilina and Silas Nemo from DIFFRACTIONS. Transcription below essay.
:: For anyone who anticipates being observed in this way, my recommendation is to dig now, before new baseline data can be produced. Once a system is operational, it will be harder to build underground without detection, or even just to hide existing structures ::
-Wayne Chambliss
The film presented here, “Hezar-Too: A Thousand Withins,” was born out of an essay written by Wayne Chambliss, featured in the 2020 edited collection Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination (Billé, 2020). Titled “Spoofing: The Geophysics of Not Being Governed,” the essay traces the escalating arms-race between gravitational sensing and subterranean concealment, a contest that is inseparable from the broader pressures by which a world is becoming besieged: accelerating AI development linked to forever wars, climate catastrophe, displaced populations, and a surveilled globe scoured by an unrelenting martial gaze (Bousquet, 2018; Reichborn-Kjennerud, 2025). This gaze, which also lies at the heart of the film, is not confined to the visible spectrum or even human eyes. Rather, it operates through geophysical coercion — gravimetric, seismic, or electromagnetic means that penetrate the planet’s crust beyond mere listening, mining for insurgent and clandestine infrastructures. In effect, it reads and transforms the Earth into a suspect, recruiting it “as [an] informant” (Chambliss, 2020) pressed to disclose what lies beneath its surface.
The instruments enabling this gaze have been intensifying a struggle to subdue or choke the subterranean itself – namely, the warren-like arteries that move matériel and, increasingly, the life-support systems that sustain combatants and populations. As Daphné Richemond-Barak underscores: “The subterranean realm is not a marginal or auxiliary feature of contemporary warfare. It is central to how both state and nonstate actors conceive of strategic depth, survivability, and asymmetry” (Richemond-Barak, 2025). Equally we can recognise that the chthonic strategies now central to contemporary warfare are not new. They belong to an ancient continuum.
For millennia, the subsurface has been a type of telluric canvas for those who sought to unground and reshape it from above and below. Scanning the globe, one can be struck by the feats of Cappadocia’s underground cities: Derinkuyu, Kaymaklı, and others were chiselled from volcanic stone, or by the Mapuche of the Americas, present-day Chile and Argentina, who sculpted trenches and earthworks (trincheras) into the land during the Arauco War (Weizman, 2026).
Tunnelling our way to the 20th century, we encounter a shift catapulted by the World Wars, the unleashing of air power and the expansion of surveillance into orbit, a transformation Paul Virilio captured in his crosshairs, discerning how warfare and terrestrial strategy were to be fundamentally redefined: “The conquest of the third dimension by the aerial forces and the extension of the submarine offensive gave to the Second World War its ‘volume’. What was only yesterday the privilege of sea powers became the privilege of the entire military establishment: the control of the sky completed the control of the sea’s depths. Space was at last homogenized, absolute war became a reality, and the monolith was its monument” (Virilio, 1994: 39-40).
This transformation is nowhere more visible than in the underground architectures that have come to define modern asymmetric warfare, multi-dimensional volumes transformed for the very purposes of combat and even permanent habitation in the face of catastrophe: from Soviet-era metro systems in Kyiv and Kharkiv becoming bomb shelters and command centers, to the salt mines of Soledar transforming into subterranean battlefields, to Switzerland’s 370,000 fallout shelters — providing over nine million shelter places, more than its entire population (Stevens, 2025).
The underground also takes on a radically different shape when the threat is not a distant war but one that is technically still ongoing to this day. During the Korean War, North Korea endured what was, by some measures, the largest bombing campaign against a single country in modern history, exceeding the tonnage dropped in the entire Pacific theater of World War II (Armstrong, 2009). In the wake of that aerial onslaught, the state retreated underground. North Korea hollowed its mountains into ‘missile cities’ and dug at least four invasion tunnels under the DMZ. The most notorious of these, the Third Tunnel of Aggression, extends over 1.6 kilometers at a depth of 73 meters and was reportedly capable of moving an estimated 30,000 troops per hour (Chambliss, 2020; Orr, 2025).
