Damage Technics

I want to spend most of my time today talking about one company: KoBold Metals, a silicon valley start-up who are, to my knowledge, the most egregious exploiters of the energy transition agenda to engage in neocolonial plunder of critical minerals from the Global South. However, before getting into that I want to quickly lay out a pattern that I came across from doing some archival research around the geological surveys undertaken by the British Colonial Geological Survey of what were then referred to as its African protectorates. In the 1950s relatively high prices for niobium stimulated geological prospecting for rare earths in these colonies, amongst them the identification by Tanganyika Geological Survey of the rare-earth bearing carbonatite at Wigu Hill. As the author writes, at that time “Naturally some of the carbonatites that were examined were found to be of little economic interest”.

Sixty years later, however, in March 2008, the Canadian mining company Montero commenced prospecting activities on Wigu Hill. After a decade of exploration and chemical assays on rocks extracted from the site, the Tanzanian government rescinded their retention license. As a result, the mining company filed for arbitration, requesting compensation of 90 million Canadian dollars for what it called <quote> the “unlawful expropriation and mistreatment of Montero’s investment in Tanzania”.<end quote>

In November 2024 a settlement was finally reached, with Tanzania being forced to pay Montero £27 million US dollars in three instalments. As this instance shows, when western mining corporations are prevented from extracting wealth from an African state, they cry expropriation and use international arbitration procedures to recoup their financial speculation on the territorial resources of another sovereign nation.

To my mind, this case is exemplary of what Kathryn Yusoff describes as the slippage between the two meanings of “property” in the context of geology: “property as a description of mineralogy and property as an acquisition”. The right to prospect, which is the right to describe the mineral properties of a given location, becomes conflated with the right to acquire those minerals as property. As an artist I’m particularly interested in the visual cultures that enable dispossession. So, for example here – on the left a diagram of how the properties of a mineral are changed into a metal – a process is called beneficiation, which I’ll come back to later, and on the right a diagram of corporate ownerships showing how – in this case – Tanzanian Nickel becomes the property of a company headquartered in the Isle of Man.

The 1957 summary of Colonial Geological Surveys contains numerous references to minerals now crucial to energy transition. The introduction lists findings of rare-earth minerals at several locations including Nkombwa, Kangankunde, Tundulu, Mrima. Now, with energy transition a political priority and the automobile industry dependent on electrification to stay in business, these hills are all being prospected, contested, or actively extracted.

In July 2022, Marula Mining reported their plans to mine the monazites of Nkombwa Hill, it has now abandoned the project in pursuit of more profitable projects. Lindian Resources is currently set to commence production of rare earths at Kangankunde Hill, Malawi. Also in Malawi, in June 2024 DY6 Metals received confirmation of the license for their Tundulu project. It is only Mrima Hill in Kenya that bucks the trend, where, following the suspension of a mining license by the Kenyan government, a tribunal dismissed the case that had been brought by Cortec Mining and Stirling Capital. It seems that every single deposit found and deemed uneconomic is now suddenly being mined. I’m interested in this line that says “investors were spooked by resource nationalism”. Because the competition for critical minerals is often hailed by those on the right as a nationalist concern. Especially in the US, where Senator’s like Todd Young are aggressively pursuing legislation to enable critical minerals trade deals in the explicit name of nationalism, yet of course when a “resource rich” nation —a term which seems to be used as a euphemism for a poor country—pursues resource nationalism, then that is sufficient to “spook” investors.

So —hopefully that gives a picture of the research— I have been combing through colonial archive documents, investor presentations, prospecting reports and environment impact assessments and consistently finding the same pattern. For example here’s a British colonial era geological map of Tanzania and here’s a map from a corporate slideshow by Kabanga Nickel which seems blissfully unaware that it reads visually as a complete erasure of the topology, history, and community of a sovereign nation, annotating its land solely with the corporate interests who own various patches of its subsoil.

Having established this pattern, I want to move on to KoBold Metals – a company who have clearly learnt to keep their white male executives and shareholders out of their publicity materials. The company’s explicit aim is to develop “a Google Maps of the Earth’s crust, with a special focus on finding copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium deposits”. The reasons for this selection of metals are evident from the investor presentations of numerous mining companies currently prospecting in Africa. Batteries. Batteries for cars.

Yusoff describes geology as a white science. What is immediately apparent from researching current mining projects to resource energy transition is how the expropriative terminologies and technics of white geology are being mobilized to prospect for resources to guarantee the survival of an equally white automobility. The clean, green claims of the electric vehicle industry will be underwritten by the pollution of African landscapes and the labour of its inhabitants. The freedom of movement enjoyed by white populations is once again a privilege built on expropriation. 

Unlike most of the companies mentioned so far KoBold are not a traditional mining company. But first and foremost are a technology company who are applying the standard playbook of machine learning and artificial intelligence found in LLMs to the process of geological prospecting. To do so they have developed two proprietary software packages, which I will discuss in some detail:

TerraShed

The first of these, TerraShed is a geoscience database for storing and accessing exploration data which can then be analysed by the second, their MachineProspector package, which they describe as: “a continually evolving system comprising a growing repository of proprietary machine learning, data processing and artificial intelligence modules”. KoBold offers potential partners the benefits of these two software services, neither of which are available for licence or sale, in exchange for their data.

TerraShed <and I’m quoting here from an article about the company>: “functions like a massive data integration and visualization engine. It ingests geological maps, geophysical surveys, geochemical analyses, drilling records, satellite imagery, topography, climate data, and dozens of other data types. The platform standardizes these diverse formats, aligns them spatially and temporally, and creates unified representations of geological information across large regions. This integration alone provides value because it makes previously siloed data accessible together.”

The most recent estimate I can find suggest that this database already holds somewhere between 3 and 5% of global geoscience data. How is this acquired? Here I’d like to show you two opposing examples of how geological archive data has either been made available or contested by the authorities holding the data. In the first case, Zambia, who have essentially handed the responsibility for digitising its archive to KoBold, for whom it then becomes valuable training data for its AI prospecting tool.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Africa Museum in Belgium recently denied KoBold the right to digitise its geological survey archive of the Congo, their director is quoted as saying <quote> “Privatising them does not seem fair to us and would give one company a significant commercial advantage over another, which is not in line with our identity as a public and scientific service” <end quote> It seems strange to me that a museum of looted artefacts and archives in a European colonising nation is now the last bastion protecting that country’s resources from further exploitation.

However, KoBold appears to have circumvented this decision by coming to agreement with Congolese authorities… In July 2025, the DRC and Kobold Metals committed to <quote> “cooperate to provide free public access to historical geoscientific data through the National Geological Service of Congo (SGNC) in the interest of all”. <end quote> But clearly to the greatest financial interest of KoBold, and just last month KoBold announced that it has signed a deal with the government of Burundi to digitise their geological archives.

Machine Prospector

In a talk by KoBold CEO Kurt House, he explains how they differ from traditional prospecting companies. The industry standard model of predicting the shape and size of a target mineral ore is to generate a single block model. It’s what House refers to disparagingly as a best guess. Instead MachineProspector takes the scientific observations from a specific location and – using the knowledge of previous explorations and mined ore bodies stored in TerraShed –it makes thousands of simulations of the possible shape of a mineral deposit that would fit the observed data. It then superimposes all of the matches on top of one another to determine <and now I’m quoting again> “The precise location, depth, and angle of the hole that would intersect the largest number of all the possible deposits is calculated to determine where to mine.”

And—from the effusive promotional material scattered all over the internet—it seems to be very successful. At this point all of a sudden KoBold starts to look very much like a traditional mining company, so right now in Zambia it is drilling what House unironically refers to in his talk as “one of the neatest new copper deposits around at Mingomba”.  

Here, down in the foreground, we see KoBold’s drill rig at Mingomba from the vantage point of a drone. I’m interested not only in how the geological diagramming of the subsoil erases the cultural and ecological value of place, but also how photographs like this — and indeed the one of Wigu Hill with which I started — are used to construct an image of the land as an empty, uninhabited terrain, visually producing the impression that mining here doesn’t impact communities. Although of course we can also observe the river running across the image and ask what the Environment Impact Assessment will have to say about the inevitable danger to that fresh water source, to the migratory communities of mammals that might rely on it and be displaced and so on.

