On April 28, 2025, a massive blackout shut down much of Spain and Portugal. Not due to a shortage, but an excess, of renewable energy. At the time, nearly 70% of Spain’s electricity came from solar. The grid couldn’t keep up. What this exposed was more than a technical failure: it revealed how deeply our infrastructures rely on ecological forces like wind, sunlight, and terrain, while working hard to obscure that dependence.

These systems are sensitive, unstable, and rhythmic. But their volatility is made invisible by interfaces that demand smooth readability. We rarely notice wind or sun unless something breaks. The blackout was one such rupture. And yet, this volatility already surrounds us, our infrastructures are ecological, whether we recognize it or not.

Inspired by Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–1965), which made atmosphere visible through slow, silent accumulation, I built a version that doesn’t just condense—it translates. Using a DHT22 sensor and ESP32 board, my cube measures interior climate conditions and displays them on a screen. But this act of translation is not neutral. It introduces machinic priorities: “The system does not merely detect; it declares.” What was once witnessed is now reported.

This shift is not innocent. It marks a broader epistemological violence: “We live under a language dictatorship,” where what we are allowed to know, feel, or name is filtered through systems demanding legibility. The moment moisture becomes a number, something else is erased, perception is replaced with interpretation. The sensor chooses what matters, the interface structures what is visible. Even the materials, lithium, gold, tantalum, speak to a deeper extraction, made invisible by seamless design.

What is lost in this translation? What forms of attention are displaced by metrics? The real experiment is not the hardware, but the question:
How much relation are we willing to trade for legibility?
How much entanglement are we willing to erase for the illusion of control?