A Geology of Media: Jussi Parikka
A Geology of Media: Jussi Parikka
A Geology of Media: Jussi Parikka
Jussi Parikka
Parikka, Jussi.
A Geology of Media.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/39052.
[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2023 09:00 GMT from Chinese University of Hong Kong ]
A GEOLOGY OF MEDIA
Electronic Mediations
Series Editors: N. Katherine Hayles, Peter Krapp, Rita Raley, and Samuel Weber
Founding Editor: Mark Poster
46 A Geology of Media
Jussi Parikka
45 World Projects: Global Information before World War I
Markus Krajewski
44 Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound
Lori Emerson
43 Nauman Reiterated
Janet Kraynak
42 Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in
the Postprint Era
N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, Editors
41 Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World
Ulises Ali Mejias
40 Summa Technologiae
Stanisław Lem
39 Digital Memory and the Archive
Wolfgang Ernst
38 How to Do Things with Videogames
Ian Bogost
37 Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture
Peter Krapp
36 Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture
Patrick Crogan
35 Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text
Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations
Roberto Simanowski
(continued on page 207)
A
GEOLOGY
OF
MEDIA
JUSSI
PARIKKA
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Geology of Media
Jussi Parikka
Parikka, Jussi.
A Geology of Media.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/39052.
[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2023 09:00 GMT from Chinese University of Hong Kong ]
PREFACE
This iconic take from 1830 outlines geology as one of the main disciplines
of planetary inquiry, leaving the regime of morals to the humanities. It is
both an emblem of the division of labor in the academia and a genealog-
ical record that could not be more central to our concerns. The geologi-
cal manifests in earthquakes, mass extinction of species, pollution of the
globe, and the debates about the Anthropocene, which demonstrates
that morals, culture, and geology after all have something to do with each
other. The book argues that the world of thought, senses, sensation, per-
ception, customs, practices, habits, and human embodiment is not unre-
lated to the world of geological strata, climates, the earth, and the massive
durations of change that seem to mock the timescales of our petty affairs.
And yet, the human affairs have demonstrated an impact. Science and
engineering has a significant impact on the earth. The idealized object of
knowledge itself registers the observing gaze that was supposed to be at
a distance. Geoengineering is one practice of intertwined naturecultures,
vii
viii Preface
The book was finished primarily in Istanbul in 2013 and early 2014, a
city where one has a privileged view to some of the issues that we face
with technological projects and disastrous environmental consequences.
Such are often underpinned by shortsighted and just blatantly exploit-
ative violent politics. The story, and the book, was started during the
Gezi protests of summer 2013, sparked off by an environmental protest
but resonant of a wider political situation where issues of capitalism, reli-
gion, technology, knowledge, and the environment folded into a complex
historical event. Istanbul is a tectonic city, sitting on top of geological
formations promising another major earthquake in the future. It is a city
branded by massive geologically significant building projects. Some are
already ready, some are in planning. The recently opened Marmaray tun-
nel connected the two continents through a tunnel under the Bosphorus;
a canal project suggests to link the Black Sea with the Marmara Sea; a lot
of the projects are reminiscent of the national engineering of modernity
but also now the corporate capital investment in this geopolitically impor-
tant region. But the protests were also highlighting the aspects that tie
location to politics, the life of the earth with increasingly authoritarian rul-
ing powers with corporate interests in the construction business and other
businesses. The events demonstrated the impossibility of detaching the
political from the natural, the geopolitical from the geological. The short-
term political struggles had to do with political freedoms as much as with
the awareness of what would happen if some of the massive building pro-
jects, including a new airport and a third bridge, would wipe out impor-
tant parts of the forestry around Istanbul as well as creating extremely
dangerous risks to the underground water resources of the city.
This political situation and its link with capitalism was present already
in the nineteenth-century evaluation of the changing modes of produc-
tion. Of course the environmental catastrophe is not merely a capitalist
aftereffect. We should not ignore the impact “real socialism” of the twen-
tieth century left in the natural record as radioactive radiation and indus-
trial traces in soil and rivers. But there is a connection to the capitalist
intensification of modes of production with the necessity to expand into
new resource bases to guarantee growth. What we now perceive as the
environmental catastrophe at times branded as the “Anthropocene” of
human impact on the planet matches in some periodization also what
x Preface
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created
more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all
preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to
man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agricul-
ture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of
whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole popu-
lations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even
a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of
social labour?4
Parikka, Jussi.
A Geology of Media.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/39052.
[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2023 09:00 GMT from Chinese University of Hong Kong ]
1
MATERIALITY
GROUNDS OF MEDIA
AND CULTURE
The future is out there on the permafrost.
—THOMAS PYNCHON, THE BLEEDING EDGE
1
2 Materiality
our present. Media archaeology has been one field to constantly empha-
size this point.
For Kittler, media studies was never to be reduced to the play of
interpretations, semiotic connotations, or modes of representation, which
were only secondary effects, second-order phenomena. Media work on
the level of circuits, hardware, and voltage differences, which the engi-
neers as much as the military intelligence and secret agencies gradually
recognized before humanities did. This mode of argumentation ignored,
however, a wide range of politically engaged work that tried to make sense
of why media govern us humans on a semiotic level too. Such creeping
suspicions that any inclusive account of materiality definitely filtered out
many competing ones triggers the question, what is being left out? What
other modes of materiality deserve our attention? Issues of gender, sex,
embodiment, and affect? Of labor, global logistics, modes of production?
In other words, from where do our notions of materiality stem, and what
is their ground?
What if there is another level of media materialism that is not so
easily dismissed as we would think? What if media materialism is not
something that hones in on the machines only? Where do machines come
from, what composes technology in its materiality and media after it be-
comes disused, dysfunctional dead media that refuse to die? This book
is structured around the argument that there is such a thing as geology of
media: a different sort of temporal and spatial materialism of media cul-
ture than the one that focuses solely on machines or even networks of
technologies as nonhuman agencies. It echoes John Durham Peters’s point
that the axis of time and space—familiar also from the Canadian media
theory tradition of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan—is not restricted
to traditional ideas about media as devices but can refer back to cosmol-
ogy and geology: that the geological sciences and astronomy have already
opened up the idea of the earth, light, air, and time as media.4
This is a green book—in the sense of referring to the ecological con-
texts in which we should make arguments about media technological
culture—as well as a book covered in dirt and soil. Instead of leafy meta-
phors of animals, technology, and ecosystems, it insists on a particular
aspect of this relation between media and the geophysical environment.
Scholars such as Douglas Kahn have recently made the same point that
4 Materiality
Kittler’s agenda could have been more radical and continued from the
circuits to what enables hardware: the environmental contexts, questions
of energy consumption, and, one could add, the electronic waste that sur-
round our contemporary worries of what transmission, calculation, and
storage mean in a material context.5
The guiding conceptual ground of this book refers to geology: the
science about the ground beneath our feet, its history and constitution,
the systematic study of the various levers, layers, strata, and intercon-
nections that define the earth. It implies the work of geoengineering and
geotechnics as specific ways of interacting with the solidity of the earth
but also the fine measurements that relate to a wider awareness of the
environmental constitution of our lives. Hence geology is not only about
the soil, the crust, the layers that give our feet a ground on which to stum-
ble: geology is also a theme connected to the climate change as well as
the political economy of industrial and postindustrial production. It con-
nects to the wider geophysical life worlds that support the organic life
as much as the technological worlds of transmission, calculation, and
storage. Geology becomes a way to investigate materiality of the techno-
logical media world. It becomes a conceptual trajectory, a creative inter-
vention to the cultural history of the contemporary.
Geology and various related disciplines and fields of knowledge,
such as chemistry and, indeed, ecology, frame the modern world and give
it one possible scientific structure. Such disciplines are strongly implied
in the emergence of the technological and scientific culture, which feeds
to our media cultural practices. It is in this sense that I am interested in
finding strains of media materialism outside the usual definition of media:
instead of radio, I prefer to think what components and materials enable
such technologies; instead of networking, we need to remember the im-
portance of copper or optical fiber for such forms of communication;
instead of a blunt discussion of “the digital,” we need to pick it apart and
remember that also mineral durations are essential to it being such a cru-
cial feature that penetrates our academic, social, and economic interests.
Consider, then, lithium as such a premediatic media material that is essen-
tial to the existence of technological culture but also as an element that
traverses technologies. This chemical element (Li) and metal is essential
for laptop batteries as well as future green technologies (again, battery
Materiality 5
of deep time to media art discourse has offered a way to think and oper-
ate like a geologist of media art culture. For Zielinski, this concept has
been a way to bypass the short-term “psychopathological” capitalist
media discourse to understand that the interactions between media, art,
and science have long roots. Indeed, Zielinski was after ways of modu-
lating seeing and hearing before we historically rather recently thought
to call them media.16
In stories of inventions by Empedocles, Athanasius Kircher, and many
others, Zielinski uncovers the layered history that offers a way to engage
with the past that is suddenly animated in front of our eyes and more
alive than the repetitious advertising-based digital media innovations.
Zielinski’s deep time is a methodology that bypasses the narrative of defi-
nite origins and is interested in the quirky variations within media his-
tory. There is an archaeological urge to dig out the uncovered, the sur-
prising, the anomalous, and in Zielinski’s hands, this digging takes on the
geological and paleontological concepts. But what if this notion based in
geological time needs further radicalization? Indeed, what if we should
think more along the lines of Manuel Delanda’s proposition of thousands
of years of nonlinear history and expand to a geology of media art history:
thousands, millions of years of “history” of rocks, minerals, geophysics,
atmospheric durations, earth times, which are the focus of past decades of
intensive epistemological inquiry and practical exploitation as resources—
things we dig from the (under)ground, the harnessing of the atmosphere
and the sky for signal transmissions, the outer space for satellites and
even space junk, as a new extended geological “layer” that circles our
planet, like Trevor Paglen reminds us in his photographic performance/
installation The Last Pictures, which takes place in the orbit around the
Earth17 (see Figure 1; see also chapter 5). If the emergence of industrial-
ization since the nineteenth century and the molding of the environment
with mines, smelting facilities, and sulfur dioxide from coal energy was
addressed by poets who either in adoring ways or critically narrativized
the dramatic aesthetic and ecological change, our contemporary techno-
logical arts do similar work, although often also engaging directly with
the material world of geophysics in their practice.
This geophysical media world manifests itself in contemporary arts.
This book covers examples of projects from Paglen to microresearchlab
Materiality 9
and techniques. Such are earth’s tenants, and yet effectively contributing
to the way in which the planet is being seen, used, and modified. We need
to be aware how carefully grafted concepts are able to catch the variety of
practices that work across traditional disciplines and connect issues of
nature and culture. The effect of the planet earth as seen from space since
late 1960s space travel started demonstrates how visual media contribute
to scientific concepts. The planetary vision—of a holistic organism as
much as an object of military and scientific technologies of transporta-
tion and visualization—was part of why scientists from James Lovelock
to Lynn Margulis contributed to the wider discussions of feedback mech-
anisms. But it also signaled a shift from James Hutton’s Theory of the
Earth (1788) to media of the earth, executed by means of technologies
and media—of visualization techniques revealing the earthrise from the
moon but also the galaxy from new perspectives. What’s more, the trip
to the moon included the Apollo lunar module bringing back geological
samples,25 a dream not altogether disappeared: the promise of mining
helium-3 important for another energy revolution could be seen only as
a natural continuation of the planetary politics of nation-states and cor-
porations such as Google into interplanetary dimensions.26 Such specu-
lative accounts have even spoken of Russian moon colonies established
by 2030 as part of the current geopolitical race for resources.27
The mediated vision turned back on the earth itself was instrumental
to a whole new range of social and scientific agendas. Visions of the earth
from the moon since the 1960s but also the technological gaze toward
deep space with Hubble were never just about space and its interplane-
tary objects but as much about mapping such entities as part of the cor-
porate and national interest. Geographical surveys benefited from the
developed lenses and image processing of satellite-enabled remote sens-
ing.28 The perspective back to the globe has prompted the existence of
corporate maps such as Google Earth and a massive military surveillance
system too. And in ecological contexts, it enabled a way to capture the
Gaia concept’s force as a way to understand the various layers where the
biological and the geophysical mix. In Bruce Clarke’s words,
give a sense of the dynamics of the sky;33 geology is an excavation into the
earth and its secrets that affords a view not only to the now-moment that
unfolds into a future potential of exploitation but also to the past buried
under our feet. Depth becomes time. A tape recorder tracks the slow roar
of the earthquake—like already in the 1950s practices of measurement,
fascinating in regard to the effects of nuclear detonations as well as earth-
quake trembles, making them a media object: “Through the tape recorder,
earthquakes and explosions became portable and repeatable.”34 In some
ways, we can also say that this means the portability and repeatability of
the Real: the geophysical that becomes registered through the ordering of
media reality.35
And conversely, it is the earth that provides for media and enables it:
the minerals, materials of(f ) the ground, the affordances of its geophysi-
cal reality that make technical media happen. Besides the logic of order-
ing, we have the materiality of the uncontained, and the providing, that is
constantly in tension with the operations of framing. This double bind—
which I call the sphere of medianatures—is the topic of this book, with a
special focus on geology and the geophysical.