Similarly, Iran has gouged extensive underground bases into the Zagros Mountains, with a network of nearly 30 missile systems descending to depths of 500 meters within granite, beyond the reach of even the most powerful bunker-buster bombs (Aris, 2026). And what is known as the notoriously serpentine ‘Gaza Metro’ has been mapped to varying degrees, honeycombing an estimated 1,300 tunnels, driven through some 500 kilometers of rock, with passages plunging as deep as 70 meters (Schaer, 2023; Weizman, 2026).
Even as these underworld geographies are continuously burrowed and expanded, they confront an arsenal of detection technologies that threaten to render them legible, challenging whether the underground remains a refuge from the planetary martial gaze we have mentioned. In collusion with sensing technologies from above and on the ground that are piercing and plumbing these deep-earth zones, nation-states and commercial enterprises also burrow and install bulkheads and blast seals to dam and plug subterranean flows of all kinds — including human, material, or hydrological – imposing a striated space that “collapse[s] the volume into two-dimensional paths, making the terrain both legible and controllable” (Dunn, 2020: 59).
Other eyes or human-machine formations have also been stirred, with Silicon Valley ventures eager to enter the fold, resurrecting Cold War visions, such as Soviet Subterrenes to Los Alamos’s nuclear-powered prototypes, that have captured the imagination of automated warfare acolytes such as Anduril and its founder, Palmer Luckey. Leading this charge, Luckey recently emphasised: “I’m trying to get people to believe that the next warfighting domain is the crust of the earth, that we’re going to move people eventually but mostly material and weapons and effects through the crust of the earth, just like we move them through the air or through the ocean today” (Dougherty, 2026).
Luckey’s vision of conquering the earth’s crust may be ambitious, and has apparently attracted investment in an underground warfare startup (Gilead, 2026), but it is matched by an equally formidable capacity of technologies detecting subsurface cavities and voids from the heavens. Circling back to Chambliss’s essay, “a whole xenophenomenology of other intelligence methods”, (Chambliss, 2020: 67) is mapping anomalies that make the deep-earth decipherable, whether from orbit or close to the surface.
This is realised through quantum magnetometers and gravimeters that now detect density perturbations from afar, while SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) waves, enabled by advanced flight paths, probe deeper into the subsurface than ever before. Alongside these remote sweeps, LiDAR and AI-enhanced ground-penetrating radar (GPR) map tunnel networks in real time, delivering high-resolution 3D images. Layered together, these fused signatures uncover the depths, potentially extracting any type of networks, trapdoors, or assets.
Yet the most elemental way to extract a confession from the deep does does not come from radar or magnetism, but from gravity itself. As Chambliss clues us in, the Earth’s gravitational force, averaging approximately 9.81 m/s², is not uniform. It fluctuates across the globe by minute amounts, with anomalies relevant to subsurface detection often resolved down to the order of one millionth of the average field strength. More specifically, these variations arise from the Earth’s uneven internal composition or in other words, denser rock pulls more strongly on the gravitational field above, while less dense material or empty space weakens it. When reading and decoding these shifts precisely enough via instruments such as gravimeters or gravity gradiometers, patterns begin to materialise: positive anomalies signal the presence of heavy, concealed masses, while negative anomalies register the absence of mass, a void (Chambliss, 2020).
This brings us, then, to the question at the heart of Chambliss’s inquiry: confronted with this sensorium, what countermeasures remain available to those seeking concealment? Chambliss exhumes several strategies that straddle the speculative and the material, cut from the fabric of two primordial arts spanning the human to non-human divide: crypsis and mimesis. As he sheds light for us, crypsis, or ‘concealment’, in other words, “trick[s] adversaries (which need not be human, of course, or even biological) into believing something that is there isn’t” (Chambliss, 2020: 72). In this tectonic setting, cryptic gravity spoofing is premised on masking the negative gravity signature of a buried void. This can be achieved by manipulating the densities of surrounding materials, blending denser materials below, above, and within an excavated area in order to balance the gravitational anomaly. The result is a “gravitational trompe l’œil,” (Chambliss, 2020) or an optical illusion rendered in gravimetric terms, where the absence reads as nothing.