But going back to KoBold’s MachineProspector, the software goes further than telling you where to dig: by highlighting “what type of data would affect the per unit dollar of exploration expenditure, recommending what data should be collected next.”

KoBold isn’t only ingesting legacy data, its business model operates on the basis that by outsourcing the services of MachineProspector to other companies it can profit both financially and data-colonially: the more data it ingests, the more accurate its models, the more accurate its models the more invaluable it becomes as prospecting service until it reaches the point where the cost of “traditional” prospecting in labour and time becomes unsustainable by comparison with the loss of a portion of your profits to partner with KoBold. So, to feed TerraShed, KoBold has initiated numerous joint ventures and earn-in partnerships with other mining companies, ranging from large international mining corporations like Rio Tinto and BHP to smaller subsidiaries prospecting individual locations. In the case of smaller organisations like Libra Energy, who are prospecting for Lithium in Flanders, Canada, KoBold have signed an earn-in agreement that would see them taking 75% of the profits from that project by its 6^th year, on the understanding that they commit $33million to exploration of the project. And the reason they are able to get such beneficial terms is that their expenditure on the project exceeds the entire valuation of the Libra Energy as a company.

KoBold currently has similar joint ventures and earn-in agreements signed with companies exploring in Finland, Greenland, DRC, Canada, and Zambia, and it has also proven that if the results of prospecting don’t look promising they are willing to pull out, but of course when they do—as with Midnight Sun’s Solwezi project in Zambia—they have still increased the value of their software along the way by giving it more field tests. So, during this early stage in the company’s development, for KoBold these ventures are win-win even without the production of minerals.

Where does that money come from? In short: Big Tech. KoBold has initiated three private sector funding rounds, the first of which in March 2019 raised $20million including from Venture Capital Fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures which is funded by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Michael Bloomberg. But also from Equinor – the Norwegian state oil company. Its second funding round raid $192million and its most recent one last year raised $537 million, the majority of which is being ploughed into turning the Mingomba deposit in Zambia into a working mine. This is my diagram of the income and interests of this single company. I suspect its not as exhaustive as it could be.

Beneficiation and waste

I said at the start that I would come back to the process of beneficiation, which is the name given by the mining industry to the production of metal-rich concentrate from raw ores. Beneficiation, literally means making good, but this ostensibly objective term again contains a racialised dynamic, because— in all processes of refinement—this “making good” produces waste materials known as “spoil” or “tailings”, which usually constitutes over 90% of the material mined. So, the “good”, or in other words valuable, product extracted is a tiny fraction, the massive majority of which ends up dumped in heaps or tailings ponds. The shadow of white beneficiation is the enduring pollution of black and brown peoples’ homelands from which its resources have plundered. But now that the raw material demands of infrastructure have changed, these spoil heaps are actually found to contain highly desirable percentages of scarce metals. Colonialism isn’t the only thing being recycled in sub-Saharan Africa for energy transition. There is also some literal recycling of waste materials: in this case Germanium.

This is the centre of Lubumbashi, where the pile of mine waste colloquially known as Big Hill has dominated the skyline for decades since Belgian colonizers were expelled from the country in 1967. The map on the left shows you the extent to which Lubumbashi has been dominated by the mining industry, and here it is 1917, when the Belgian mining company Union Miniere Haut-Katanga (UMHK) operated a copper and cobalt mine on the site.

In the case of Big Hill the historic relationships between colonial mining and contemporary resources are not merely contextual but actual. Following its ejection from the Congo UMHK rebranded itself Union Minière in 1968 and, following a merger with other companies in 2001, eventually became Umicore, who have now signed a deal with a Congolese company which is processing germanium from the mine waste in Big Hill. The 10 million tons of spoil in Lubumbashi literally generated some of the wealth upon which Umicore’s corporate knowledge and mineral processing expertise was built. This expertise is now being sold back to the same country ‘in return for exclusive access to the processed germanium’. The collateral debris from one round of expropriation now serves as the raw material for a second round.

In rare earth mining the quantity and toxicity of its tailings is particularly egregious, usually containing high quantities of heavy metals such as cadmium and the radioactive element thorium. So the legacy of the current proliferation of rare earth mines across Africa will be an equal number of toxic tailings ponds whose contents will poison the land for decades to come, until the heavy metals contained in them becomes valuable enough that a profit can be gouged out of reprocessing them. And of course, KoBold are now implicated in this reprocessing race too. This is Manono, also in the DRC, historically this was the site of the Manono-Kitotolo tin and cobalt mine, run by a Belgian mining company, and leaving a legacy of tailings ponds and spoil heaps as well as remaining pegmatite deposits beneath them which are rich in Lithium. This site particularly emblematic of the current global critical minerals race as Chinese mining corporation Zijin is currently developing a mine on its north-east section, while Kobold has purchased the share owned by Australian mining company AVZ. The centre of Africa is once again, being carved up while between global powers to fuel their economic development and maintain their geopolitical power. Documents like these, which proclaim to bring peace and prosperity, while admitting that their sole purpose is to <quote> bring the Manono Lithium to Western markets <end quote>.

In some ways you have to hand it to House and his co-founders – geophysical prospecting is quite simply a far better use case for Artificial Intelligence than the text and image generation that dominates headlines. There are a finite number of mineral formulations which at this point are well known, surveyed, observed, and diagrammed. Training an AI to recognise the signs of these deposits is a commercial no-brainer, as is reflected by KoBold’s current $2.96 billion valuation as a company.

KoBold have also recognised what is repulsively referred to as the “generational opportunity” provided by energy transition. This phrase is reminiscent of what TJ Demos has referred to as ‘disaster capitalism: which flips runaway climate change into an economic opportunity achieved through techno-scientific rationality matched by Silicon Valley funding’. This simple phrase discloses KoBold’s perspective: that energy transition is less an essential de-escalation of emissions than it is an opportunity to generate economic growth through the perpetuation of an extractive industry, now under the guise of sustainability. This nominal commitment to sustainability as the ultimate goal of infrastructural transition is now enabling a rapid expansion of mining projects that ignore their own unsustainability.

Under the corporate practices of KoBold (and others) energy transition is mobilised as ethical cover for an exploitative reinvigoration of colonial mining practices. But where this all gets far more complex is when we factor in the entanglement of Artificial Intelligence. The NYT captured the circular loop in this logic with their headline about the company.

The AI boom is fuelling a massive expansion of computational capacity – and I’m not going to say anything about data centers this morning because there are people here today, including the next speaker, who know far more about that subject than I do – but one of the clear possibilities of the coincidence of energy transition with the current AI boom, is that the electrification made possible by companies like KoBold’s rampant expansion of mining activities is that it fuels energy additionality rather than energy transition.

The expansion of mining—for which consent is being manufactured on the basis of transitioning away from fossil fuels—might only end up feeding the expanding energy requirements of AI technology, one of whose functions is now to find the minerals required for its own computational capacities. The scarcity of these minerals, and the complex metallurgical processes required for their beneficiation will produce mountains of waste and toxic lakes at the sites of their extraction. The foundations of energy transition look likely to produce radioactive mud for some communities to ensure access to A.I. slop for others. Energy transition will provide the illusion of emissions free automobility to its white consumers, and another proliferation of poisonous playgrounds and used car tyres for African children.

Yesterday I was at the Planetary Experiments conference in Dresden, organised and moderated by Michaela Büsse and Johanna Mehl. I presented my recent research, including part of my ongoing collaboration with Theo Stanley, on the imaging techniques used to measure carbon – in both industrial emissions and forestry absorption – and how these techniques present the possibility to use remote sensing in carbon governance and marketisation. Below is the text of my talk:

Net zero leverages economic theory as a method of atmospheric management. A financial market that has delivered widening inequalities and planetary injustices is now being trumpeted as the mechanism with which to achieve balance. These are the logics of the carbon market: We can account our way out of ecological collapse. We can transact carbon by commodifying ecosystem services. We can exchange pollution with nature restoration to eliminate emissions. We can regulate planetary phenomena with monetary mechanisms. In short, net zero applies the ideologies of neoliberalism to the biosphere.