Despite some references, I am not really opting for the Heidegger-
ian route, however useful his comments on standing reserve and order-
ing might be. Instead, medianatures is a variation on Donna Haraway’s
famous and influential concept of naturecultures.36 The term is for Har-
away a way to understand the inherently interconnected nature of the
two terms that in Cartesian ontology were separated across the field of
the infamous binaries: nature versus culture, mind versus matter, and
so on. In Haraway’s terms, we are dealing with a more entangled set of
practices in which it is impossible to decipher such spheres separately.
Instead, naturecultures implies the ontological need to take into account
the co-constituted relationships in which
none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never
done once and for all. Historical specificity and contingent mutability
rule all the way down, into nature and culture, into naturecultures.37
The Anthrobscene
The Anthropocene is one of the leading concepts that brought a geolog-
ical awareness to climate change discussions of the past years and
decades. Suggested by the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Paul J. Crutzen
more than ten years ago45 and preceded more informally by Eugene Sto-
ermer in the 1980s, the term is a sort of placeholder for the contemporary
moment that stretches from the 1700s or the 1800s to the current time. It
performs this cartography from a geological perspective, which argues
for a sort of a holistic but analytical view to the changes in our life world.
Following the Holocene, the accepted term for the geological period of
the past ten thousand to twelve thousand years, the Anthropocene refers
to the massive changes human practices, technologies, and existence
Materiality 17
Figure 2. “Capital and Labour, Cartoon, No. V.” A satirical image from 1843 in Punch
(volume 5) underlines the ontology of labor as one of underground: capitalism works in the
depths to find an infrastructural level that sustains the pleasant consumerized life above
the ground and yet stays invisible. Reprinted with permission of Punch magazine.
have brought across the ecological board. The concept, which is not sci-
entifically universally accepted,46 takes aboard the cross-species and eco-
logical ties human activity has been developing: the concept speaks to the
relations with other animals—for instance, domestication of the dog—and
the various techniques of living, primarily agriculture and fire, which have
had massive influence over thousands of years. But the Anthropocene—or
the Anthrobscene, to use a provocative combination of the term with the
addition of a qualifying “obscene”47—starts to crystallize as a systematic
relation to the carboniferous: the layers of photosynthesis that gradually
were being used for heating and then as energy sources for manufacture
in the form of fossil fuels. In China, the use of coal and the emergence of
significant coal mines go back to the Song Dynasty (960–1279), only later
followed up by key centers such as in England.48 More significantly, the
move from local and regional use of such resources emerges with industri-
alization and the triangulation of fossil fuels as energy source, technology,
18 Materiality
and wealth creation related to the new capitalist order. The economic
order was from its start an energetic one, reliant on the slowly accumu-
lated resources of coal, oil, and gas. Fossil fuels such as oil were essential
for the smoother and quicker planetary movement of energy compared to
coal. In this sense, globalization, too, as a form of transported planetar-
ization, has been based on logistics of energy.49 In short, one could claim
that capitalism had its necessary (but not sufficient) conditions in a new
relation with deep times and chemical processes of photosynthesis:
At the same time, the story of capital, the contingent history of our
falling into the Anthropocene, cannot be denied by recourse to the
idea of species, for the Anthropocene would not have been possi-
ble, even as a theory, without the history of industrialization.56
The stories we tell imply more than just their words; they tell sto-
ries of media and mediation, of materiality and the earth. The stories are
themselves of a scale of geological durations that are at first too slow
to comprehend. This demands an understanding of a story that is radi-
cally different from the usual meaning of storytelling with which we usu-
ally engage in the humanities. This story is more likely to contain fewer
words and more a-signifying semiotic matter57 that impose a presence
especially in the current era of crisis to which we refer as the climate
change.
Concepts in crisis seek to make sense of change while signposting
the necessity for different vocabularies.58 Hence use of surprising per-
spectives as well as provocations is needed, as is the work of concepts
that travel across disciplines.59 One implicit concept behind this book is
Materiality 21
Thus the earth is not an object containing its ground within itself, like
the preformationists’ animal series; but rather a series or process of
grounding with respect to its consequents. If geology, or the “mining
process,” opens onto an ungroundedness at the core of any object,
this is precisely because there is no “primal layer of the world,” no
“ultimate substrate” or substance on which everything ultimately
rests. The lines of serial dependency, stratum upon stratum, that
geology uncovers do not rest on anything at all, but are the records
of actions antecedent in the production of consequents.67
nomad science that contrasts with the form-seeking Royal Science that
extracts constants and categories from its observations. The metallurgist
is a figure of someone who “follows the flow of matter”70 and invests in
giving a reality to the variations and potentials in the object. Metal is the
privileged example and is inspiring to such vital materialists as Bennett
because of its seemingly stable solidity, which, however, is in metallurgist
perspective and practice revealed as teeming with material potentials
that can be teased out in different constellations, temperatures, and con-
ditions; this applies to the atomic level, where a metallurgist has a prac-
tical “know-how” relation to metal that applies to the wider role metals
play in cultural assemblages as nonhuman agents.71 Hence, to follow Ben-
nett’s adaptation of Deleuze and Guattari’s ethological idea about bodies
defined by their unfolding potential, where “ethology” refers to experi-
mental relationality, “the desire of the craftsperson to see what a metal
can do, rather than the desire of the scientist to know what a metal is,
enabled the former to discern a life in metal and thus, eventually, to col-
laborate more productively with it.”72
This stance should not be confused with a practice–theory division.
Indeed, I want to insist that there is a metallurgical way of conducting
theoretical work: ambulant flows, transversal connections, and teasing
out the materiality of matter in new places, in new assemblages of cul-
tural life in contemporary technological media.
The cartography of geocentric cultural theory is definitely not only
about philosophical references. From the James Hutton of The Theory
of the Earth to philosophy (Hegel, Schelling, and contemporary specula-
tive realist discussions involving Grant, Graham Harman, and Steven
Shaviro), we can also move toward the media geological contexts, which
this book tackles. Despite references to the ongoing debates in theory,
this book does not attempt to create a primarily philosophical argument;
more accurately, it argues the case for a geology of media that tries to pin
down the often rather broad notion of “nonhuman” agency to some case
studies concerning the assemblages in which the grounds of media are
ungrounded through the actual geologies of mining, materiality, and the
ecosophic quest becoming also geosophic.
Indeed, the earth of media finds itself displaced from geography to
geophysics. This is why Pynchon’s latest book, The Bleeding Edge (2013),
24 Materiality
The Chapters
The chapters of this book are strata themselves. They stratify and con-
dense themes that intertwine and build on each other as dynamic appa-
ratuses mobilizing different sorts of material: historical sources, theory,
and, importantly, references to contemporary media art projects and
practices.
One could call this approach a media history of matter: the differ-
ent components, minerals, metals, chemicals, and other things involved
in media are considered as essential to media history and archaeology.
Media technologies can be understood as a long story of experimenting
with different materials—from glass plates to chemicals, from selenium
to silicon, from coltan to rare earth minerals, from dilute sulfuric acid to
shellac silk, different crystals in telegraphic receivers, and gutta-percha
for insulation in earlier transatlantic wired communication. Also Mum-
ford notes this in his analysis of the emergence of modern materiality of
technology: technological phases, or “epistemes” as Foucault might have
it, are themselves functions of the ways in which materials and energy are
channeled, appropriated, and exploited:
Just as one associates the wind and water power of the eotech-
nic economy with the use of wood and glass, and the coal of the
paleotechnic period with iron, so does electricity bring into wide
industrial use its own specific materials: in particular, the new alloys,
26 Materiality
the rare earths, and the lighter materials. At the same time, it cre-
ates a new series of synthetic compounds that supplement paper,
glass and wood: celluloid, vulcanite, Bakelite and the synthetic res-
ins, with special properties of unbreakability, electrical resistance,
imperviousness to acids, or elasticity.77
help of media arts and design projects to the other stuff of media materi-
alism: the metals, minerals, and chemicals in which we can develop the
aforementioned ecosophical and geosophical perspective.
This book aims to take up these issues in five main chapters. This
chapter acted as a theoretical introduction to the context and the issues.
In the next chapter, I focus on deep times. The concept has already been
effectively used by Siegfried Zielinski in his take on the paleontology and
geology of media arts, but my point is to remind of the need for an alter-
native deep time. In this account, we take deep times more literally and
look at geology of media in and through the mines and (un)grounds.
The third chapter follows suit and continues developing specific aes-
thetic concepts for the geophysical media world. It picks up on the idea
of psychogeophysics—a version of the Situationist psychogeography—
and offers a radical aesthetics of the media technological world that maps
the relations between subjectivity, capitalism, and the earth in long-term
durations and geophysical assemblages. In the chapter, we focus on proj-
ects by the Berlin and London–placed microresearchlab, Martin Howse’s
earthcomputing, and the Crystal World project by Kemp, Jordan, and
Howse: speculative media arts that addresses in assays and technological
assemblages the substrate as part of our media systems.
Running through the book is the aim to talk about the variety of
materialisms and temporalities of media. In the fourth chapter, I address
these themes through a nonhuman particle: dust. Dust is carried forward
as a rhetorical device too, mobilizing the entangled materialities of global
labor and residue materialism. Dust is found as residue of polished iPads
as well as attached to workers’ lungs from coal mines to contemporary fac-
tories of information technology. The art projects by Yokokoji–Harwood
(YoHa; from the United Kingdom) are good examples of addressing this
notion of residue, from coal to aluminum. They reveal an alternative side
to the discourse of cognitive capitalism: the world of hardwork and hard-
ware that persists as a defining factor of digital media culture.
Chapter 5 picks up on (media) fossils. The paleontological insight
to the history of the planet might put special interest on fossils, but sim-
ilarly it is a figure that one finds resurfacing in Walter Benjamin’s analy-
sis of advanced capitalism as well as in contemporary projects such as
Grégory Chatonsky’s art and Trevor Paglen’s extension of the geophysical
28 Materiality
Parikka, Jussi.
A Geology of Media.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/39052.
[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2023 09:00 GMT from Chinese University of Hong Kong ]
2
AN ALTERNATIVE DEEP
TIME OF THE MEDIA
They penetrated to the bowels of earth and dug up wealth, bad
cause of all our ills.
— OVID, METAMORPHOSES
29
30 An Alternative Deep Time of the Media
something else. The earth is alive, and that this vitality can be proved with
experimental means was actually the true objective of Challenger’s mis-
sion. Instead of drilling and mining for petroleum, coal, copper, iron ore,
and other valuables for which men usually dig holes in the ground, Chal-
lenger’s mission is driven by a desire to prove a new speculative position
that concerns the living depths of the earth: beyond the strata of “sallow
lower chalk, the coffee-coloured Hastings beds, the lighter Ashburnham
beds, the dark carboniferous clays, and . . . gleaning in the electric light,
band after band of jet-black, sparkling coal alternative with the rings of
clay,”7 one finds the layers, which did not adhere to the classical geologi-
cal theories of Hutton or Lyell. It seemed suddenly as if undeniable that
even nonorganic matter is alive: “The throbs were not direct, but gave the
impression of a gentle ripple or rhythm, which ran across the surface,”8
Mr. Jones describes the deep surface they found. “The surface was not
entirely homogenous but beneath it, seen as through ground glass, there
were dim whitish patches or vacuoles, which varied constantly in shape
and size.”9 The whole layers, the core and the strata, throbbed, pulsated,
and animated. It should not even be necessary to go to similar lengths
as Professor Challenger does, in one of the most bizarre rapelike scenes
in literature, when he penetrates that jellyesque layer just to make the
earth scream. This scientific sadism echoes in the ears of the audience
and much further. It is the sound of “a thousand of sirens in one, paralyz-
ing all the great multitude with its fierce insistence, and floating away
through the still summer air until it went echoing along the whole South
Coast and even reach our French neighbors across the Channel.”10 All
this was observed and witnessed by an audience called by the professor—
peers and interested international crowd, by invitation only.
The interest for “the bowels of the earth”11 was not restricted to
the writing of fiction and the vibrant language of Conan Doyle return-
ing merely to the scientific discourse of geophysics. Professor Challenger
was predated by nineteenth-century fiction characters, like Heinrich in
Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800/1802) asking, “Is it possible
that beneath our feet a world of its own is stirring in a great life?”12 The
poetic thrust toward the living, pulsating earth opened it up: for coal, for
minerals, for precious material. Jules Verne’s Les Indes Noires (1887; The
Black Indies) told the story of an exhausted coal mine where, however, a
An Alternative Deep Time of the Media 33
Figure 3. The underground became both a poetic and an engineered realm of technology,
from romanticism to twentieth-century industrialization. The mines never disappeared
but persist as effective geological scars even in advanced technological culture. Bingham
Canyon copper mine in Utah, Rio Tinto, Kennecott Utah Copper Corp. Photograph by
Spencer Musik.