The second strategy, mimesis or ‘imposture’, “would disguise an anomaly to look like something else” (Chambliss, 2020: 73). This can be engineered by filling solids: adding, displacing, or mimicking density to make a void appear as something innocuous like a buried crater or extinct riverbed. Even beyond these, Chambliss explores more speculative measures that can be complementary, such as gravity jamming that amplifies ambient seismic or atmospheric noise to obscure an anomaly, as well as the theoretical possibility of artificial electromagnetic fields “with stacks of superconducting solenoids to use for masking anomalies” (Chambliss, 2020: 73). Together, they constitute in his words a “poliorcetics of undetectability”, a defensive art that contests the legibility of territory not by fighting the surface, but by disappearing into its depths.
Still, this leaves us with a critical question: for those on the asymmetrical side, how can strategies of concealment, whether through spoofing technologies, sheer manual excavation, or the temporary cover afforded by terrain, be deployed when the technological arms-race favours the surveillant? No easy answer can be offered, or perhaps it is a matter of how far one is willing to dig, what cavities to excavate and occupy, knowing that it grows hostile with depth: temperatures rise ruthlessly — increasing 25–30°C with every kilometer descended, while pressure mounts to crush unprotected structures and oxygen gives way to lethal gases. It returns us to Virilio, pointing out that the bunker, the tunnel, or any chthonic refuge also shares its role in becoming a sepulchre, part of a funerary architecture where a shelter and tomb can become one another (Virilio, 1994; Hidden Architecture, n.d.). Ultimately, to hide underground is then to sign a pact with the earth itself, with an understanding that the refuge and the grave are separated by little more than the depth of one’s digging. How far, then, are you willing to go?
Thank you to Antoine Bousquet and Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud for their conversations.
REFERENCES
Armstrong, C. K. (2009). The destruction and reconstruction of North Korea, 1950–1960. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 7 (0), Article 3460. https://apjjf.org/charles-k-armstrong/3460/article
Aris, B. (2026, March 26). Iran’s missiles, drones stored under impenetrable granite mountains. IntelliNews. https://www.intellinews.com/iran-s-missiles-drones-stored-under-impenetrable-granite-mountains-433911/
Billé, F. (Ed.). (2020). Voluminous states: sovereignty, materiality, and the territorial imagination. Duke University Press.
Bousquet, A. (2018). The eye of war: military perception from the telescope to the drone. University of Minnesota Press.
Chambliss, W. (2020). Spoofing: The Geophysics of Not Being Governed. In F. Billé (Ed.), Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination (pp. 64-77). Duke University Press.
Dougherty, R. (2026, June 10). Beneath the surface: subterranean domain is next warfighting arena, says Anduril founder. Defence Connect. https://www.defenceconnect.com.au/land/18342-beneath-the-surface-subterranean-domain-is-next-war-fighting-arena-says-anduril-founder
Dunn, E. C. (2020). Tunnel: Striating and Militarizing Subterranean Space in the Republic of Georgia. In F. Billé (Ed.), Voluminous states: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination (pp. 52–63). Duke University Press.
Gilead, A. (2026, July 2). Anduril founders invest in Israeli underground warfare startup. Globes/TNS. https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-anduril-founders-invest-in-israeli-underground-warfare-startup-1001547539
Hidden Architecture. (n.d.). Sainte-Bernadette-du-Banlay Church. Retrieved July 7, 2026, from https://hiddenarchitecture.net/sainte-bernadette-du-banlay-chruch/.
Negarestani, R. (2008). Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials. re.press.
Orr, C. D. (2025, December 17). North Korea’s ‘Third Tunnel’ could have moved an estimated 30,000 troops per hour towards Seoul. 19Fortyfive. https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/12/north-koreas-third-tunnel-could-have-moved-an-estimated-30000-troops-per-hour-towards-seoul/
Reichborn‑Kjennerud, E. (2025). The world according to military targeting. MIT Press.