This carbon economy is built upon a set of conceptual equivalences. Every industrial or metabolic process can be quantified in terms of its capacity to emit, absorb, release or sequester carbon. These capacities are now traded in two parallel markets. The mandatory carbon market is regulated by mechanisms such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and requires industrial polluters to purchase emissions credits in a cap and trade system. Meanwhile, the voluntary carbon market offers offsets to anyone who wishes to purchase either peace of mind, or positive PR.

The first equivalence is carbon dioxide equivalence, against which every greenhouse gas is measured. This is also known as its global warming potential. Over a 20 year time frame, Methane has a global warming potential of 84, meaning one tonne of methane has the same warming effect as 84 tonnes of CO2. Fortunately, unlike carbon dioxide, methane degrades in the atmosphere relatively quickly. The CO2 equivalence of some refrigerants, however, is shocking. Chloro-di-fluoromethane, for example, better known as HCFC-22, is used in air-conditioning and has a global warming potential of 1080. But the industrial synthesis of this refrigerant also produces small quantities of the gas Trifluoroethane or HCFC-23. This so-called super greenhouse gas has a CO2 equivalence of either 11,700 or 14,800 tonnes, depending on which estimate you believe. Planetary warming has increased the demand for localised cooling. Air conditioning business is booming. But the atmospheric consequences of aircon could be recursive warming. For every 100 tonnes of HCFC-22 that is produced, 3 tonnes are HCFC-23. The capture and decomposition of these three tonnes of gas can be exchanged on carbon markets bringing a further income stream to air-conditioning manufacturers and enabling the industrial emission of 35,100 tonnes of CO2 elsewhere. What would the global warming potential of the sustained growth of the air conditioning industry be if the avoided emissions of its by-products were asymmetrically traded in this way in perpetuity?

The standardised measure of the first equivalence is 1 tonne of CO2. But, as with all capitalised commodities, carbon offsets are not all created equal. Offsetting one tonne of CO2 on the voluntary carbon market can cost as little as 47 cents per tonne, while the EU price on the compliance market on the day of writing was $70. Carbon credits can be underwritten on the basis of the avoidance of hypothetical emissions or for actual carbon removals, the latter are more expensive: a price point seen as reflecting their “high-integrity”. I arrange a market intelligence call with one carbon networking company to discuss the purchase of credits to offset the production of my own artistic research. I am informed that “avoided deforestation would be the cheapest option available” to me. It is clear from our discussion that the majority of voluntary carbon credits purchased are for projects located in the Global South, simply because they are cheaper per tonne. But, as a report published last year by Carbon Market Watch points out, there is a discrepancy between where carbon projects are located, and where the companies involved in those projects are headquartered. Carbon commodities are regulated by registries, the market mechanisms that codify and verify a set of methodologies for carbon capture or the avoidance of emissions. The American Carbon Registry methodology of Improved Forest Management (IFM), for example, aims to “offset lost revenues associated with reduced harvest levels and retention of forest growth”. This methodology “encompasses a range of silvicultural activities which increase the carbon stored in forests.” “The potential greehhouse has benefits from Improved Forest Management in the U.S. are estimated to be 279.4 million metric tons per year.” In 2022 total emissions in the US were estimated to be 6343 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, 12% of which was calculated to be offset by land use and forestry. According to these calculations, maximising IFM across the continental US could offset a further 4%.

Improved Forest Management is therefore one means of shifting the economic model of forestry—as my collaborator has characterised it—from one of growing timber, to one of growing credits. The current shift in forestry’s economic paradigm has coincided with a shift in the scientific measurement paradigm, from direct observation to remote sensing. Simultaneous with the economic conceptualisation of forests moving from plantation to carbon sink, their dominant measurement regime is transferring from tape measure to laser scanning. The global biomass maps used to calculate planetary carbon stocks will be remotely sensed by synthetic aperture radar, such as the instrument on ESAs biomass mission satellite.

According to German theorist Alfred Sohn-Rethel “intellectual abstractions such as scientific concepts or ideological constructs, have their origins … in the abstractive practices embodied in commodity-exchange and monetisation”. In the case of the carbon economy it seems to me that the inverse is true, that scientific understandings of spectroscopy and the carbon cycle provide the foundations for the marketisation of emissions and sequestrations. Today I will briefly discuss two particular manifestations of this entanglement between science, abstraction and commodity as they relate to net zero and the carbon market. On the one hand, the implementation of LiDAR as a technique of carbon measurement in scientific forestry. And, on the other, the multispectral satellite measurements of methane emissions from mining, landfill and fossil fuel infrastructure, now made by a variety of commercial satellite missions. In the former, microtemporal differentiations in the reflections of lasers dissolve the forest’s material reality into a cloud of points whose spatial relation is globally precise. While in the latter, volumes of atmosphere are flattened into two dimensional plumes of pixels in the now near-ubiquitous heatmap spectrum. It is here—in the common colour spaces inherited from computer graphics—where these two techniques of visualisation meet. Vectors of vegetation reflectance and atmospheric pollution both represented as chromatic measurements of hue and saturation.

The Remote Sensing Complex

In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff outlines the constituents of what he calls a “complex of visuality”. “First,” he writes, “visuality classifies by naming, categorizing and defining”, it then “separates and segregates those it visualizes” and finally “makes this separated classification seem right and hence aesthetic”. “Classifying, separating, and aestheticizing together form a complex of visuality.” Here, I would like to extend and adapt Mirzoeff’s formulation to the data visualisations used in scientific practice. Mirzoeff’s list comprises the plantation complex, the imperial complex, and the military-industrial complex, to which I will add the remote sensing complex which has by now become the dominant mode of contemporary scientific data visualisation and the prevailing imaginary for environment-scale resource management.

For Mirzoeff, visuality “was founded in plantation practice.” The clearing of primeval forest and its replacement with the linear arrangement of monocultural cash-crops constitutes a natal moment of visuality. In the process the forest is also prepared for the camera, spatially arranged to conform to the perspectival construction of space. This complex of visuality begins from an attempted erasure of the historic ecology of a place: the imposition of an always imaginary terra nullius, that is echoed in the isolation of contemporary scientific visualisations from their context: the blank blackness or bright whiteness of spatial software simulations. If plantation visuality arranged singled species geometrically to facilitate their future harvest, then what economisation and extraction is being enabled by the remote sensing of forest biomass?

I will return to Mirzoeff’s intial stage of classification later, because remote sensing is fuelled first and foremost by data acquisition. Image capture is continuously performed, actively or passively at a nested series of scales from the individual leaf to the entire planet, and across a vast range of the electromagnetic spectrum. On the day that I’m writing, a PhD student is fixing cameras to branches in the canopy of a forest in Demmin, northern Germany. The cameras will monitor the circadian movement of the leaves, which, in spite of its potentially vast impact on vegetation reflectance at landscape scale, remains unaccounted for in satellite remote sensing. The remoteness of remote sensing is always dependent on this physical, located, and highly repetitive labour to produce local observations with which to verify global measurements. Planetary scale calculations are informed by numerous ground truth models.

The second stage of Mirzoeff’s complex of visuality: separation, corresponds precisely with the software process of segmentation: the partitioning of an image or dataset into its component elements. In forest science, automating segmentation, both by species and of individual trees is currently a key ambition. Even though the measurement paradigm has shifted to quantifying vitality, structural diversity, and other essential biodiversity variables, these are still derived from the atomisation of forests into their constituent trees.

The third stage of Mirzoeff’s complexes is aestheticization, which, in remote sensing, takes place exclusively within the spaces of software. The granular accuracy of LiDAR as a spatial measurement system goes a long way to making the point cloud visualisations it produces convincing and aesthetic. With one click the forest canopy is transformed from a dizzyingly dense array of data, into shaded clumps of vegetation. It is made to look like trees, literally sculpting the data for human visual perception. But it is the colour mapping that is the most glaring example of aestheticization in scientific data visualisation. False colour renderings, due to their association with scientific method, have come to be accepted as reflecting some imperceptible reality, perhaps even as closer to truth than perception. The epistemic value of colour in these images, even when entirely arbitrary, is commonly understood as giving extra-perceptual access to reality, as holding some physiological truth to which we are insensible. As Haraway succinctly put it so long ago “these fabulous objects come to us simultaneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of technoscientific production.” Aesthetically constructed astronomical images are popularly adopted as if they held an indexical certainty. Images of known realities in spectacular hyperspectral colour are taken to access their material essence in a manner that evades unaided perception.

