A biting into with different kinds of teeth: calcium sinks into fruit as easily as steel sinks into ground. Extraction, as much as sculpting, is understood as work that forms and reshapes the expression of and with a resource. Owing its structural properties to the cylinder as much as the bite, Caterpillar feeds off the obstacle, whether material or immaterial. The mouth is the beginning of a segmented tract that extends into cylindrical digestive systems. The machine is known as the caterpillar due to how it appears to move across the landscape, a movement that is the beginning of large-scale consumption of soils and stones that are digested by our built environment.
"They were living beings, of this I was certain: I had too much experience manipulating life forms to make that mistake. There are some movements no machine can imitate. I calculated the size of the worms: they were approximately one thousand feet long and seventy feet in diameter; they were almost perfect cylinders, with no heads or tails, although their geometric form had to be mentally reconstructed because they were coiling and twisting and changing shape as they moved across the anfractuous mountain terrain. They also looked soft and slimy, but their formidable weight could be deduced by observing them displace enormous rocks along their way, sunder the mountainside, and reduce whole trees to splinters." (César Aira, The Literary Conference, New York, New Directions Books, 2006)