Richemond-Barak, D. (2025, July 18). From Khan Yunis to Fordow: the strategy of subterranean spaces. Modern War Institute. https://mwi.westpoint.edu/from-khan-yunis-to-fordow-the-strategy-of-subterranean-spaces/
Schaer, C. (2023, October 20). Túneles subterráneos de Hamás: reto para ejército de Israel. DW. https://www.dw.com/es/la-red-de-túneles-subterráneos-de-hamás-reto-para-el-ejército-de-israel/a-67169428
Stevens, J. J. (2025, April 24). Safe space: why does Switzerland have so many bunkers? The Dial. https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-27/switzerland-civilian-bunkers
Virilio, P.[1975](1994). Bunker archaeology. Princeton Architectural Press. (Original work published 1975)
Weizman, E. (2026). Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide. Fern Press.
TRANSCRIPTION
This is a story about the hunt, written in gravity and light, in thermal signatures and seismic tremors…where sensing becomes targeting, and where the hunted adapt and carve forms of concealment. Down in depths, inside occulted volumes, in the spaces the sensors have not yet found, sensing and scanning turns into a type of gaze: the martial gaze. It relentlessly searches. It glides across surfaces. The world converts into actionable data. Landscapes become arrays. Volumes become variables in a strike calculus, lethal signatures for a machinic loop to process, respond to, and also potentially to turn into the next target.
It is also a gaze that is pursuing another kind of prey, carved from stone and hollowed from within. The earth has been hiding. So have those inside it. For millennia, they have never stopped digging labyrinths of survival, a thousand withins. Holes that conspire with other holes. “Everywhere a hole moves, a surface is invented” (Negarestani, 2008). Voids leave traces for those who hunt. The earth can confess what it shelters. Beneath our feet lie the tactical and temporary geometries of those who try to hide: silent tunnels, burrowed hideouts, passages that turn back on themselves. These are topologies of refusal that inhabit volumes, but a loop is still searching for them. The earth is an informant.
The martial gaze demands more than passive watching. It demands action. This form of engagement refuses to wait for a threat to form. Instead, it makes the threat emerge. The enemy exists as potential, a state of possibility waiting to crystallize, to become actual. Going on the offensive starts with that potential alone. Perturb systems. Perturb environments. Perturb ecologies. Probe the darkness. One element will have to respond. That response becomes a signature. That signature becomes intelligence. A raid becomes research. A strike can kill and also provoke. Hidden things stir. Invisible things expose their architecture.
Confronted with overwhelming force, resistance moves underground, an art of staying unseen, fragile, incomplete, but sometimes enough. Underground, the usual rules change. A tunnel makes space where nothing existed. Another tunnel makes more. Each passage adds a new layer to fight over. The deeper anyone goes, the stranger it gets. More surfaces mean more places to hide, and more places to be found. Maybe the sensors miss them. Maybe the algorithms classify their warmth as wrong. Maybe, and maybe not.
Digging alone is rarely enough. Openings and airways, the breath of any shelter, need disguise too. So the hidden must build decoys: false vents, fake entrances, traps for the gaze. Two old survival strategies have returned, updated for this age of gravity surveillance, where the hunted can mobilize and weaponize them in the earth that can play a riddle against detection. The first strategy is crypsis, making a hole seem like it was never there, balancing the missing rock with heavier materials. Pump thick slurry into the ground around the tunnel. Add weight above and below. Trick the gravimeter into feeling solid where there is only empty space. The second is mimesis, making a bunker look like something natural: a dry riverbed, a cave, a lava tube, a deception carved in density, the void made to weigh something else, the shadow made to lie. Gravity shadow puppets.
But as we know, and have come to find out down here, every trick we use triggers a reaction, another data point to be learned from. We find new shadows, and the sensors evolve and discover new voids. Nothing rests. This loop does not end. But we are still here… beneath it all…