The preponderance of these images in the earth sciences, their conflation with truth, implies that fixing the planet can be achieved simply by fixing the pictures. >>15 The promotional test materials for the commercial greenhouse gas sensing satellite Carbon Mapper, provides a case in point, the animations generated from its test flights over the Permian Basin imply that monitoring, locating and eliminating methane leaks from the oil installations in the region would be sufficient to clean it up, as if methane are the environmental problem with fossil fuels. The business model of commercial remote sensing has become reliant on the smooth functionality of their online mapping platforms. Visualisation is vital to the evidential weight of emissions data. The superimposition of saturated pixels onto a satellite image or map background confers legitimacy on what would otherwise be an abstract arrangement of colour. The geolocation of graphics produces them in the mind of the user as a real phenomenon. Not only does their source become visible, but also their scale, reach, perhaps even some measure of their impact on the populations whose homes are occluded beneath these pixelated plumes.

Spectral Counter-Governance

In the data visualisations of forest lidar and emissions monitoring the technical, aesthetic and political are all entangled. Methane sensing satellites respond directly to a requirement of the Kyoto protocol for independent verification of emissions. The imaging technique has been developed in academic science contexts, yet their operation has become a commercial enterprise, highly valuable to a fossil fuel industry desperate to improve its image. In this case the sensing capacity was expressly designed to address a political aim, but, at the other end of the carbon cycle—in the forest—the connections are less direct.

The scientists we met this Spring have little interest in carbon quantification, they are concerned with understanding forest ecologies, how they can survive the impending shocks of a changing climate, what benefits novel sensing techniques will bring them in developing this understanding. But the measurement regimes they employ on the ground are being applied at continental scales from space. The electromagnetic wavelength employed by ESAs biomass mission bypasses reflections from leaves enabling spaceborne measurements of trunk and branch. In the logic of the carbon market, these biomass calculations could quickly become a capacity to be traded, and the more granular the measurement technologies producing the estimates become, the more carbon can be squeezed into them. When asked which ecological processes they are measuring, one scientist we interviewed replied that—precisely speaking—the only thing they are measuring is growth, from which all other variables have to be estimated, inferred or extrapolated in coded models. In a carbon economy such measurements of physiological growth could end up feeding into markets fixated on economic growth. This might seem like a glib pun, but—to return to Mirzoeff’s first stage of classification—the trick of carbon economics is a semantic one. It is the classification of metabolic processes in carbon terms that makes them exchangeable. Not only can the growth of a tree produce economic growth but also the decision to not cut another tree: avoided deforestation is cheaper than reforestation. All metabolisms, from the scale of the individual organism to that of the global corporation, can be abstracted in this manner. Simply including more of them in the carbon calculus would provide brokers with a steady stream of offsetting portfolios to sell.

The ostensible goal of the remote sensing complex is the production of a regime of spectral measurement that can monitor vegetative health, infrastructural integrity and resource management at the planetary scale. The outputs of this can then be run into scientific models, algorithmic avatars of earthly environments that perform the calculations on which the conclusions of climate science are built. Matteo Pasquinelli has referred to a similar conception as “the governance machine of the Anthropocene”. The parallel construction of systems of satellite emissions measurement and global biomass maps points towards a regime of environmental economics in which the growth of forests are instrumentalised solely as carbon sinks to enable extractive industry to persist elsewhere. A planetary operational image system where data abstractions of industry and ecosystem are placed in exchange with one another, where wilderness becomes valuable only for its ability to offset consumption.

While researching methane emissions sensing a headline catches my eye. In Memphis a set of 35 methane-burning turbines have been installed to meet the prodigious power requirements of the data centre where X-AI supercomputer is currently being trained. Activists from the Southern Environmental Law Centre have obtained and published thermal aerial imagery of the site, clearly showing the turbines in operation. The pressure group estimate the power output of the turbines to be 421 MW — all installed and operating illegally without an air permit. The turbine manufacturer’s data states that the emissions will include between 1200 and 2000 tonnes of Nitrous oxides (NOx), whose absorption of infrared frequencies means they have a global warming potential between 30 and 33 on a 20 year timescale, comparable to that of methane. It is infrared aerial imagery that provides the smoking gun with which to challenge the impact of the AI industry on Earth’s infrared absorption spectrum.

The production of climate knowledge from satellite observations is reliant on an identical infrastructure of information access and storage as found in X’s Memphis data centre. Climate science is necessarily data heavy and this content courses through the same circuitry of servers by which surveillance capitalism scrapes and accumulates its content. Environmental politics has placed science in conflict with the vested interests of big tech even while it remains wholly reliant on their very infrastructures. Elon Musk, whose data centre quickly retired half of its methane turbines when challenged, currently owns two thirds of the satellites in earth orbit. Emissions sensing has the potential to challenge corporate claims, and evidence atmospheric pollution. But these visualisations have always struck me as reminiscent of CCTV: evidence after the fact. Mirzoeff describes CCTV as having “no other effect than to make the watching visible.” Emissions monitoring has the potential to function on solely this performative level, without enabling preventative action.

Greenhouse gas sensing satellites are not passive, but must be targeted at specific sites, the decision of which observations a satellite makes is referred to as “tasking”. If we are going to have a regime of climate governance by remote sensing then who gets to choose these targets becomes politically vital. I arrange a call with a representative of UK Satellite Catapult’s Sustainable Earth project, through whom tasking can be arranged, and am told that “as a researcher” I have the right to request tasking through the European Space Agency third party programme, but that I may find the process overwhelming, and the observations of data centres may well come back without emissions. For Mirzoeff, the “ability to assemble a visualisation manifests the authority of the visualiser.” He lays claim to The Right to Look as an oppositional gaze, the construction of a counter-visuality with which to challenge or contest the visualiser’s authority. In the remote sensing complex, perhaps it is the Right to Task: the authority to define the targets of earth observation that needs to be challenged. Might democratising this Right to Task be mobilised to produce a counter-visuality of earth observation?

The seed of this talk was a tweet several years ago by American academic Shannon Mattern, who in response to a question about what the greatest fallacy of contemporary universities is, eschewed all the obvious answers about mismanagement, and wrote simply “disciplines”. If the University is the best mechanism that industrial society has developed to organise the production of knowledge, then its disciplinary compartmentalisation has been foundational. Of course there are exceptions, primarily originating in the humanities, where the importance of disciplines has been de-emphasised—I’m thinking for example of the model of the Institute of Advanced Studies—but for the larger part, the structure of disciplines remains disciplinary, sometimes even in the Foucauldian sense.

My instinct, in life, as an academic, and in my own artistic practice runs counter to this. And this talk is really just me trying to feel my way into talking, not about the work itself, but about its approach to disciplinary knowledge. This is not something about which I know very much, nor have I read in great depth about it so I am certain that I am missing some important precedents. Nevertheless, I have been trying to find some of my own, beginning with Alfred North Whitehead’s thoughts on speculation:

“Speculation, [he writes] by entertaining alternative theories is superficially sceptical, disturbing to established modes of prejudice. But it obtains its urge from a deep ultimate faith that through and through the nature of things is penetrable by reason. Scholarship, by its strict attention to accepted methodologies, is superficially conservative of belief. … For scholars the reasonable topics in the world are penned in isolated regions, this subject matter or that subject matter. Your thorough-going scholar resents the airy speculation which connects his own patch of knowledge with that of his neighbour. He finds fundamental concepts interpreted, twisted, modified” (108).

It seems to me that the twisting, interpretation and modification of concepts which are accepted as incontrovertible in some disciplines, is a necessary precursor to the knowledge synthesis of artistic experimentation. So, I’m taken with Whitehead’s understanding of the speculative, not as the fictional or fantastical, but as the extrapolation of knowledge from one discipline into questions posed outside of its boundaries.