34 An Alternative Deep Time of the Media
from being a society that until the mid-twentieth century was based on
a very restricted list of materials (“wood, brick, iron, copper, gold, silver,
and a few plastics”20) to the fact that even a computer chip is composed
of “60 different elements.”21 Such lists of metals and materials of technol-
ogy include critical materials, including rare earth minerals that are in-
creasingly at the center of both global political controversies of tariffs and
export restrictions from China. They are also related to the debates con-
cerning the environmental damage caused by extensive open-pit mining
massively reliant on chemical processes. Indeed, if the actual rock mined
is likely to contain less than 1 percent of copper,22 it means that the pres-
sure is on the chemical processes of teasing out the Cu for further refined
use in our technological devices.
The figures about metals of media seem astounding but testify to
another materiality of technology that links with Conan Doyle but also
with contemporary media arts discourse of the deep time of the earth.
However, I will move on from Professor Challenger to Siegfried Zielinski,
the German media studies professor, and his conceptualization of deep
times of media art histories. In short, and what I shall elaborate in more
detail soon, the figure of the deep time is for Zielinski a sort of a media
archaeological gesture that, though borrowing from paleontology, actually
turns out to be a riff to understanding the longer-term durations of art and
science collaboration in Western and non-Western contexts. However,
I want to argue that there is a need for a more literal understanding and
mobilization of deep times—in terms of both depth and temporality—
in media technological discourse and in relation to media art histories
too. Professor Challenger is here to provide the necessary, even if slightly
dubious, point about geological matter as living: this sort of a media his-
tory is of a speculative kind in terms of referring to a completely different
time scale than usually engaged with in terms of our field. It borrows
from the idea of dynamics of nonlinear history that Manuel Delanda so
inspirationally mapped in terms of genes, language, and geology but which,
in this case, can be approached even more provocatively as not just thou-
sands but millions and billions of years of nonlinear stratified media his-
tory.23 Media history conflates with earth history; the geological materials
of metals and chemicals gets deterritorialized from their strata and reter-
ritorialized in machines that define our technical media culture.
36 An Alternative Deep Time of the Media
that materiality of media starts much before media become media. Sec-
ond, in a parallel fashion, we need to be able to discuss the media that
are not anymore media. This is the other pole of media materiality that is
less high tech and more defined by obsolescence:27 the mined rare earth
minerals essential to computers and in general advanced technology
industries from entertainment to the military, as well as, for instance, the
residue products from the processes of fabrication, like the minuscule
aluminum dust residue released from polishing iPad cases to be desirably
shiny for the consumer market28 (see chapter 4).
the layers of granite, you find further strata of slate signaling the exis-
tence of deep temporalities. Hutton is proposing a radical immensity of
time, although it comes without a promise of change; all is predeter-
mined as part of a bigger cycle of erosion and growth.31 Despite his use of
terms such as continual succession for time of the earth and its geological
cycles discovered in its strata (the reading of strata, “stratigraphy”), time
of immense durations does not, however, change in the historical fash-
ion. More specifically, and in Hutton’s words,
His theory posited that the earth was constantly restoring itself.
He based this concept on a fundamental cycle: erosion of the pres-
ent land, followed by the deposition of eroded grains (or dead
ocean organisms) on the sea floor, followed by the consolidation of
those loose particles into sedimentary rock, followed by the raising
of those rocks to form new land, followed by erosion of the new
land, followed by a complete repeat of the cycle, over and over
again. Hutton was also the first to recognize the profound impor-
tance of subterranean heat, the phenomenon that causes volca-
noes, and he argued that it was the key to the uplifting of formerly
submerged land.33
An Alternative Deep Time of the Media 39
Figure 4. A lithograph featuring a visualization of geology through the ages of the earth
and details of types of stone. Colored lithograph by Bethmont, 1911, after himself.
Wellcome Library, London.
40 An Alternative Deep Time of the Media
But this is exactly where Zielinski also departs. Paradoxically, the inspira-
tion of Hutton (and one should remember that he was only one of the
geotheorists working on this topic in his time) goes both toward the uni-
versalizing and standardizing logic of the industrial factory system and
toward Zielinski’s exactly opposite account of variantology that, however,
finds a different tune with Stephen Jay Gould. Indeed, through Gould,
Zielinski is able to carve out a more detailed account of what the geolog-
ical idea affords to media art history and media analysis as variantology.
To achieve this, Zielinski has to turn from Hutton to more contempo-
rary readings of geology and paleontology. Zielinski picks up on Gould’s
paleontological explanations and ideas that emphasize the notion of
variation. It is in Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle that Zielinski finds a
suitable account for a critique of progress in media culture. As a reader of
Gould, Zielinski notes that the quantifying notion of deep time is itself
renewed with a qualitative characteristic that produces a critique of myths
of progress, which present a linear imagination of the world. Both discover
the necessity to abandon divinity from the cosmological picture, whether
one of the earth or the media. Instead, one has to develop such images,
metaphors, and iconography that do not reproduce illusions of linear
progress “from lower to higher, from simple to complex.”44 A resurging
emphasis on diversity takes the place of the too neatly stacked historical
layers.
Without going too much into the geologic debates, we need to under-
stand how Gould’s note itself is based on his arguments against uniformi-
tarianism. Gould’s argument for the “punctuated equilibrium” is targeted
against the false assumption of continuity of a uniform evolution that
persisted in the various geological and evolutionary accounts for a long
time. It includes Lyell’s views as much as Darwin’s beliefs.45 The series
of arguments and academic discussion Gould started together with his
cowriter Niles Eldredge stems from the early 1970s and included, besides
a new way of approaching the fossil record, also a different sort of an
understanding of the temporal ontology of geology.46 In short, against
the view that one can read a slow evolutionary change from the geologi-
cal records, which at times are with gaps and missing parts, one has to
approach this “archive” in a different way. This imaginary starts already
in the nineteenth century: processes of transmission and recording are
42 An Alternative Deep Time of the Media
of geology and the earth’s resources was the political economic function
of this emerging epistemology. This is where the archaeological and geo-
logical interests of knowledge reveal the other sides of the deep times as
exposing the earth as part of new connections. Indeed, the knowledge of
the planet through geological specimens (demonstrated, for instance, in
Diderot and D’Alembert’s “Mineral Loads or Veins and Their Bearings” in
volume 6 of l’Éncylopedie, 1768) and its newly understood history meant
a new relation between aesthetics and the sciences. This link is also ben-
eficial for new ways of extracting value: “As a result of eighteenth-century
archeological and antiquarian activities, the earth acquired a new percep-
tual depth, facilitating the conceptualization of the natural as immanent
history, and of the earth’s materials as resources that could be extracted
just like archeological artifacts.”52
The media theoretical deep time divides into two related directions:
waste and in general scrap metals, necessary for the booming urban
building projects and industrial growth.
Adam Minter’s journalistic report Junkyard Planet offers a different
story of hard metals and work and looks at the issue from the perspective
of geology of scrap metals.61 China is one of the key destinations not only
for electronic waste but for scrap metals in general, offering a different
insight to the circulation of what we still could call geology of technolo-
gies. China’s demand for materials is huge. Part of the country’s continu-
ing major construction projects from buildings to subways to airports
was the need to be able to produce—or reprocess—more metals: scrap
copper, aluminum, steel, and so on:
On the other side of the mall, in all directions, are dozens of new
high-rises—all under construction—that weren’t visible from the sub-
way and my walk. Those new towers reach 20 and 30 stories, and
they’re covered in windows that require aluminum frames, filled with
bathrooms accessorized with brass and zinc fixtures, stocked with
stainless steel appliances, and—for the tech-savvy households—
outfitted with iPhones and iPads assembled with aluminum backs.
No surprise, China leads the world in the consumption of steel,
copper, aluminum, lead, stainless steel, gold, silver, palladium, zinc,
platinum, rare earth compounds, and pretty much anything else
labeled “metal.” But China is desperately short of metal resources
of its own. For example, in 2012 China produced 5.6 million tons of
copper, of which 2.75 million tons was made from scrap. Of that
scrap copper, 70 percent was imported, with most coming from the
United States. In other words, just under half of China’s copper sup-
ply is imported as scrap metal. That’s not a trivial matter: Copper,
more than any other metal, is essential to modern life. It is the
means by which we transmit power and information.
of this dead media pile, of which only 25 percent was collected for any sort
of actual management and recycling in 2009. The amount of operational
electronics discarded annually is one sort of geologically significant pile
that entangles first, second, and third nature:65 the communicational
vectors of advanced digital technologies come with a rather direct link to
and impact on first natures, reminding that the contemporary reliance on
swift communicational transactions is reliant on this aspect of hardware
too. Communicational events are sustained by the broader aspects of
geology of media. They include technologies abandoned and consisting
of hazardous material: lead, cadmium, mercury, barium, and so on.
National, supranational, and nongovernmental organizational bod-
ies are increasingly forced to think the future of media and information
technologies as something “below the turf.” This means both a focus on
the policies and practices of e-waste as one of the crucial areas of con-
cern and planning toward raw material extraction and logistics to ensure
supply. As the preceding short mention of scrap metal China illustrated,
Figure 5. The April 2014 excavation in Alamogordo, New Mexico, of the 1983 abandoned
and buried Atari games became a widely publicized form of “media archaeology,” with
connotations relating it to the much bigger problem of dumping electronic waste and
the residuals of game and electronic culture in heaps of rubbish. Photograph by Taylor
Hatmaker.
50 An Alternative Deep Time of the Media
the usual practices of mining are not considered the only route for a
future geology of media. In any case, the future geo(physical)politics of
media circulate around China, Russia, Brazil, Congo, and, for instance,
South Africa as key producers of raw materials. It connects to a realiza-
tion that the materiality of information technology starts from the soil
and the underground. Miles and miles of crust opened up in drilling.
This depth marks the passage from the mediasphere to the lithosphere.
An increasing amount of critical materials are found only by going down
deeper into the crust or otherwise difficult-to-reach areas. Offshore oil
drilling is an example, in some cases in rather peculiar circumstances
and depths: the Tupi deposits of oil off the coast of Brazil, beneath one and
a half miles of water and another two and a half miles of compressed salt,
sand, and rock;66 new methods of penetrating rocks, fracturing them,
or of steam-assisted cavity drainage; deep sea mining by countries such
as China; and the list could be continued. Corporations such as Chevron
boast with mining depth records—tens of thousands of feet under the
ocean bottom67—in search for oil and minerals. Suddenly an image comes
to mind, one familiar from an earlier part of this chapter: Professor Chal-
lenger’s quest to dig deeper inside the living crust that is alive.
Depth becomes not only an index of time but also a resource in the
fundamental sense of Martin Heidegger’s standing-reserve: technology
reveals nature in ways that can turn it into a resource. For Heidegger, the
writer of trees, rivers, and forest paths, the River Rhein turns from Höld-
erlin’s poetic object into a technological construct effected in the assem-
blage of the new hydroelectric plant. The question of energy becomes a
way of defining the river and, in Heideggerian terms, transforming it:
weird narrative mix of paranoia, conspiracy, and mental states. The V-2
rocket motivated insights into technology, and science as an essential
part of power relations inspired Kittler and a range of other scholars in
Germany and internationally. In Against the Day, the theme is similar,
but with a focus on light, optics, and chemistry, where especially the lat-
ter is what connects to our need to understand media history through its
materials. It is an account that persists from the early histories of pho-
tography, such as geologist–photographer W. Jerome Harrison’s History
of Photography (1887), which, if you read it through the perspective of
geology of media, becomes a story of chemicals instead of merely the
inventor–experimenters such as Niepce, Daguerre, or Talbot: bitumen
(in lithography); tin or, for instance, iodide; lactates and nitrates of silver;
carbon processes; uranium nitrates; and chlorides of gold.81 The history
of technical media is constantly being reenacted in different ways in
contemporary media arts. For photochemical artists, getting their hands
dirty with gelatin and silver nitrates, this is part of the artistic methodology
infused in chemistry: cyanotypes’ aesthetic effect comes down to chemi-
cals (ammonium iron [III] citrate and potassium ferricyanide). A film
artist with a media archaeological bent knows the amount of combina-
tion needed in testing and experimenting with chemicals or materials.82
But this knowledge is more of the sort a metallurgist might hold than a
scientist: experimentation in dosage and practice-based learning of the
materials’ characteristics.83
In Pynchon’s own version of media materialism and optical media,
the list of objects constitutes a sort of a pre–media technological media
materialism, a list of voluntary or involuntary participants in the process
of technical imaging circa the nineteenth century:
After going through all the possible silver compounds, Merle moved
on to salts of gold, platinum, copper, nickel, uranium, molybdenum,
and antimony, abandoning metallic compounds after a while for
resins, squashed bugs, coal-tar dyes, cigar smokes, wildflower
extracts, urine from various critters including himself, reinvesting
what little money came in from portrait work into lenses, filters,
glass plates, enlarging machines, so that soon the wagon was just a
damn rolling photography lab.84
56 An Alternative Deep Time of the Media
Besides the object worlds with which the narrative continues—a world
a speculative realist might call “flat,”85 including a litany from humans to
lampposts to trolley dynamos and flush toilets—so much has already
happened on the level of chemical reactions. In other words, the media
devices are not the only aspects of “materialism,” but we are as interested
in questions of what enables and sustains media to become media.