I can illustrate this quickly with an example drawn from the practice of American artist Claire Pentecost who has done a lot of research into soil biology and industrial farming methods. Of seeds she writes:

“Most of the seeds that yield food and flavors, medicine, and flowers have been cultivated for generations by millions of people. As a material form of collective knowledge, seeds constitute one of the longest-running open-source systems in history. Agricultural diversity is not simply spontaneous but is the product of centuries of attentive cultivation and unregulated exchange. Designed to travel, the seed is a powerfully compact and mobile medium and for this reason is easily fetishized for exchange on the market. The privatization of the seed in the form of intellectual property is legalized theft of the commons.”

Pentecost is exemplary of Whitehead’s speculative scholar because research across botany, biology and agriculture, leads her not to conclusions within whichever of those disciplines she is thinking but to economics. This is typical of Pentecost’s practice, exemplified by her proposal to replace the petro-dollar with the soil-erg a unit of currency made of dirt and work (erg being a unit of energy). Soil, she writes, “must be produced and maintained in a context. It makes no sense to circulate it … If currency as we know it is the ultimate deterritorialization, the soil-erg’s value is inherently territorialized”. >>5 The work then consists of an economic speculation whose gesture is kind of reparative anticapitalism, proposing a corrective to capital’s abstraction of value from material, that radically roots value in the ground. It performs an opposition to extraction, a radically located and embodied notion of currency.

Pentecost was (and still is) part of a moment when artists took up the tools of biotech in an act of DIY resistance to the patenting and engineering of genetic material and to the ecological scourge of what I will call pestro-chemicals. To theorise her practice, and that of her peers, Pentecost proposes the model of the Public Amateur, whereby (and here I’m quoting an article about her work, at length):

“whereby artists inhabit the position of amateurs and hobbyists in order to make visible our everyday relationships with techno-scientific processes. The advantage of the amateur, is that one can enter specialized discourses in order both to reveal how those discourses function (that is, to demystify them) and to empower others to think about how science and technology function in their daily lives and in the public sphere at large. What’s more, since the amateur is not inside the discourses of techno-science, but rather an intruder into those forms of knowledge production, they may possibly see more clearly a series of relationships between corporations, public and private institutions, governmental agencies, and the everyday practices of consumers, producers, and citizens.”

Through the model of the Public Amateur, Pentecost redefines visual art’s value for intervening in the public sphere, enabling citizen-artists to “think what we are doing”.

It’s from this model of artist as disciplinary intruder that I have recently come to wonder whether the encounters that I have been having with those from other academic departments constitute collaborations or are better described as contaminations. Is the resident artist, engaged with scholars from other fields, actually more of an institutionally invasive species, a foreign body of knowledge smuggler, a disruptor of normative disciplinary functions and procedures.

In the rest of this talk I perform the role of Public Amateur, not, for once, talking about my own practice—the only thing about which most artists have expertise—but about how disciplinarity situates knowledge and in doing restricts it circulation.

The last time I was asked to speak about my work was while visiting Spectral Geologist Arjan Dijkstra at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Spectral Geology is a sub-discipline that uses measurement of the electromagnetic spectrum for mineralogical analysis. Having given his assembled colleagues a brief account of my previous contaminations of scientific research, I was faced with hostile questioning from one corner of the room: “what knowledge had been produced by my research?” my (inevitably male) inquisitor wanted to know. His demeanour typified the ruffled air of the scholar described by Whitehead, a man who could not imagine the epistemic value of the amateurish, and as he saw it “aesthetic” experiments that I was conducting. Interestingly he spoke the word aesthetic in the same disparaging tone that I often find myself doing. In response, I just about managed to explain that, to my mind, the most important knowledge I had gained from this research was a clarity about the extent to which the technologies we use are founded on a pollutive industry, whose toxic by-products we somehow accept as collateral, and that this model is the same one required for the generation of scientific knowledge.

Central to this response was the example I had given earlier in the talk of hydrofluoric acidb, one of the most toxic substances produced by and for western science, and yet essential to its knowledge production for its ability to etch and clean pure silicon. In their idealised pure form many of the 92 chemical elements are straightforwardly toxic to most terrestrial organisms. Yet, as Buckminster Fuller has shown in his diagram Profile of the Industrial Revolution, the isolation of these 92 substances has been foundational to science’s development. In this endless pursuit of purity, science has given a bad name to contamination. However, we can also find in western science, or, to be more specific, in the theory of symbiogenesis proposed by Lynn Margulis, an account of the generative nature of contamination in the evolution of complex multicellular life. Margulis proposed that the various primordial capacities of life: oxygen-respiration, mobility, photosynthesis originated in distinct bacteria and that it was by their bodily incorporation of one another, their symbiotic merger, that the earliest complex life forms emerged.

This detour into the speculations of evolutionary science leads to the central questions that I want to ask today: If, biologically speaking, the new can only come about by mutation, ingestion, contamination: then might not the same be true of knowledge? Do the strict delimitations of disciplinary knowledge not leave us in a kind of epistemic evolutionary stasis? Is the purity of such disciplinary knowledge regimes not as toxic to knowledge production as purified chemicals are to a biosphere evolved through symbiosis, through contaminative incorporation? But we will circle back to that question later because first I want to make the bridge to some of my own specific interests.

In 1992, Margulis included an essay by Sri Lankan scientist Cyril Ponnamperuma in her textbook on Environmental Evolution. In “Cosmochemical Evolution and the Origins of Life”, Ponnamperuma describes his attempts to experimentally synthesize the effects of ionizing radiation on a prebiotic Earth, “we had a linear accelerator emit a stream of beta particles into the “atmosphere” [in this case the experimental replacement for earth’s atmosphere consisted of a long horizontal tube attached to a flask between two heat lamps]. These beta particles interacted with the atmospheric constituents to form organic molecules”. Ponnamperuma was surprised to find that adenine, a central component of DNA and RNA, was among them. He writes “what seems to be an almost random experiment yielded the molecule most important for life”. One hypothesis, then, for the origin of life’s genetic material is simply in the intra-action of what we now consider dangerous and toxic wavelengths of solar radiation with chemicals that were abundant in the minerals and atmosphere of early earth. These intra-actions between energy and matter are studied by spectroscopy.

A few years ago I downloaded a scientific paper titled ‘The Spectral Signature of Recent Climate Change’, the first sentence reads: “The balance between net incoming solar radiation and outgoing terrestrial radiation at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere fundamentally drives our climate system.” I put it down, shocked at the simplicity, clarity and totality of that single sentence. Climate change, for all its complexities can be boiled down to an exchange between incoming and outgoing electromagnetic energy at the top of earth’s atmosphere. And the gases on which this energy gradient depends are exchanged in the leaves and lungs of terrestrial organisms. For Elizabeth Povinelli the lungs are the emblematic organ of our bodily porosity to our environment, but how can we solidify a societal understanding of the relationality of respiration and radiation? We breathe in and out the atmosphere that supports our life, and whose protective ozone layer—that shields us from ionizing frequencies of ultraviolet— was exhaled by the organisms of the nascent biosphere. If we follow Ponnamperuma’s thesis then the electromagnetic energies that generated the composite proteins of complex life, then soon became toxic to that life, whose current oxygen-reliant abundance could only thrive once those frequencies had been filtered out, absorbed atmospherically by ozone.

Spectroscopy has enabled us to analyse the chemical composition of the sun– by scrutinising its emission sprectrum for the dark lines which are the fingerprints of the chemical elements, and is now being used by the James Webb telescope to analyse the atmospheric composition of distant exoplanets. In the nineteenth century spectroscopy proved the fundamental continuity of electromagnetic energy beyond and through the visible spectrum. A continuum which, in the human urge to dissect and divide, we have parcelled in semantic pockets of long and short, far and near, infra and ultra, alpha and beta, and chopped into ever smaller functional fragments of radiowaves, microwaves, 3G, 4G, 5G and so on. The electromagnetic spectrum is another commons which has become industrialised and proprietorial: it constitutes the material basis for all telecommunications technologies, and the sensing apparatus for numerous scientific disciplines including meteorology, astronomy, climatology, and geophysics.

I have started to refer to all of these things: electromagnetic media technologies, and scientific sensing apparatuses as spectral geotechnics, a category so wide as to potentially be useless, but one that nevertheless conjoins all aspects with which my work is now concerned: spectral energies, earth systems, and technicities. Its usefulness, for me, lies in its potential to unify natural and anthropogenic technicities.

The atmosphere’s geotechnicity, for example, absorbs harmful frequencies of solar radiation, but transmits infrared, therefore providing a warm and safe environment for organic life. But the spectral technics of intercontinental radio broadcast is also reliant on the atmosphere’s reflection of certain wavelengths. In a similar way, all human capacities to understand earth systems are ultimately mediated through the facility of terrestrial materials to selectively emit, reflect, refract, transmit and absorb the electromagnetic spectrum. If we simply invert normative anthropocentric understandings of agency, then we can see human thought and knowledge production as merely an inventive and convoluted means of distributing the planet’s energy disparity. From this perspective, the biosphere is not a concept thought up by humanity, rather humanity is a notion conceived of by the biosphere. Ponamperumma’s conclusion to the Origin of Life in the Universe proposed a similar Copernican turn. “Today, he writes, we are gradually learning to accept the hypothesis that life is only a special and complicated property of matter and that basically there may be no difference between a living organism and lifeless matter.”

But I am drifting off topic.

I follow spectral geotechnics wherever I can find them, this takes me to a mountaintop in Northern Norway where a geophysical survey team are using an array of spectral geotechnics to prospect for lithium in the underlying pegmatites. One team fire a single frequency of ground penetrating radar into the bedrock, measuring its echoes off the underlying strata, while another fly a drone equipped with multi- and hyperspectral cameras over the area, collecting the reflectance spectra of the exposed rocks at the surface. I feverishly film their activity all day long, but—I realise later—more to look busy, to perform the role of documentary filmmaker. What actually interests me are their methodologies, their data, and their images. Asking them questions I am immediately aware of how their specialisations divide them from one another. Each of them clearly delimits their role in the overall project, or their lack of expert knowledge about the aspect I happen to have asked them. Rocks are not only studied by geologists, but by geophysicists, petrologists, geochemists, paleobiologists, mineralogists, and volcanologists to name only a few. I wonder how much they care about the latest innovations or discoveries in one another’s fields. And how and by whom the knowledge they each derive in their corners is assimilated into the whole that was articulated to the funder, and who this assimilated knowledge serves, which in this case sadly seems to primarily be the interests of mining companies.

Watching these earth technologists using their instruments to turn landscapes into commodities before my eyes makes me concerned about another balance, not that of radiation entering and exiting earth’s upper atmosphere, but that between the rate of industrial extraction on land and of mineral sedimentation at the bottom of earth’s oceans. The bios and the geos are mutually reliant spheres of energetic and material metabolism. Minerals weathered from the land are absorbed in the ocean by algal blooms: phytoplankton, radiolaria, and diatoms biotically transmit minerals from the land back into the food chain or onto the ocean bed. Margulis analogises this biological deposition of minerals to a “global skeleton or storage system, one that is drawn upon by life in the way a pregnant woman draws upon the calcium of her bones to feed her foetus”. Just as for Karen Barad, at the microscopic scale, there is no meaningful distinction between the molecules of a hand and those of the handle it holds, for Margulis—at the macro scale—there is no meaningful distinction between animal and mineral into separate kingdoms.

I purchase a textbook to inform myself about these processes: An Introduction to Marine Biogeochemistry. Its concatenated title seems to confess the futility of understanding holistic phenomena through sciences divided from themselves. The book falls open on a page about cosmogenic sedimentation: the perpetual rain of extraterrestrial fragments that permeate the atmosphere and sediment on ocean beds. The high concentrations of the element iridium in meteorites throws new light on the relationship between toxicity and purity, as I read that it was high concentrations of iridium dispersed in the atmosphere that are thought to have been responsible for a mass extinction 66 million years ago.

The opposition of generative contamination and toxic purification is far from binary. If we accept Ponamperuma’s proposal that ionising radiation created the fundamental proteins of bio-genetics, then multicellular life was made possible by what we now consider toxic radiation. It is only thanks to shelter from this radiation that the organic oxygenated abundance of the Holocene epoch has persisted so stably. Grasping this double bind allows us conceive that something which was once generative can become toxic to ongoing evolution. Is the same then not true of knowledge? That a structure and formation which has enabled innovations and discoveries to be made can then become stifling. In spite of its dissective, mechanistic and reductionist approach to matter, science has produced an extraordinary body of knowledge. But at what point does its tendency to fragment itself become obstructive to resolving the ensuing climate catastrophe that is also in part a consequence of its knowledge regime?

Artist Agnes Denes, whose practice and engagement with multiple disciplines makes her an exemplary Public Amateur, and a repeated critic of specialisation, likens the body of knowledge to that of an octopus. In The Predicament, she writes:

“Think of the body of knowledge as a form of octopus whose countless tentacles represent specialisations. As these tentacles multiply and extend, new ones grow out of the old, forming thousands of sinuous strands. Each speciality is locked into its own interests and language that narrow daily. Breadth is sacrificed for depth, detail and special interests. Meaningful exchange with the main body, for feedback and direction, becomes increasingly difficult. Specialisation, by definition, is narrow, limited, restricted and concentrated on one aspect at the expense of all others. While it does create experts who can analyse in unprecedented depth, it is all-consuming, leaving no time or inclination to integrate, filter, or even care about the growing wealth of information that obviously needs to be compressed and translated into a universal language”

Africana philosopher and Fanon scholar Lewis Gordon describes the worst traits of this system as “disciplinary decadence”: the slavish adherence to advancing the exclusive domain of one’s field of study, while art historian Clare Bishop describes the alternative as “drift rather than depth” and characterises this drift as typical of both the meta-discipline of artistic research and of the internet’s way of structuring knowledge and scholarship. But, where Bishop is ultimately somewhat disdainful of artistic research, describing its system of knowledge production as “governed by creative inaccuracy rather than expertise”, I am trying to describe an undisciplined model of knowledge practice which is not so much about the creative potential of inaccuracy as it is rigorously dubious of the stranglehold that accuracy and precision have come to hold over truth. Bishop proposes that artistic research proceeds by a casual multidisciplinarity, an almost random entangling of knowledge matter, but what I am after is far more strategically disruptive. I am trying to envisage a model of antidisciplinary practice that goes beyond what Nicola Triscott describes as co-enquiry, a model in which artists and scientists work alongside one another while not knocking each other out of their disciplinary lanes.

Monocultural plantations, such as the sitka woodlands of industrial pine foresty are now widely understood to be ecologically disastrous. But what is the difference between an industrialised agriculture of monocultures and an industrial epistemics of sub-disciplines and specialisms? The production of truths within disciplinary silos wholly ignores their wider integration and synthesis into a means of conceptualising the whole by which we are produced, with which we are permeated and without which we cannot persist.

Ecofeminist and activist Vandana Shiva, who is one of the figures depicted on Pentecost’s speculative soil-erg banknotes, describes the epistemic model of western science as being “born at a time when the Industrial Revolution needed an exploitative knowledge. And that knowledge for exploitation was then treated as the only reliable knowledge”. The division of minerals into metals, of substances into elements, of chemicals into atoms, of spectra into wavelengths, and—for that matter of peoples in races—have co-evolved as industrial systems with the division of knowledge into disciplines. What then is the model of knowledge that would be required to realise the de-industrial, decolonial, degrowth revolution that will either be forced upon us by climatic events, or, as seems increasingly unlikely, managed by a radical shift in geopolitics?

If this knowledge is capable of being generated in the academic spaces of our universities, which is also doubtful, then perhaps it is only by subverting or hijacking the divisive nature of its existing structures of knowledge production. Can we appropriate knowledge from science, interpret and modify it speculatively for our own ends? Can we take scientific theories of evolution and apply them—as I have done here—to human epistemic progress, taking literally the parallel that Gregory Bateson drew between mind and nature? How might we smuggle the research agendas of the arts and insert them into the workings of other disciplines to force them to consider the limits and consequences of their own worldviews?