In this sort of perspective of deep time geologies and chemistries
of media, one cannot avoid at least a brief mention of the long history of
alchemy. Isn’t it exactly the lineage of alchemy that is of relevance here?
It has meant imbuing a special force to the natural elements and their
mixes, from base to precious: from realgar, sulfur, white arsenic, cinna-
bar, and especially mercury to gold, lead, copper, silver, and iron.86 The
history of alchemy is steeped in poetic narratives that present their own
versions of sort of deep times (e.g., in pre-Christian Chinese alchemy87)
as well as occupying a position between arts and sciences.88 In a way, as
Newman notes, alchemy prepared much of later technological culture in
its own experimental way. Developers included a variety of such cases:
Avicenna with his De congelatione (at one point mistaken for a writing by
Aristotle) and scholastic writers such as Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus
Magnus, and Roger Bacon are main examples of early-thirteenth-century
practitioners. In Vincent’s Speculum doctrinale, written between 1244
and 1250, one gets a sense of alchemy as a “science of minerals,” a sort
of practice-based excavation into their transmutational qualities. In Vin-
cent’s words, alchemy “is properly the art of transmuting mineral bodies,
such as metals and the like, from their own species to others.”89
In Against the Day, Pynchon presents his own condensed narrative
prose lineage from alchemy to modern chemistry and technical media.
According to his way of crystallizing the chemistry of technological cul-
ture, this transformation in knowledge and practices of materials corre-
sponds to the birth of capitalism, which is characterized by a regulariza-
tion of processes of material reaction and metamorphosis. In Against the
Day, a dialogue between two characters, Merle and Webb, reveals some-
thing important about this turning point from alchemy to modern science:
“But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming
in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets
going. Strange, eh? What do you make of that?”
An Alternative Deep Time of the Media 57
Parikka, Jussi.
A Geology of Media.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/39052.
[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2023 09:00 GMT from Chinese University of Hong Kong ]
3
PSYCHOGEOPHYSICS OF
TECHNOLOGY
The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the
sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade
the rational order, and social structures which confine art. In order to
read the rocks we must become conscious of geologic time, and of
the layers of prehistoric material that is entombed in the Earth’s
crust. When one scans the ruined sites of pre-history one sees a
heap of wrecked maps that upsets our present art historical limits.
— ROBERT SMITHSON
59
60 Psychogeophysics of Technology
Depth means time, but it also means heat. Deep down is the hot core.
The internal heat is one of life that melts the gravel, sand, and other for-
mations under the seabed and consolidates them into rock, to paraphrase
Rudwick.2 The solids are end results of long processes of a natural histor-
ical kind. And yet, it is history, but in the sense Manuel Delanda pitches
as a sort of a new materialist metaphysics of metallic affects: metals have
to be accounted as chemical catalysts.3 However, they do not catalyze only
chemical reactions but social, political, economic, and, indeed, media
technological ones too.
The previous chapter outlined some ideas for an alternative deep
time of the media. It was a start at least. My suggestion in this book is
to excavate this deep layer of media technologies that, besides connota-
tions of depth (the reality of mines as essential to existence of contempo-
rary technological culture), points toward temporalities: the rethinking
of what media historical times count as part of our analysis—the long-
term durations of geological formations, of mineralization across mil-
lions of years, as well as the millions of years of decomposition of fossils
to form the fossil fuel layers essential for the modern technological world.
We also have to account for the effects on the climate in broadest terms
and the way in which media technologies play a double role. This double
role is articulated as follows:
This chapter develops these themes, but with a special connection to art
methods and aesthetics. Indeed, this is again characteristic of the just
mentioned double bind; the enabling aesthetics of even being able to talk
Psychogeophysics of Technology 61
about such scales as “the climate” or even its change on a geological time
scale; and the aesthetics of this change as a form of critique that inter-
venes in and feeds off from the geophysical. This chapter introduces one
of the main concepts of the book: psychogeophysics. This concept and
an art practice or a mix of methods is an expansion of the psychogeo-
graphical familiar from the Situationist vocabulary. Psychogeophysics
argues that we need to extend beyond the focus on the urban sphere
to the geophysical for a more fundamental understanding of the modula-
tion of the subject that is stretched between ecologies of capitalism and
those of the earth. This discussion of aesthetics as a pertinent revamp-
ing of Situationism—here a nod is in place to McKenzie Wark’s recent
years of highlighting the relevancy of Situationist theorists, practices, and
themes with a particular eye to some of its neglected figures6—is taken to
a rather extreme direction that talks about geophysics and media tech-
nologies in connection.
The chapter discusses the psychogeophysical “manifesto” (published
in Mute magazine) as an extended “Situationism” of the geophysical
media arts.7 In this context, the conceptual discussion is connected to
some recent art and hacktivist projects, which engage with the provo-
cative concept. Such projects include Martin Howse’s Earthbooth and
Florian Dombois’s Earthquake sonification but also other relevant takes
that address earth durations, sounds, and sensations.
Psychogeophysical Dérives
Questions of aesthetics unfold in a different way if you start to ask them
from a nonhuman perspective. A question of aesthetics—as a question not
necessarily of art and its value but of perception and sensation—unfolds
in alternative ways when considering animals. In literature, Josephine the
singing mouse (in Franz Kafka’s short story) is one curious story of such
fictitious animal worlds and aesthetic appreciation, but in biology and
experimental psychology, it is a matter of measurable temporal rates and
thresholds of perception. The rates of perception of different animals
are so very different from the human senses: it is not cognitively or affec-
tively easily accessible how a bird perceives, a fish senses sound, or a
bee is embedded in a different world of color sensations. This brings
the question from philosophy of aesthetics to the fields of physiology and
62 Psychogeophysics of Technology
The text continues to attack the “INMB (In My Back Yard) region-
alism and general lack of ambition to look beyond the city and beyond
the contemporary” that is seen as characteristic of the psychogeo-
graphical bias. After all, to adopt the tone of the Summit’s manifesto of
psychogeophysics,
66 Psychogeophysics of Technology
Earth Computing as
Psychogeophysic Cartography
Kahn’s natural history of media (arts) resonates with the focus of psycho-
geophysics, although the latter is a rather more unruly practice-based
endeavor. In the midst of the Anthropocene discussions and ongoing
Psychogeophysics of Technology 73
Figure 7. Jonathan Kemp, Crystal World v. 2.0, 2012. Various precipitation products,
including sulfates and phosphates, after the continuous cycling for six weeks of weak
acid–Grand Union Canal water over an installation of computer junk and rock ores.
Courtesy of the artist.
Viral code refers in this context less to work of software agents than
to the substrate.60 In art historical terms, Howse’s contribution to psycho-
geophysics draws also on Smithson’s earth arts and the 1960s discourse
of geophysics in the visual arts. The Earthcodes project refers directly to
Smithson, but the link is rather evident anyway. The entry of metals as
well as chemical processes to the art studio highlights both the use of
materials of geological and ecological significance and also, importantly,
78 Psychogeophysics of Technology
Figure 8. Martin Howse’s Earthboot rematerializes land art and Smithson’s abstract
geology in the computer age: it constructs a speculative interface to use earth’s electricity
to boot an alternative computer operating system. Courtesy of the artist.
Psychogeophysics of Technology 79
Parikka, Jussi.
A Geology of Media.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/39052.
[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2023 09:01 GMT from Chinese University of Hong Kong ]
4
DUST AND THE
EXHAUSTED LIFE
Each particle of dust carries with it a unique vision of matter, move-
ment, collectivity, interaction, affect, differentiation, composition,
and infinite darkness.
— REZA NEGARESTANI, CYCLONOPEDIA
I used to live in the north. Even southern Finland had its fair share
of snow some years, which meant the necessity to bring skis to sports
class and, on alternate weeks, skates. Next to the ice skating rink was
something to which one never really paid attention: the snow depot,
growing from the snow gathered by clearing the streets after snowy
nights. The mounds were sometimes rather big even in such a small town
and perfect natural, although temporary, hills for sliding or building a
snow castle.
I never thought of them as much more than that. I never thought of
them, for example, as glaciers—as Christian Neal MilNeil suggests we
should.1 He pitches city snow dumps as significant geological constel-
lations. We media theorists are primarily thinking of other sorts of waste
dumps as our fields of research—from Walter Benjamin’s figure of the
ragpicker to the current interest in e-waste. But snow is a nonhuman
collector; it is an accumulator that by summer leaves this collection in its
wake. What snow demonstrates, acting as a sort of an inscription surface
or more likely as a mushroom sucking it in, is the heavy air that sur-
rounds us. The geological does not stay on the surface:
83
84 Dust and the Exhausted Life
In these rings they have found, for example, that some corals have
recorded the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests of the late 1950s
and early 1960s. Evidence of the Industrial Revolution is also docu-
mented, as is the Little Ice Age of the late seventeenth century. And
Dust and the Exhausted Life 85
daily rings in coral may also document the gradual slowing of the
earth’s rotation that astronomers first postulated.5
This chapter engages with the microparticles of dust and reads those
in relation to both the earlier themes of the deep time of geophysics of
media culture and its relation to the materialities of human bodies and
labor. Hence this double articulation of the chapter has to do with dust
and exhaustion. The notion of dust transports us to the lungs of miners
and Chinese workers subcontracted to produce digital media compo-
nents in special economic zones. Health risks entangle with media mate-
rialism, dust with speculative realism, which, however, is approached
from a political angle together with Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s notes on the
exhausted cognitariat. This chapter looks at this side of the cognitive capi-
talism, wanting to ground it in more mundane work and material fea-
tures. Dust narrates the story but in a way that is paying attention to the
nonhuman agency of this narrator. Geology of media can be continued
with dust: not quite of the ground, not quite the atmosphere.
Figure 9. Rachel
de Joode, Dust
Portrait, 2014.
Courtesy of the
artist.
Dust and the Exhausted Life 87
pollen, and nonorganic stuff like soil minerals. Even dust is metallic, geo-
logical. But the other pole is smart. Nanoparticles, smart dust, engineered
tiny things that are able to invade and inhabit organisms as mechanisms
of repair, improvement, and engineering. Smart dust quietly highlights
the world of nonhuman transactions that can facilitate, track, record, and
govern human affairs. We are nowadays fascinated by things minuscule,
mobile, peer networked, and able to calculate, process, and further trans-
mit the data it receives. Dust can be seen in this sense as “the minimum
recognizable entity of material transformation and circulation.”10 But the
archaeology of computational dust goes much deeper into history and
begins with the abacus and the etymological root of the word in abaq,
Hebrew for “dust.” Ancient dustboards were erasable calculation platforms,
writing surfaces. Babylonians and various scholars in the early Islamic
world used this platform, which consisted of “a board or slab spread with
a fine layer of sand or dust in which designs, letters, or numerals might be
traced and then quickly erased with a swipe of the hand or a rag.”11
What if we followed dust as a trajectory for theory—theory that is
concerned with materiality and media? What if dust is one way to do
geology of media as “dirt research”: a mode of inquiry that crosses insti-
tutions and disciplines and forces us to think of questions of design as
enveloped in a complex ecology and geology of economy, environment,
work, and skill. Dirt brings noise, as Ned Rossiter reminds us, and dirt
research can be understood “as a transversal mode of knowledge produc-
tion [that] necessarily encounters conflict of various kinds: geocultural,
social, political and epistemological.”12 It fits in our emphasis on geology
of media: to track materialities and times of media culture through non-
organic components, entangled in issues of labor, economy, representa-
tions, and discourses.
Dust takes us—and our thinking—to different places and opens up
multiple agendas. In this case, dust talks to issues of global labor, media
materialism of digital culture, and illuminates how to approach media
materialism through nonhuman nanoparticles. The argument routes itself
through video games to factories, where gadgets are produced, to theo-
retical excavations in new materialism and speculative philosophy, to
science fiction and the engineering of everyday realities. Dust fills our
reality as well as our fantasies: the various fiction products set in dust
88 Dust and the Exhausted Life
and dunes, with the obvious ecological example of Frank Herbert’s Dune
(1965).
Material things are often mistaken as modest—their numbers can be
mostly counted—yet the immodest countlessness of dust signals some-
thing else. Are such “things” immaterial? Are they almost like the air, just
a tiny bit heavier? Like gases, they are atmospheric for sure. Dust shares
a lot of qualities with air as well as breath—they each force us to rethink
boundaries of individuality as well as space. You cannot confine air and
breath in a manner that our more stable contours, like skin, suggest. Peter
Sloterdijk talks of the processes of inhaling and exhaling in this manner—
as deterritorializations of sorts, like when the child blows her breath into
a soap bubble, exporting a part of herself, externalization, extension.13
Dust, too, must be thought as more of an environmental and atmospheric
quality through which a different spatial and temporal thinking emerges.