Having thought through spectroscopy and tried working outside the disciplinary boundaries, it suddenly feels to me that existing within a single discipline is akin to seeing in a single colour: an expert’s perspective is analogous to having ultra high-definition vision, but in monochrome. To understanding a fragment of the spectrum in an obsessive depth.

In spectroscopy I have found a totalising lens that connects phenomena rather than isolating them. Understanding light, heat and radiation as a continual spectrum enables a grasp of all the energy exchanges in a system. To consider something spectrally refutes the isolation of one phenomenon from its environment. The balance of energy entering and exiting earth’s atmosphere is altered, maintained, exacerbated or mitigated by the circulation of matter. As the so-called knowledge economy struggles with the undesirable side-effects of its extractive circulations of physical matter not only do we need, as Denes so eloquently explains, to assimilate multidisciplinary knowledge for a basic grasp of the facts. We also need to think against disciplines, against the forces that mean that only economists are able to propose research agendas in economics, in order to propose and realise new agendas that treat the social, political, ecological, and epistemic as the entangled and inter-reliant spheres they are. In searching for the images

I came across Ponamperumma’s 1964 essay on the Origins of Life in the Universe, where he expresses his own doubts about disciplinarity:

“Even the formulation of this problem is perhaps beyond the reach of any one scientist, for such a scientist would have to be at the same time a competent mathematician, a physicist, and experienced organic chemist. He should have a very extensive knowledge of geology, geophysics, and geochemistry and, besides all this, be absolutely at home in all biological disciplines.”

Just 60 years later, I wonder what disciplinary competencies are needed to effectively formulate the problems of the world in which we now live, one for which science bears equal responsibility for problem creation as it does problem formulation or resolution.

I sit waiting for the camera to capture the passage of time, trying to acclimatise my perception to a different temporality. I watch the ripples on the surfce of the lake and the clouds drift across the sky, the gorse rustle and the distant diggers scurrying: the things that all move in my time. But what I am trying to see is beyond the time of my presence here, beyond the ability of the timelapse function I am using to gesture towards it. I am looking for how this landscape has been and is, was and will be, transforming imperceptibly. Trying to look for rather than looking at.

The diagonal cuts in the spoil-scree slopes opposite have been repurposed by sheep and wild ponies to feed on the scrub. Ingesting and excreting in the service of the soilless land. Moss, grass and ruminant, persistant pondweed photosynthesis. Fungi sprouting from faeces. All this patient toil, just visible, beneath a mountain of quarried spoil, a man-made future moorland-to-be.

Today, for the first time, a rock steadies my tripod, anchoring its spikes into the mud. The camera’s stability is provided by the land – its carbon fibres, once drawn from rocks, now pulled back pendulous down to rock. I sit at the edge of the moor, and the edge of the pit. Fungi grow in faeces at my feet. The moor spills over the previously barren benches of machine hewn, or digger dumped stone. Slowing my perception I watch the gorse rolling annually further down the slopes, trying to perceptually timelapse the decade advance of lichen into moss into grass into gorse.

I see the rain-cut rivulets in the scree, eroding familiar patterns of flow in the shovel-flattened embankments. The warning signs proclaim this to be the destabilising force of subsidence, but it’s actaully returning structural stability to the precarious mounds of spoil. Coagulating finer particles washed through gravel, cohereing granular particles, the gradual carbonation of gaps among the aggregate, securing footings, spreading weight. Fungi cultivated in faeces. How does the crust remediate itself following such comprehensive disturbance? Will these vast banks of ground granite solidify again having been blasted apart, dug and crushed? What are the forces that conjoin pebbles into rocks in the way that molelcules form covalent bonds by sharing electrons? Do those processes scale? While writing, grey clouds have rolled away and returned, the sun momentarily baked the scree and dried the dew. Precipitation, evaporation, precipitation, evaporation, precipitation, evaporation. Sedimentation.

On the drive down I listened again to the excellent Geopoetics episode of the Future Ecologies podcast. An unnamed participant asked: “At what point do the molecules of apple become molecules of me?”. Since I started writing this I have eaten two apples: one russet, one cox. I cast the core of the second aside: at what point do the molecules of apple become molecules of the ground? A couple of minutes later I watch a small fly, whose emerald thorax catches the light, alight on the apple: at what point do the molecules of apple become molecules of fly? What then is the difference between fly, ground, apple, and I, when molecules of apple are simultaneuosly becoming all of us in the same place? Faeces becoming fungi.

My camera has been beeping incessantly all the while, marking out the seconds obsessively, out of sync with the reversing tipper trunks on the western horizon whose diesel chug flutters to and from my ears. In front of me now, a cream-grey waste of recently bulldozed dust. At its edges brave pioneer grasses gather nutrients from the puddles among tyre tracks, whose chaotic patterns cross-hatch the bare bed of a future open-cast lake. What organic life will first force a toehold in these mechanised striations of soilless surface? How do the catepillar track tracks of industry become a matrix within which remediation begins?

At my feet, in the triangle marked out by the tripod’s legs, this process is well underway. In places glistening pebbles the size of coarse salt belie the mechanically ground nature of this ground. Away to the right the moor’s spillage over the edge is perhaps only a single solar orbit underway. I count the species that have carved a niche, whose roots bind scree for larger roots to dig among, find poise and reach up to cast their seeds down the ravine, to hold the stones and channel the rain among them, incrementally replacing that which has been blasted from them. Everywhere fungi are germinating from faeces.

Today, as part of the exhibition Seismic Mother in London, we launched Petrified Media. Below is the text of the talk that I gave, which is just an updated version of the talk posted 18 months ago and given at the exhibition opening. But somehow the conclusion is much more satisfying here, so repetition or not, I’m posting it here:

At its core this book is about the relationship between rocks and digital image technologies, or as I now think of them – earth media and technical media. Everything we make, every cultural object, is derived (or grown) from the resources beneath our feet. By changing the physical state of rocks we have made hammers, cars, iPads and the instruments used in volcanology. From the lithosphere humans have built what geologist Peter Haff refers to as a technosphere, that extends from the deepest mine cavities and underground science facilities up to the geosynchronous orbit of the most distant communication satellites. Haff now describes this technosphere as a planetary paradigm, one whose potential impact is equal to that held by the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere or biosphere. However, Haff writes, “unlike the other paradigms, the technosphere has not yet evolved the ability to recycle its own waste streams”. Volcanoes, I quickly discovered on starting this project are part of the lithosphere’s circularity. One of the main causes of volcanic activity is the geological process of subduction. This takes place at tectonic boundaries where one plate is pushed beneath the edge of another, forcing the softer of the two down into the Earth’s mantle and triggering the release of magma. Subduction zones are sites of geological recycling, where portions of the crust are folded back into the planetary metabolism.

At the beginning of the Earth Art Fellowship from which this book developed, these were some of my questions:

– What is the difference between a rock and a camera?

– If a camera can be made from a rock then is the rock not already capable of photography?

– And what happens when a camera turns back into a rock? (as is presumably already happening at some unknown depth in the crust). Does it return to a previous lithic state or will it sediment new minerals to be unearthed by future geologists?

More recently I’ve been experimenting with extending this playful equivalence between rocks and camera into my personal life, to see if it might be possible to simply replace the memento role that photographs play with rocks. I never print a photograph any longer, but my house is increasingly littered with stones collected from particularly memorable locations or events, and when I hold them, sure enough, I am reminded of the site and time where I picked them up. Following this principle I have decided to illustrate today’s talk with objects rather than power point.

The short video I made during the fellowship begins with the line: “To photograph a rock is to point polished pebbles at a rock”. Which is really just to say that the image sensor in our cameras is a sliver of near-pure silicon, extracted from a predominantly silicate planetary crust, refined, and hooked up to a series of also-silicon computer chips to process light into image data. But, long before human beings made cameras : weren’t rocks always already processing light into data? The photosensitivity of silver and silicon are not inventions after all, but discoveries. Benjamin Bratton writes that with the appearance of the first photograph of a black hole the aperture of the camera has become the size of the planet – meaning just that this image is triangulated from simultaneous telescopic exposures at multiple terrestrial sites. But hasn’t the earth – absorbing incident solar radiation and developing a photosynthesised bio-image across its land masses – always in fact been a camera?