Perhaps, then, dust is not just “matter” but something that troubles
our notions of matter. Steven Connor talks of it even as antimatter: “evac-
uated of air, the gaps between the particles reduced to their minimum—
hence its muffling, choking effects.”14 Dust also forces us to think of
surfaces—it exposes them:
designed into the product, which also contributes to its weighty share of
electronic waste problems. To make game play out of such themes is
to look at the darker, not-so-immaterial cultural techniques that sustain
creative cultures of digitality.
As noted in Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of
Empire, Molleindustria games effectively establish procedural critique, a
mapping of the algorithmic logic into which you, as the player–subject,
are sucked into a systematic production of a limited, repetitive, depres-
sive, and oppressive world without an outside.20 What if we mobilize such
critique in relation to the geopolitics of hardware? What if our mobile-
consumer selves have to be understood in connection with the heavier
burden of hardware, labor, and work processes? For instance, the outsourc-
ing of production is also an outsourcing of this hardware geology from
the Western perspective to far-away places. Outsourcing is historically
connected to the emergence of consumer discourses that emphasize the
lightness and mobility of digital technology. But it hides the outsourced
Figure 10. The Tantalum Memorial installation addresses the entangled circuits of
communication, tantalum mining, and the Congolese civil war. Harwood, Wright,
Yokokoji, Tantalum Memorial–Residue, 2008. Manifesta7 Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, 2008.
Raqs Media Collective, “The Rest of Now.” Photograph by Wolfgang Trager. Reprinted
with permission.
Dust and the Exhausted Life 91
hardness. This harder perspective does not downplay the argument con-
cerning games and immaterial labor—that games as labor involve special
“communicative cooperation, use of networked technologies and a blur-
ring of the line between labor and leisure time,” to use words from Games
of Empire—but rather flags that supportive mechanism of labor on which
immateriality can exist. This other labor—of factories, production lines,
and lung diseases—shows a different notion of immateriality, which takes
the near-immateriality of “lungs” and breathing as one central concep-
tual trajectory that offers a paradoxically different pairing in the context
of geology of media.
What if you breathe the heaviest of air? What if you breathe resi-
due of the metals and chemicals of digital culture? Should we speak of
the exploitation of the soul through the contamination of the lungs?
For Franco “Bifo” Berardi, the Italian philosopher, the soul becomes a
way to understand the mobilization of language, creativity, and affect as
parts of capitalist exploitation and production. Soul is the new ground
for exploitation of cognitive capitalism, but it is a material soul that can
also be exhausted:
All the “magic” that today’s technology offer [sic], ubiquitous com-
puting and networked communities, depends on the reliability of
hardware and physical power and communications infrastructure.
This means that though the experience of electronically augmented
daily life has changed significantly over the past few decades, the
physical conditions which support these new realms of experience
has not. Hardware still has to be made, under precise often difficult
conditions. And hardware is made from materials which all started
out, at one point, in the earth. The closer we get to the origin of the
materials of digital technology, the more difficult the conditions
often are.24
can also act through the disciplinary power of (media) machines. Bodies
are made docile and behave in certain patterns of gesture and memory.26
The term Aufschreibesysteme originates from a curious case from
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that of Daniel Paul
Schreber, a prestigious German high court judge who was eventually diag-
nosed with paranoid schizophrenia and subsequently spent much of his
time in treatment and in hospitals, becoming a widely discussed case
study for Freud and many others. This was partly because of his book
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903).27 In the peculiar but rather appeal-
ing piece of autobiographical prose, Schreber talks of bodies and inscrip-
tion surfaces for the celestial scribes who write down everything about
him, which for Kittler becomes a way to understand the new effects of
technical media.28 The body becomes passivized into a victim as “divine
nerve rays invade and retreat, destroy organs and extract brain fiber, lay
down lines of communication and transmit information.”29 Such hallu-
cinatory case studies as Schreber’s also produce the body as the locus
of research and as epistemic objects too: for Freud psychic, for Kittler
technological.
Kittler elaborates the idea further in relation to technology and argues
that the focus on “bodies” remains insufficient when it comes down to
the world of technical media. Indeed, such a stance is important in trans-
porting the cultural theoretical vocabulary to take nonhumans seriously;
so far this move has been often in terms of technologies, scientific ele-
ments, or what pejoratively has been called a technodeterminist approach
(the media theoretical equivalent to “strangling cute puppies,”30 as media
theorist Geoffrey Winthrop-Young so aptly and with definite black humor
calls it).
And yet perhaps we can extend that approach back to bodies—only
not the model of the body adopted from Schreber’s story, which inspired
Kittler to write about technical media. What if we replace Schreber’s tor-
tured body with the focus on underpaid (and mistreated) workers’ bodies
at the hardware end of digital electronic media production as the model
for inscription systems—sick, vulnerable, sacrificial bodies on the sys-
tematic production lines of products where the polished brand has its
direct link to production processes and cheap labor? These bodies are
epistemic objects as well, in the sense that they register the materiality of
Dust and the Exhausted Life 95
of coal seams, oil fields, aquifers, and peasantries across the space and
time of historical capitalism. In this light, the chief problem is not ‘peak
everything’ but peak appropriation. Capital’s problem today is not deple-
tion in the abstract but the contracting opportunities to appropriate nature
cheaply (with less and less labor).”38 But of course, there is work, and then
there is hard work: work that does not correspond to the idealized notions
of capitalism of the brain (cognitive capitalism) but cheap, repetitive, and
physically exhausting labor. It is this connection between labor and the
biosphere of which we should also be aware. Labor consists of work and
of working “the biosphere where the time-scale may be 1 million years”;39
processes of photosynthesis, fossil fuels, and the now-increasing central-
ity of rare earth minerals as memories of geological durations but mined
as an essential part of advanced technological information culture—all
these are part and parcel of the entanglement of materiality of work and
the long-term duration of the materiality of the earth. For sure, such per-
spectives are usually only revealed in the critical breaking points of the
normal processes of production to which twentieth-century philosophers—
from Heidegger to Gilles Deleuze to Bruno Latour—continuously referred:
only once things fail, then you start to see their complexity. In our case,
that failure might come on such a scale that it is planetary: the depletion
of resources, from fossil fuels (oil as the obvious case, and the discourse
of peak oil40) to the already mentioned rare earth minerals. To this list let
us add clean water, air, and soil.
Gary Genosko has referred to the Empedoclean four elements of
earth, water, air, and fire as ways to molecularize also the contemporary
realities of material reality where the elements and their new variations
take a double role: empirical and metaphysical. In his reading, relying
on Negarestani, Genosko moves further from an environmental or aes-
thetic understanding of the elements41 toward a more molecular insight:
how to map the constitution of contemporary issues, including polluted
air, blood-stained mineral mining, new forms of contamination, and other
mixing of elements into a new planetary machinic phylum resurfacing
from the inherited four:
Figure 11. A close-up from the YoHa installation Coal Fired Computers, 2010. Arnolfini,
Bristol, United Kingdom, 2010. “Coal Fired Computer and Tantalum Memorial.”
Photograph by Jamie Woodley. Reprinted with permission.
100 Dust and the Exhausted Life
As for the “new” media? Even “clean” digital media come with a residue
dust: coal-fired computing that supports the existence of such glossy
products.48 Media are polished, also literally.
Aluminum dust is one of the excess “products” from the manufac-
ture of computerized technology, such as from the process of polishing
iPad cases. The minuscule dust particles already mentioned carry with
them a double danger: they are highly inflammable and, more impor-
tantly, they can cause a variety of lung diseases among workers.
YoHa’s Coal Fired Computers provides a good way of understanding
the underground mining perspective to computational culture, and their
Aluminium project from 2008 is a parallel one that relates to the metal–
chemical composition of technology.49 The project picks up on the imag-
inary of the aluminum defined by “beauty, incorruptibility, lightness and
abundance, the metal of the future,” mixed together with political reali-
ties (futurism and fascism in the Italy of the earlier part of the twentieth
century) and materiality. Aluminum carries and assembles both realms of
imagined meanings and the long trail of material residue, which becomes
a method for the location-based installation at an Italian aluminum fac-
tory of the 1930s, investigating it from a media ecological perspective.
This included both local elements, for instance, the power grid energizing
the factory and the mythology of aluminum as the symbolically national
metal of Italy of the time, alongside the accelerated industrialization
throughout the 1930s and the rather longer and more abstract connec-
tions linking aluminum to contemporary concerns of material and tech-
nological culture.
The collaboration with the Raqs Media Collective rested on key
terms and methodologies such as the notion of “residue”:
Such narratives are less linguistic and symbolic chains. The dust
itself carries an affective force that is material and assembles collectivities
around it. Dust does not stay outside us but is a narrative that enters us:
dust has access in every breath inhaled, and it entangles with our tissue.
Indeed, such a material agent of transformation as dust—whether smart
or just irritating to the lung—is itself a reminder that there is an excess to
the symbolic narratives.53
Dust and the Exhausted Life 103
work leaves its stain on the lung in the heavy air of computer-industrial
capitalism.
In short, I am trying to work through some themes that are clearly
part of the agenda of media materialism by showing how they gesture
toward a politically significant materialism. This relates to geology of
media through a tracking of the residues and materialities that tie plane-
tary durations, chemical compositions, and media technologies into such
assemblages, which move in different ways than traditional political, aes-
thetic, or media vocabularies.
As Harwood from YoHa articulates in relation to the activity of mat-
ter, materials have their own ability to “recursively unfold possibilities,
transforming the flesh, the social, political and economic. Essentially what
a material makes possible and what it shuts down when it’s ripped from
the earth and it’s [sic] context and contaminates human ecologies.”57 This
is where activity of the material, nonhuman, and nonorganic articulates
itself: as a reality entangled with human concerns. Harwood, while artic-
ulating the idea behind the Coal Fired Computers project, makes a point
relevant to the previously discussed contexts of materiality, minerals, and
geopolitics:
The materials also come into existence as a force when the political,
geographical and economic situations are right for them to do so.
Aluminium “needs” Italian Fascism to “need” a national metal, it
“needs” Italy to lack coal, iron and have bauxite instead. Coal for a
long time in the UK was dug from deep cast mines and the shafts
required pumping out which creates the steam engine which in turn
requires more coal and more labor. Tantalum “requires” political
unrest in the Congo, kids playing Sony games.58
The lack of breath, whether from dust particles or from the increase
in anxiety disorders and panic attacks, is indicative of the tie between
immaterial labor and the material exhaustion of bodies of nature. Le
Corbusier’s modern fantasy of rationalized, filtered, and optimized “exact
air” in The Radiant City has proven to be a short-term dream. With a
different focus, Peter Sloterdijk identifies the beginning of the twentieth
century with a specific event of breathlessness, in the early phases of
World War I: “April 22, 1915, when a specially formed German ‘gas regi-
ment’ launched the first, large-scale operation against French-Canadian
troops in the northern Ypres Salient using chlorine gas as their means
of combat.”63 Lack of breath, or “atmo-terrorism” (as Sloterdijk calls it),
escorts the technological twentieth century into the twenty-first century,
where we continuously face the same danger: not only from state terrorism
but from (in)corporate(d) terrorism across industrial and postindustrial
production—the twenty-first century as the century of dust, depletion
of water resources, desertification leading to reduced crop lands. These
issues expose the residues in our modes of production. This is geophysi-
cal terrorism.
This page intentionally left blank
A Geology of Media
Jussi Parikka
Parikka, Jussi.
A Geology of Media.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/39052.
[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2023 09:01 GMT from Chinese University of Hong Kong ]
5
FOSSIL FUTURES
As rocks of the Miocene or Eocene in places bear the imprint of
monstrous creatures from those ages, so today arcades dot the
metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of
a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of
capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe. On the walls of these caverns
their immemorial flora, the commodity, luxuriates and enters, like
cancerous tissue, into the most irregular combinations.
—WALTER BENJAMIN, THE ARCADES PROJECT
Fossil Production,
Silicon Valley to Shenzhen
This chapter follows the path of geology outward to space. It also moves
from deep times to future times by speculating on the idea of future
fossils, as a future temporality turned back to the current moment. The
fossil is in this sense a question about the contemporary that expands
across multiple times. We are forced to investigate the persistence of the
fossil as a material monument that signals a radical challenge to prevail-
ing notions of time. This happened in the early modern times, with fos-
sils presented as material evidence that was incapable of fitting into the
scheme of biblical time and also challenging views of nature of earlier
scientific heroes such as Linnaeus, who, with his taxonomic mission,
was happy to be referred to as the Second Adam. Outside the world of
adams and eves, in which ways could the future fossils of media waste,
the “anthropocenic (re-)fossilizations” (see chapter 3) be also such uneven
109
110 Fossil Futures
When I show this tablet to people in the industry, they have univer-
sally shared my shock. And then they always ask “Who made it?”
My stock answer is “Who cares?” But the truth of it is that I do
not know. There was no brand on the box or on the device. I have
combed some of the internal documentation and cannot find an
answer. This is how far the Shenzhen electronics complex has
evolved. The hardware maker literally does not matter. Contract
manufacturers can download a reference design from the chip
Fossil Futures 113
maker and build to suit customer orders. If I had 20,000 friends and
an easy way to import these into the US, I would put my own name
on it and hand them out as business cards or Chanukah gifts.14
Once my heart started beating again, the first thing I thought was,
“I thought the screen alone would cost more than $45.” My next
thought was, “This is really bad news for anyone who makes com-
puting hardware. . . .
No one can make money selling hardware anymore. The only
way to make money with hardware is to sell something else and get
consumers to pay for the whole device and experience.15
The visual image of immense piles of electronic rubble that the list
provokes is one indication of an attempt to cognitively grasp the scale of
production of digital culture. From visual arts such as Pieter Hugo’s pho-
tography of bleak landscapes (see his “Permanent Error” work) to United
Nations reports, there are various overlapping and reinforcing ways in
which different institutions are trying to make sense of the contemporary
conditions of technological waste. Often the images of solitary e-waste
workers in non-Western locations, standing next to the piles of dead or
zombie media, correspond to the tropes favored by the written journalis-
tic descriptions: counting the mass of electronic waste per year (last year
around fifty tons globally) or eventually as “a 15,000-mile line of 40-tonne
lorries”17 full of phones, computers, monitors, electronic gadgets of all
sorts. The United Nations action-step initiative is in this context a rather
significant and comprehensive attempt to tackle the e-waste problem
from policy, design, and, for instance, reuse and recycling practices per-
spectives so as to be able to address the dual issue of waste and critical
material depletion.18
This chapter’s perspective is, however, on fossils. These bodies of
dying media technology are not merely disappearing as part of the soil
Fossil Futures 115
Fossils have been at the center of the new modern worldview at least
since the nineteenth century: both geologists like Charles Lyell and biol-
ogists like Charles Darwin focused on the fossil as an object of analysis
that opened up a book of fragments. The fossil was the buried temporal
object that was a gateway to past times as a monument in the present.
These are signals of the historicity of the planet condensed in the present
and show the earth as a library as well as “a recording medium.”22 The fos-
sil enthusiasm of the nineteenth century was visible in how geology mobil-
ized the earth as a secret treasury of the past, with volcanoes as one source
of disruption that sometimes fold the visible surface with the hidden
depths of the planet. Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) preempts with its
early geological scientific touch what Pink Floyd did poetically later with
sound technologies in Pompeii (“Live in Pompeii,” 1971–72): in the shadow
of Vesuvius and the wake of its magma to depict Pompeii as a place of
frozen time and frozen bodies, but as ways to understand the overlapping
temporalities where the past exists in the present as monument.23 The
magma is in such geological imagination the original time-based art pro-
cess, which imprints us images as fossils.24 In later parlance of the infor-
mation age, we can say that fossils are the data that geology processes.25
But the important thing and indication of the multitemporality of
the fossil layer is really brought to light only in contemporary paleontol-
ogy, which rethinks fossils through punctuated equilibrium. For Darwin
in Origin of Species some decades later, following Lyell, the fossil record
is like a book with only fragments left; it is only a fragmented part of a
totality that cannot be discovered, and the only things scientists—and the
contemporary living world—are left with are traces. However, for our
contemporary scientists, such as Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge,
the fossil layers’ seeming deficiencies, random jumps, and nonlinear nature
are exactly the striking fact that demonstrates the essential: the archaic
and the current are entangled through such fossil monuments. Instead of
a uniform, slow, gradual evolution of the planet, from its geological record
Fossil Futures 117
Telofossils
Media artist Grégory Chatonsky’s Telofossils (2013), a collaboration with
sculptor Dominique Sirois and sound artist Christophe Charles, picks up
on this context of technologies, obsolescence, and fossils. The exhibition
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan, focuses on the
slow, poetic level of decay that characterizes technopolitical society and
nature. The “future archaeologist” perspective that Chatonsky summons
with immersive affective moods created in the exhibition’s installations is
akin to Manuel Delanda’s figure of the future robot historian that gazes
back at our current world emphasizing not the human agency of innova-
tors but the agency of the increasingly automated and intelligent machine
(as part of the military constellation).35 The future archaeologist in Cha-
tonsky’s installations and immersive narrative is a displacement of the
human from a temporal perspective (the future) and from the Outside
(alien species):
Figure 13. A close-up from Grégory Chatonsky and Dominique Sirois’s installation
Telofossils, 2012. Courtesy of Xpo Gallery.
Fossil Futures 123
Figure 14. Trevor Paglen’s project included the development of a special ultra-archival
disc. Courtesy of the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco;
Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne.
Since 1963, more than eight hundred spacecraft have been launched
into geosynchronous orbit, forming a man-made ring of satellites
around the Earth. These satellites are destined to become the
longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly floating
through space long after every trace of humanity has disappeared
from the planet.50
The material memory of the earth continues outside its surface. The
extension of technology to space is a sort of return of the various mate-
rials and minerals to a geosynchronous orbit. Besides the orbit of func-
tioning satellites, Paglen turns our attention to the circular temporality of
the orbit slightly higher to that. The junk orbit is one of future media
fossils, which as a project fuses a deep time interest with the technologi-
cal realities of contemporary geopolitics. The EchoStar XVI itself is an
important media relay for the fifteen years it will continue transmitting
images—an approximate ten trillion—but it becomes a different sort of
media object when it is moved to the graveyard orbit of zombie media “so
far from earth that the derelict spacecraft will never decay.”51
It is this slightly higher orbit that sustains a new geological layer
of technological rubbish, media fossils that have a geological duration,
128 Fossil Futures
Schmidt). The focus on asteroids shifts from the narrativization of the end
of life as we know it—scenarios of apocalyptic proportion of past years of
Hollywood audiovisuals—and concentrates more on the resource basis
for future technological competition. The interest in geology that has
mapped the earth as a resource leading to the recent years of digital cul-
ture devices, hungry for minerals, metals, and energy, is being replicated
now outside our planetary scale. In the midst of the satellites, relaying
massive network transmissions of entertainment and military content, we
have the future plans of geological surveys and mining expanded much
beyond the underground of the earth, from the deep time of the media of
mining its underground to the space of geological objects, within reach
exactly because of the development of advanced (space) technologies.
The Last Pictures establishes an aesthetic framework to understand
this wider context of geology of media reaching outside the globe. In many
ways, we are increasingly conscious of the mediasphere as significantly
defined by the orbital.57 But discussing the orbital in terms of geology—
both fossils from the dying technological waste and the resources from
asteroids—is what opens a new horizon for a media materialist analysis.
Paglen makes explicit this link with the geological sphere and the influence
of the Anthropocene reaching out thousands of miles high above earth
itself. His photography has a relation to the resourcing of the geophysical
sphere as part of the geopolitical (military) missions of past decades and
how scientific visual worlds demonstrate the intertwining of aesthetics
with power.
As Brooke Belisle points out, already Paglen’s earlier work, a photo-
graphic diptych Artifacts (2010) (see Figure 1), works through relating
geological formations and astronomical space.58 It offers a photographic
argument concerning the nineteenth-century temporalization of geology
(deep time) and the ongoing spatialization of space (deep space) in a way
that entangles also the extraterrestrial into a geological discourse. Belisle
is able to show the geological connotations of Paglen’s interests: the outer
space and satellite orbits as the future fossils of human-made space debris
and the focus on the earth’s topology from geological sciences to geo-
engineering of canals and other formations that tied industrialization,
colonialism, and capitalist globalizing logistics to the opening up of deep
time. This supports the argument in this book concerning the deep time
130 Fossil Futures
of the media, of which some of Paglen’s visual themes are good examples.
From the geological strata of Canyon de Chelly in Arizona to the night
sky of strata of light, as traces from satellites, Artifacts paves the way for
the Anthropocene that is further investigated in The Last Pictures. The
historical genealogy of photography shows the close links the new visual
medium had with the mapping of the geophysical; U.S. Geological and
Geographical Surveys were closely linked with the media of visualization
since the nineteenth century, as Belisle brings out in the context of Paglen’s
practice. The geological ground was dug through, mined but also made
flat and into an information surface with the aid of the new technical
medium of photography connected to various other techniques, such as
air balloons and aerial photography.
But besides the aerial, the militarized technological imaginary has as
much been haunted with the necessity of trying to see the underground.
As Ryan Bishop skillfully shows, this penetration of the underground
Figure 15. Orbital debris visualizations give a sense of the vast quantity of objects that
form an external geotechnological layer circulating the earth. This refers to the layer of
living dead, obsolete technological objects in circulation in the geosynchronous region
(around 35,785 kilometers altitude). Image from NASA Orbital Debris Program Office.
Fossil Futures 131
is irreducible to the human and yet partly supports and conditions it along-
side various aspects of the earth and its outer space geological layers. It
refers back to the notion of medianatures I used earlier. In other words,
perhaps instead of dismissing relations and mediations, we need carefully
to refine what we mean by media and communication in the noncorrela-
tionist as well as new materialist contexts of contemporary media culture.66
Notions of temporality must escape any human-obsessed vocabu-
lary and enter into a closer proximity with the fossil. The deep time even
in its historical form is a mode of scientific temporality that allows imag-
ination of planetary time without humans. It presents epochs that strat-
ify dynamics of the earth (see chapter 2) but also in later geological
research reminding that the periods are formed of dynamic, even cata-
strophic events: a punctuated equilibrium.
If history has been the discourse concerning narratives of men and
their lives, then fossils set the scene for a different challenge: a world
without humans, and narrativizing a future-present in which media and
residues of waste might be the only monuments we left behind. In some
ways, this is acknowledged by Tim Morton: also on the level of design,
we must necessarily think of the other-times than that of humans—from
thousands to hundreds of thousands of years and, for instance, account-
ing for things such as “Plutonium 239, which remains dangerously radio-
active for 24,100 years.”67
In the humanities and social sciences, we are engaging with this chal-
lenge, which comes under different names: the Anthropocene, the non-
human, media materialism, the posthuman, and so forth. Discussions of
microtemporality (see chapter 1) are trying to present a technical media
temporality different to narrative writing of media history (from the human
perspective and for the humans68); discussions of archives are turning
toward the constitutive role of data centers as the infrastructural support
for memory;69 furthermore, data centers are themselves also geophysi-
cally determined organizations, reliant on energy and efficient cooling
systems. The geological is one way to account for the ecological relations
in how they address change across scales: the slow duration of deep times
but also the accelerated microtemporalities that govern the algorithmic
world of communication and trading reliant on as much as about the
planet and its resources. Acceleration, deceleration.
This page intentionally left blank
A Geology of Media
Jussi Parikka
Parikka, Jussi.
A Geology of Media.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/39052.
[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2023 09:01 GMT from Chinese University of Hong Kong ]
AFTERWORD
SO-CALLED NATURE
137
138 Afterword
Parikka, Jussi.
A Geology of Media.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/39052.
[ Access provided at 30 Mar 2023 09:01 GMT from Chinese University of Hong Kong ]
NOTES
Preface
1 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (London: John Murray, 1830), 1. Online
facsimile at http://www.esp.org/books/lyell/principles/facsimile/.
2 Michael T. Klare, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the
World’s Last Resources (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), 29.
3 Ibid.
4 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto
Press, 2008), 40.
5 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the
Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2013), 10.
6 “As we have seen, man has reacted upon organized and inorganic nature,
and thereby modified, if not determined, the material structure of his earthly
home. The measure of that reaction manifestly constitutes a very important
element in the appreciation of the relations between mind and matter, as
well as in the discussion of many purely physical problems.” George Perkins
Marsh, Man and Nature: Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action
(New York: Charles Scribner, 1865), 8.
7 Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the
Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010).
8 Antonio Stoppani, “First Period of the Anthropozoic Era,” trans. Valeria Fed-
erighi, ed. Etienne Turpin and Valeria Federighi, in Making the Geologic
Now: Responses to the Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, ed. Eliza-
beth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (New York: Punctum, 2013), 38.
155
156 Notes to Chapter 1
1. Materiality
1 Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from
Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 2. To quote Cubitt in
full: “Mediation is the ground of relationship, the relationship that precedes
and constructs subjects and objects. Media matter, both in the sense of giv-
ing material specificity to our descriptions of such abstract concepts as soci-
ety and environment, and in the sense of the active verb: mediation comes
into being as matter, its mattering constitutes the knowable, experienceable
world, making possible all sensing and being sensed, knowing and being
known.”
2 As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young aptly notes, the term German media theory is
an outsider construct. See Winthrop-Young, “Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogey-
man: Kittler in the Anglosphere,” Thesis Eleven 107, no. 1 (2011): 6–20.
3 Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with
Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).
4 John Durham Peters, “Space, Time and Communication Theory,” Canadian
Journal of Communication 28, no. 4 (2003), http://www.cjc-online.ca/index
.php/journal/article/view/1389/1467. See also Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics
(London: Sage, 1998). Cubitt’s recent book, an utterly important one, The
Practice of Light, focuses especially on the modulations of light becoming
media.
5 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in
the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 23. See also Sean
Cubitt, “Current Screens,” in Imagery in the 21st Century, ed. Oliver Grau
with Thomas Veigl, 21–35 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).
6 Klare, Race for What’s Left, 152.
7 Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), in
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996), 101.
8 See also Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal.
9 The current mission of the agency is described as follows: “The [U.S. Geo-
logical Survey] serves the Nation by providing reliable scientific information
to describe and understand the Earth; minimize loss of life and property from
natural disasters; manage water, biological, energy, and mineral resources;
and enhance and protect our quality of life.” http://www.usgs.gov/.
10 James Risen, “U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan,” New York
Times, June 13, 2010. For a short history of the U.S. Geological Survey, see
Notes to Chapter 1 157
Eric Alliez, The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s Phi-
losophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano (New York: Contin-
uum, 2004), 25.
62 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlin-
son and Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2009), 85.
63 See Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Tech-
noculture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). See also Michael Goddard
and Jussi Parikka, eds., “Unnatural Ecologies,” special issue, Fibreculture, no.
17 (2011), http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/.
64 Asko Nivala, “The Chemical Age: Presenting History with Metaphors,” in
They Do Things Differently There: Essays on Cultural History, ed. Bruce
Johnson and Harri Kiiskinen, 81–108 (Turku: Turku, 2011).
65 Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). See chapter 2 on mining in that book.
66 Ben Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy
(New York: Punctum Books, 2013). Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of
Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006). Reza Negarestani, “Under-
cover Softness: An Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay,”
COLLAPSE VI: Geo/Philosophy, January 2010, 382.
67 Iain Hamilton Grant, “Mining Conditions,” in The Speculative Turn: Conti-
nental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham
Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2010), 44.
68 This ungrounding and constituent exhumation is picked up by Reza Negar-
estani too: “If archeologists, cultists, worms and crawling entities almost
always undertake an act of exhumation (surfaces, tombs, cosmic comers,
dreams, etc.), it is because exhumation is equal to ungrounding, incapacitat-
ing surfaces ability to operate according to topologies of the whole, or on a
mereotopological level. In exhumation, the distribution of surfaces is thor-
oughly undermined and the movements associated with them are derailed;
the edge no longer belongs to the periphery, anterior surfaces come after all
other surfaces, layers of strata are displaced and perforated, peripheries and
the last protecting surfaces become the very conductors of invasion. Exhu-
mation is defined as a collapse and trauma introduced to the solid part by
vermiculate activities; it is the body of solidity replaced by the full body of
trauma. As in disinterment—scarring the hot and cold surfaces of a grave—
exhumation proliferates surfaces through each other. Exhumation transmutes
architectures into excessive scarring processes, fibroses of tissues, mem-
branes and surfaces of the solid body.” Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complic-
ity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 51–52. It would
162 Notes to Chapter 1
84 Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (London: Vintage Books, 2007), 72.
85 See Paul Caplan, “JPEG: The Quadruple Object,” PhD thesis, Birkbeck Col-
lege, University of London, 2013.
86 Homer H. Dubs, “The Beginnings of Alchemy,” Isis 38, nos. 1–2 (1947): 73.
87 “When the effluvia from the cow lands ascend to the dark heavens, the dark
heavens in six hundred years’ give birth to black whetstones, black whet-
stones in six hundred years give birth to black quicksilver, black quicksilver
in six hundred years gives birth to black metal (iron), and black metal in a
thousand years gives birth to a black dragon. Where the black dragon enters
into [permanent] hibernation, it gives birth to the Black Springs.” Quoted in
ibid., 72–73.
88 William Newman, “Technology and Alchemic Debate in the Late Middle
Ages,” Isis 80, no. 3 (1989): 426.
89 Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum doctrinale, quoted in Newman, “Technol-
ogy and Alchemic Debate,” 430.
90 Pynchon, Against the Day, 88.
91 Cubitt et al., “Does Cloud Computing Have a Silver Lining?” See also Michael
Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor
and the Birth of the Information Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
3. Psychogeophysics of Technology
1 Rachel Armstrong, “Why Synthetic Soil Holds the Key to a Sustainable
Future,” Guardian Professional, January 17, 2014, http://www.theguardian
.com/.
2 Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 162.
3 Delanda, Deleuze: History and Science, 78.
4 See Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis.” Edwards, Vast Machine. In more general
terms, one could relate this to the discourse of cultural techniques too and
to consider media technologies as cultural techniques: “namely, to relate the
concept of media/mediums historically to ontological and aesthetic opera-
tions that process distinctions (and the blurring of distinctions) which are
basic to the sense production of any specific culture.” From this anthropo-
logical definition by Bernhard Siegert, one can move on to a more ecological
sense in which media technologies operate. The quotation is from Siegert,
“The Map Is the Territory,” Radical Philosophy 169 (September/October
2011): 14. This connection is not fully explored in this book and is left more
as a hint of an alternative route that can be picked up in the future in more
detail and consistency.
5 Afterglow was the transmediale 2014 festival theme.
172 Notes to Chapter 3
6 McKenzie Wark, The Beach beneath the Street: Everyday Life and the Glori-
ous Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso, 2011). Wark, The
Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages out of the 20th Century
(London: Verso, 2013).
7 The London Psychogeophysics Summit, “What Is Psychogeophysics?,” Mute,
August 4, 2010, http://www.metamute.org/.
8 Indeed, for Friedrich Kittler and others, this marked a radical epistemic
threshold from the psychological subject to the physiological object of mea-
surement: physiology instead of the interior experience, scientific measur-
ability of reaction thresholds and speeds instead of “feeling.” See Kittler,
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 188. Cf. Sybille Krämer, “The Cultural Tech-
niques of Time-Axis Manipulation: Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media,”
Theory, Culture, and Society 23, nos. 7–8 (2006): 93–109. On Helmholtz, see
also Henning Schmidgen, Helmholtz Curves: Tracing Lost Time, trans. Nils F.
Schott (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
9 This claim can be best understood through A. N. Whitehead’s philosophy.
See Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aes-
thetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).
10 Quoted in Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions, 33.
11 John Durham Peters, “Space, Time, and Communication Theory.”
12 Marina Warner, “The Writing of Stones,” Cabinet, no. 29 (Spring 2008),
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/29/warner.php.
13 Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1985), 4–6.
14 This is a variation on the Deleuze and Guattari idea of metallurgy (as a
minor science), found in A Thousand Plateaus and in a vital materialist way
mobilized by Jane Bennett: “The desire of the craftsperson to see what a
metal can do, rather than the desire of the scientist to know what a metal is,
enabled the former to discern a life in metal and thus, eventually, to collab-
orate more productively with it.” Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 60.
15 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 115.
16 Matthew Fuller, “Art for Animals,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 9, no. 1
(2010): 17–33.
17 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 81.
18 Morton, Hyperobjects.
19 See the introduction to Jussi Parikka, ed., Medianatures: The Materiality
of Information Technology and Electronic Waste (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open
Humanities Press, 2011). Online at http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/.
20 Workshop description of the London Geophysics Summit, August 2–7,
Notes to Chapter 3 173
2010, http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/06/21/the-london-psychogeophysics
-summit-london/.
21 Of course, in philosophical discourse as well as in mythology, the invisible
underground (or caves, the preempting of the much later German romanti-
cist focus on mines) has a long history. This relates to the differentiation of
the senses and the rational mind, the work of perception versus the opera-
tions of reason. It also has a topology that comes out in Plato’s differentiation
that is besides philosophical, also related to the grounds and undergrounds
that can be only reached by the mind, not the body: “The visible is accessible
to the senses, while the invisible can only be grasped by the reasoning of
the mind. By referring to the invisible as το αιδες, Plato sets up the identifi-
cation of the invisible world proper to the soul with the traditional mythic
idea of the realm of Hades, Αιδου. This connection of Hades and the unseen
is part of the mythic tradition at least as early as Homer, and Plato refers to
it in the Cratylus as well, where he makes the etymology of Hades not from
αειδες (not-visible) but rather from ειδεναι (to know) (404b, cp. 403a).” Rad-
cliffe Guest Edmonds, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes,
and the “Orphic” Gold Tablets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 179.
22 Guy Debord, “Introduction to the Critique of Urban Geography,” trans. Ken
Knabb, in Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, ed. Harald Bauder
and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Kelowna: Praxis (e)press, 2008), 23. Origi-
nally: “Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine,” Les Lèvres
Nues, no. 6 (September 1955).
23 Wark, Beach beneath the Streets, 28.
24 The term and the collective work behind it have many layers. The text in
Mute magazine is primarily by Wilfred Hou Je Bek, even if the concept was
most probably coined by Oswald Berthold and Martin Howse. The term
became more defined in the research group and project Topology of a Future
City for the transmediale 2010 festival, even if one can justifiably say that
some of the work of people involved and active in the research and projects,
including Jonathan Kemp, goes back to the 2008 xxxxx-Peenemünde-
project (with its strong Pynchon–Kittler connotations). More information
on the history and layers of the term are on the wikipage http://www.psycho
geophysics.org/wiki/doku.php?id=wikipedia. Thanks also to Jonathan Kemp,
whom J. P. interviewed via e-mail about the term and its history in January
2014.
25 The London Psychogeophysics Summit, “What Is Psychogeophysics?”
26 Ibid.
174 Notes to Chapter 3
Natural Things, as We Must for the Idea of the Sublime,” 257. Hence, in
this context, consider Shaviro’s argument concerning the beautiful and the
Whitehead perspective to the inorganic as perhaps hinting at some aspects
relevant to our geocentric argument.
33 Williams, Notes on the Underground, 17.
34 Tate Britain’s exhibition Ruin Lust in London (March 4–May 18, 2014) was a
well-curated collection of this modern imaginary of the ruins in visual arts.
35 Kenneth White, as quoted in Matt Baker and John Gordon, “Unconformi-
ties, Schisms and Sutures: Geology and the Art of Mythology in Scotland,”
in Ellsworth and Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, 163–69. For some notes
on the emergence of the concept by White in the 1970s and its theoretical
influences from Heidegger to Deleuze and Guattari and onward to some
more cosmological dimensions, see Kenneth White, “Elements of Geopoet-
ics,” Edinburgh Review 88 (1992): 163–78. See also the Scottish Centre for
Geopoetics, http://www.geopoetics.org.uk/.
36 Richard Grusin, Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National
Parks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
37 Ibid., 131. Clarence E. Dutton, Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District ,
with Atlas, in Monographs of the United States Geological Survey, vol. 2
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1882).
38 Dutton, Tertiary History, 39.
39 Williams, Notes on the Underground, 88.
40 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 361–74.
41 “Vatnajökull (the sound of ),” Katie Paterson, project description, http://www
.katiepaterson.org/vatnajokull/.
42 “We call it the Cretaceous acoustic effect, because ocean acidification forced
by global warming appears to be leading us back to the similar ocean acous-
tic conditions as those that existed 110 million years ago, during the Age of
Dinosaurs.” “Dinosaur-Era Acoustics: Global Warming May Give Oceans
the ‘Sound’ of the Cretaceous,” Science Daily, October 18, 2012, http://www
.sciencedaily.com/.
43 See Florian Dombois, homepage, for project information, http://www.flori
andombois.net/.
44 For Wolfgang Ernst, time-critical media are able to measure events of such
time scales not necessarily directly perceptible to the human being. However,
time-critical media themselves also operate in such ways. In Ernst’s words,
“with techno-mathematical computing where minimal temporal moments
become critical for the success of the whole process of internal calculation
and human-machine communication (‘interrupt’), time-criticality becomes
176 Notes to Chapter 3
53 Delanda, Deleuze: History and Science, 87. See also Matthew Fuller, “The
Garden of Earthly Delights,” Mute, September 19, 2012, http://www.meta
mute.org/editorial/articles/garden-earthly-delights.
54 The_crystal_world:space:publicity project, http://crystal.xxn.org.uk/wiki/
doku.php?id=the_crystal_world:space:publicity.
55 Fuller, “Garden of Earthly Delights.”
56 Martin Howse, “The Earthcodes Project: Substract/Shifting the Site of Exe-
cution,” microresearchlab, http://www.1010.co.uk/org/earthcode.html.
57 Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Earth Current.” Among such mentioned pio-
neers were Barlow and Walker, interested in diurnal variations and, for
instance, the influence of the ground in earth currents.
58 See Friedrich Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” in Literature, Media, Information
Systems, ed. John Johnston, 50–84 (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International,
1997).
59 Howse, “The Earthcodes Project.” Importantly, soil also has a history. Grad-
ually, during the nineteenth century, in geology, the discussions that saw it
only as residue of rocks gave way to alternative versions that granted soil a
status, life, and history of its own. One can approach this by reading the
transformations in soil science and geology. The soil becomes a heteroge-
neous assemblage itself. See Denizen, “Three Holes in the Geological Pres-
ent,” in Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Design, Deep
Time, Science, and Philosophy, ed. Etienne Turpin, 35–43 (Ann Arbor, Mich.:
Open Humanities Press, 2013).
60 Cf. Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer
Viruses (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).
61 Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 106.
62 Ibid.
63 Manuel Delanda speaks of “metallic affects” pointing to the role of metals as
catalysts of chemical reactions. To paraphrase Delanda, the metallic affect
refers to the molecular potential for change in the real composition of chem-
ical interactions. Catalysts themselves are useful for that purpose because
they don’t change in those reactions. What’s more is how the metallic is
infused with life more generally. This new materialist perspective promises
to extend the list of material entities that usually counted (labor, space,
clothes, food) into a molecular level of reactions. Indeed, the metals in our
bodies and brains are conductive elements as much as they are in techno-
logical assemblages, cutting through a range of different level phenomena.
Methodologically, this relates to the new materialist assemblage theory that
is interested in reality of entities and their processes irrespective of scale,
178 Notes to Chapter 3
18 See Graham Harwood’s texts and in general YoHa’s 2008 project Aluminium,
http://www.yoha.co.uk/aluminium. Modern industrialism and its fascist
aesthetics (referring to futurism as a sort of an archaeology of the political
resonances of the chemical) are distributed as part of the everyday: “Alu-
minium xmas trees, pots and pans, door and window frames, wall cladding,
roofing, awnings, high tension power lines, wires, cables, components for
television, radios, computers, refrigerators and air-conditioner, cans, bottle
tops, foil wrap, foil semi-rigid containers, kettles and saucepans, propellers,
aeroplane, gearboxes, motor parts, tennis racquets and Zepplins [sic].” A key
scholarly work on aluminum is Mimi Sheller, Aluminum Dreams: The Mak-
ing of Light Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014).
19 See http://www.phonestory.org/.
20 Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capital-
ism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009),
199.
21 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathol-
ogies of the Post-Alpha Generation (London: Minor Compositions, 2009), 69.
22 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 38.
23 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Exhaustion/Depression,” in Wiedemann and Zehle,
Depletion Design, 77–82.
24 http://i-mine.org/.
25 Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 112.
26 See Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought, and Cinema
circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).
27 Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida Macalpine
and Richard Hunter (London: W. M. Dawson, 1955).
28 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Thank you to Darren Wershler for
alerting me to the conceptual link between lungs, bodies, Schreber, and Kit-
tler, in a way that finds another expression in Franz Kafka’s Penal Colony
(Strafkolonie, 1920) and its horrific machine that treats the body as an
inscription surface.
29 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 292.
30 Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2011),
121.
31 Jim Puckett and Ted Smith, eds., Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of
Asia, report prepared by the Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics
Coalition, February 25, 2002, http://www.ban.org/E-waste/technotrashfinal
comp.pdf.
Notes to Chapter 4 181
5. Fossil Futures
1 Seth Denizen, “Three Holes in the Geological Present,” in Turpin, Architec-
ture in the Anthropocene, 40.
2 Rachel Armstrong, “Why Synthetic Soil Holds the Key to a Sustainable
Future,” Guardian Professional, January 17, 2014, http://www.theguardian
.com/.
3 See Gary Genosko, “The New Fundamental Elements of a Contested Planet,”
talk presented at the Earth, Air, Water: Matter and Meaning in Rituals con-
ference, Victoria College, University of Toronto, June 2013.
4 Alexis C. Madrigal, “Not Even Silicon Valley Escapes History,” The Atlantic,
July 23, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/. See also the Silicon Valley Toxics
Coalition, http://svtc.org/.
5 Moira Johnston, “High Tech, High Risk and High Life in Silicon Valley,”
National Geographic, October 1982, 459.
6 See David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams:
Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Econ-
omy (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
7 Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish, 26.
8 Johnston, “High Tech, High Risk,” 459. See also Christine A. Finn, Artifacts:
An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2001).
9 Sean Hollister, “Protestors Block Silicon Valley Shuttles, Smash Google Bus
Window,” The Verge, December 20, 2013, http://www.theverge.com/.
10 Joe Heitzeberg, “Shenzhen Is Like Living in a City-Sized TechShop,” Hack
Things, May 2, 2013, http://www.hackthings.com/shenzhen-is-like-living-in
-a-city-sized-techshop/.
11 Pellow and Park, Silicon Valley of Dreams, 4.
12 Jay Goldberg, “Hardware Is Dead,” Venturebeat, September 15, 2012, http://
venturebeat.com/2012/09/15/hardware-is-dead/.
13 Bruce Sterling, “The Dead Media Project: A Modest Proposal and a Public
Appeal,” http://www.deadmedia.org/modest-proposal.html.
14 Goldberg, “Hardware Is Dead.”
15 Ibid.
184 Notes to Chapter 5
25 Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the
Discovery of Geologic Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1987), 86.
26 Stephen Jay Gould, Punctuated Equilibrium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2007).
27 Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, 98–102.
28 Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins (New York: Prince-
ton Architectural Press, 1994), 56.
29 Williams, Notes on the Underground, 43.
30 Stoppani, “First Period of the Anthropozoic Era,” 40. “A new era has then
begun with man. Let us admit, though eccentric it might be, the supposition
that a strange intelligence should come to study the Earth in a day when
human progeny, such as populated ancient worlds, has disappeared com-
pletely. Could he study our epoch’s geology on the basis of which the splen-
did edifice of gone worlds’ science was built? Could he, from the pattern of
floods, from the distribution of animals and plants, from the traces left by
the free forces of nature, deduct the true, natural conditions of the world?
Maybe he could; but always and only by putting in all his calculations this
new element, human spirit. At this condition, as we, for instance, explain the
mounds of terrestrial animals’ bones in the deep of the sea, he, too, could
explain the mounds of sea shells that savage prehistoric men built on the
coasts that they inhabited. But if current geology, to understand finished
epochs, has to study nature irrespective of man, future geology, to under-
stand our own epoch, should study man irrespective of nature. So that future
geologist, wishing to study our epoch’s geology, would end up narrating the
history of human intelligence. That is why I believe the epoch of man should
be given dignity of a separate new era” (40).
31 Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, 175–76.
32 “By second nature I mean the space of the material transformation of nature
by collective labor. Second nature is a space of fragmentation, alienation,
class struggle. In many ways, the space of the vector really is a third nature,
from which the second nature of our built environments can be managed
and organized, as a standing reserve, just as second nature treats nature as
its standing reserve.” Wark, “Escape from the Dual Empire.”
33 Wark, Telesthesia, 34–35.
34 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
MacLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1999), 540.
35 Manuel Delanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), 2–3.
186 Notes to Chapter 5
surpassing the affective and cognitive coordinates of the human. Paul Virilio,
Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997). Richard G. Smith, “Escape
Velocity,” in The Virilio Dictionary, ed. John Armitage (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 2013), 79–80.
53 Katarina Damjanov, “Lunar Cemetary: Global Heterotopia and Biopolitics
of Death,” Leonardo 46, no. 2 (2013): 159–62. See also Parks, “Orbital Ruins,”
NECSUS—European Journal of Media Studies, no. 4 (Autumn 2013), http://
www.necsus-ejms.org/orbital-ruins/.
54 Luke Harding, “Russia to Boost Military Presence in Arctic as Canada Plots
North Pole Claim,” The Guardian, December 10, 2013, http://www.theguard
ian.com/.
55 Richard Seymour, “Why Outer Space Really Is the Final Frontier for Capital-
ism,” The Guardian, Comment Is Free, December 20, 2013, http://www.the
guardian.com/.
56 Marc Kaufman, “The Promise and Perils of Mining Asteroids,” National
Geographic, January 22, 2013, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/. Adam
Mann, “Tech Billionaires Plan Audacious Mission to Mine Asteroids,” Wired,
April 23, 2012, http://www.wired.com/. Although some more recent accounts
are not as optimistic as to the viability of asteroid mining. Liat Clark, “Study:
Asteroid Mining Might Not Be Commercially Viable,” Wired (UK), January
14, 2014, http://www.wired.co.uk/.
57 Parks, Cultures in Orbit.
58 Belisle, “Trevor Paglen’s Frontier Photography,” 145–49.
59 Bishop, “Project ‘Transparent Earth.’”
60 Katie Drummond, “Pentagon-Backed Venture Aims for ‘Google-Under
ground,’” Wired, March 8, 2010, http://www.wired.com/. Bishop, “Project
‘Transparent Earth.’”
61 smudge studio (Elizabeth Ellsworth + Jamie Kruse), “The Uneven Time of
Space Debris: An Interview with Trevor Paglen,” in Ellsworth and Kruse,
Making the Geologic Now, 150–51.
62 Herschel, as quoted in Peters, “Space, Time, and Communication Theory.”
As Belisle notes, regarding early pioneers such as Herschel, “echoing with
contemporaneous geological arguments, his view unsettled notions of a
fixed and perfect universe, arguing it was unimaginably old and vast, and
still changing.” Belisle, “Trevor Paglen’s Frontier Photography.”
63 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 10.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 14.
66 See Galloway et al., Excommunication, 49.
188 Notes to Afterword
Afterword
1 Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene,” 616.
2 See Nest, Coltan, 8–9.
3 Huber, “Dig More Coal.” The actual estimates of how much power, and what
sort, computers and the Internet consume vary greatly. For a recent Green-
peace report, see “How Clean Is Your Cloud?,” April 17, 2012, http://www
.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/Climate
-Reports/How-Clean-is-Your-Cloud/.
4 Huber, “Dig More Coal.”
5 Caillois, as quoted in the introduction by Marguerite Yourcenar to The Writ-
ing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University Press of Vir-
ginia, 1985), xvi.
6 Babbage, as quoted in Peters, “Space, Time, and Communication Theory.”
7 Bishop, “Project ‘Transparent Earth,’” 278.
8 Part of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s important Anthropocene proj-
ect (2013–14) in Berlin, curated by Anselm Franke. The Otolith Group’s
Medium Earth was part of the program in the end of 2014 from October
to December.
9 Otolith Group, Medium Earth, The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater
(REDCAT), Los Angeles, 2013, http://www.redcat.org/exhibition/otolith
-group.
10 Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 23.
Appendix
1 The authors would like to thank Amelia Guimarin, Tony D. Sampson, Lesley
Walters, and the three referees for their valuable feedback. Garnet Hertz
would like to thank Mark Poster, Peter Krapp, Cécile Whiting, and Robert
Nideffer for feedback on earlier versions on this essay. Hertz is supported by
the National Science Foundation grant 0808783 and the following organiza-
tions at UC Irvine: the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds, the
Institute for Software Research, and the California Institute for Telecommuni-
cations and Information Technology. No endorsement implied. Jussi Parikka
Notes to Appendix 189
12 John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture
Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2005).
13 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xiv.
14 In 1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined the phrase “Califor-
nian Ideology” in an essay by the same title, which provided a genealogy of
the concept of the Internet as a placeless and universalizing utopia, with
information technologies as emancipatory, limitless, and beyond geography.
See http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology-main.html.
15 Cf. Charles R. Acland, “Introduction: Residual Media,” in Acland, Residual
Media, xx.
16 Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 37–54.
17 See Eric Kluitenberg, ed., The Book of Imaginary Media (Rotterdam: Nai,
2006); Eric Kluitenberg, “On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media,” in Media
Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo
and Jussi Parikka, 48–69 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
18 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New
Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).
19 For more information, see Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Real-
ity of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). See
also Eugene Thacker, introduction to Protocol: How Control Exists after De-
centralization, by Alex Galloway (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), xiii.
20 Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the
Turn of the Millennium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 176. For
a relevant discussion of infrastructure, see Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruh-
leder, “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large
Information Spaces,” Information Systems Research 7, no. 1 (1996): 63–92.
21 Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 185.
22 Garnet Hertz, personal correspondence, October 20, 2009.
23 Erkki Huhtamo, “Time-Traveling in the Gallery: An Archaeological
Approach in Media Art,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Envi-
ronments, ed. Mary Anne Moser with Douglas McLeod (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1996), 243.
24 Erkki Huhtamo, “Thinkering with Media: The Art of Paul DeMarinis,” in
Paul DeMarinis, Buried in Noise (Berlin: Kehrer, 2011).
25 Gutta-percha is a natural latex rubber made from tropical trees native to
Southeast Asia and northern Australasia. Columbite tantalite, or “coltan,” is
a dull black metallic ore, primarily from the eastern Democratic Republic of
Notes to Appendix 191
the Congo, whose export has been cited as helping to finance the present-
day conflict in Congo.
26 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (Lon-
don: Athlone Press, 2000).
27 Sean Cubitt, interviewed by Simon Mills, Framed, http://www.ada.net.nz/
library/framed-sean-cubitt/.
28 Such hidden but completely real and material “epistemologies of everyday
life” are investigated in a media archaeological vein by the Institute for Algo-
rhythmics, http://www.algorhythmics.com/.
29 Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (New York: Zone
Books, 1997).
This page intentionally left blank