Speaking with Professor Heidy Mader, who sadly passed away before the publication of this book, I was struck by the centrality and continuity of silicon in the experiments being conducted on the Disequilibrium project, with which my Fellowship was associated. Silicate rocks are collected from volcanic sites, they are imaged onto silicon image sensors in the synchrotron at Diamond Light Source and these images were analysed and input into a computer model in Manchester – an algorithmic magma chamber, synthesised in silicon, in which the behaviour of liquid silicates can be modelled. By the time I return from my first trip to visit the various scientific partners in the consortium, this reflexive arc of silicates within the Disequilibrium experiments has captivated me. I summarise it in the video so: Minerals are melted into machines to analyse minerals as they melt.

In volcanology, disequilibrium refers to moments in which the key variables: namely temperature, pressure, gaseousness and crystallization are in constant flux, as for example during eruption. One of the central problems addressed by the Disequilibrium project was therefore to develop a methodology to photograph a rock while it is melting. I turn these words over and over in my head:

• To photograph a rock while it is melting.
• To photograph a melting rock.
• To melt a photographic rock.
• To melt a rock while it is photographing.

…and resolve that my response should be to melt the camera.

But my camera is largely plastic, and most photos are no longer taken with a camera, so perhaps inevitably, I turned my attention to my recently broken iPhone 5, the camera of which also has a scalar relationship with the samples used by volcanologists. Heating a contemporary technical artefact to a temperature at which the melting points of its component parts are surpassed reveals its underlying materiality. Melting breaks down the temporary arrangement of these materials into a functional whole, forcing apart alloys and rearranging elements according to their physical properties rather than their electronic schematic. Anode and cathode seep together. Neat metallic squares of micro-components located to control electrical currents flowing between them now flow together : cobalt, copper, titanium and chromium recrystalise with one another in a matrix of molten aluminium that previously enclosed them in commodity form. A molten phone, baked in the subterranean heat of a nearby magma chamber, is one potential future. To melt a camera – is to manufacture a technofossil.

Jan Zalasiewicz has written extensively about contemporary technofossils, the likely traces of our Anthropocene era that will be evident in the stratigraphic record of the planet to future paleontologists. Silicon and quartz are so inert and resistant that, in his opinion, they are most likely to defy the chemical weathering of deep time, perhaps even more so than the industrially hardened types of steel found in many consumer technologies. It is possible then that some of our semiconductors might survive the extremes of temperature and pressure, and that the microelectronic paths etched into them will retain or imprint their form in the surrounding bedrock. Graptolite fossils have survived to the present as the hollow spaces left by their skeletons became pyritised (pyrite is more commonly known as fool’s gold). In commenting on the likely candidates for pyritization among our current urban detritus, Zalasiewicz identifies “the interiors of any of the myriads of tiny metal and electronic gadgets that we now produce in their millions … for these in themselves contain iron, one of the ingredients of pyrite”. Even in this brief discussion of the futurity of media objects, it is clear that the samples of molten phone I produced will bear no resemblance to the real effects of deep time on today’s electronic waste. Isolated from the hydration of the subterranean environment and dramatically accelerated in comparison to centuries or millenia of gradual baking and compression, the furnace is a blunt instrument whose results are in no way comparable to the speculative future they seek to materialise. Yet this is also how Science operates, by removing samples from their context and simulating the forces upon them in a controlled environment.

In another essay Zalasiewicz uses the example of the Antikythera Mechanism, which was found 120 years ago in the Aegean Sea inside a 2000 year old shipwreck. 72 years after it was found its purpose was understood by analysing it with X-ray tomography, revealing it to be an analogue computer engineered to predict astronomical positions and eclipses, the toothed cogs which enabled its identification also appear to us now as a 2 millenia ancestor of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. It seems inconceivable to us that our current technologies of computation could be forgotten, reinvented and then rediscovered in as little as 2000 years.  And yet this has already happened in the geological blink of an eye that we refer to as History.

Among the temporalities of geological processes such as sedimentation, compaction, metamorphosis, and deformation, the assembly of a mobile digital technology in the early twenty-first century represents a radical rematerialization of terrestrial resources both in terms of speed and geographic reach. We might even describe these mutually alien timescales as existing in a state of disequilibrium. Our media hardwares are pinched together in a geological nanosecond by an industry whose reach encompasses the planet and delves deep into its crust. In the current absence of an internationally scalable program of disassembly, a few years later, discarded and perhaps partially stripped for parts, the terrestrial temporalities of oxidization, erosion, and crystallization take over again. This disequilibrium between the planetary capacity to regenerate material and the technosphere’s capacity to produce waste causes technological flotsam to pile up in “sacrificial zones” across multiple continents.

After a period of lockdown I returned to the samples of molten iPhone in the basement labs in Bristol. I process the resulting lumps of molten metal using the tools and techniques of the petrologist, grinding and polishing them for microscope imaging and electron microscope analysis. Media theorist Jussi Parikka speaks of A Geology of Media to draw our attention to the deep time planetary processes that produce the ores extracted in the service of our industries and sciences. The pounding of waves that has ground and sifted monocrystalline quartz for centuries before sand is scooped into furnaces, the gradual accretion of heavy minerals in the coastal sands of Western Australia and Senegal, or the coursing of thermal springs through volcanic pumice that precipitates a lithium-rich brine now pumped from beneath the Atacama desert for our batteries. But, in practice, the dark grey ingots of no-longer-smartphone are relatively unyielding to the tools of geology. What is required instead is perhaps closer to a Metallurgy of Media.

According to a project conducted at the University of Plymouth where an iPhone was ground to dust and X-ray diffraction performed on the results, a smartphone consists of 22 different metals:

33g of Iron                           
13g of Silicon                        
7g of Chromium                    
7g of Chromium        
6g of Copper                       
2.7g of Nickel                   
2.5 g of Aluminium               
1.6g of Calcium                     
0.7g of Tin                             
900mg of Tungsten              
160mg of Neodymium         
90mg of Silver                       
70mg of Molybdenum          
70 mg of Cobalt                    
36mg of Gold                        
30mg of Praesodymium       
20mg of Tantalum                
10mg of Niobium                 
7mg of Antinomy                  
5mg of Gadolinium               
2mg of Dysprosium              
2mg of Germanium              
2mg of Indium                      
7mg of Antinomy                  
5mg of Gadolinium               
2mg of Dysprosium              
2mg of Germanium              
2mg of Indium                      

To identify a rock using the traditional method of optical mineralogy it must be sliced and polished to a thickness of 30 microns or 0.03mm. At this thickness it becomes translucent and its index of refraction can be measured by the interference pattern of polarised light shone through it. To identify a rock then, it must first be turned into a lens. The rock is incorporated into the body of the camera: earth media becomes technical media. The screen of a phone is similarly polished, buffed smooth to the molecular level using the rare-earth element Cerium. However, the refined metals contained in my manufactured slices of iFossil cannot be identified by optical mineralogy, so, I use the electron microscope. I am told that looking for rare-earth elements in molten lumps of iPhone is literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. But I persist and eventually find that in addition to the 22 metals identified in Plymouth I find fragments of a white lattice made of pure Zirconium, and contacts around a capacitor containing Bismuth as well as gold and silver.

To disassemble a complex technology into its constituent elemental metals requires considerable energy expenditure, involves toxic processes, and will never recover all of the materials. In a 2018 paper titled ‘Limits of the Circular Economy’, the authors model the recycling of metals from a Fairphone 2 by three different routes: smelting the phone in its entirety, dismantling and selectively smelting its modules, and shredding, sorting and metallurgical processing. Of these three techniques, the second has both the smallest environmental footprint and recovers the highest quantity of critical materials. However, even though as much as 80% – 98% of valuable metals such as gold, copper, silver, cobalt, nickel, palladium, gallium, indium, and zinc were recovered, the total percentage of material recycled was only 28%. The circular economy is currently proffered across industry and public policy as a silver bullet to the problems of finite resource and exponential waste, but when at looked at from the perspective of holistic commodities, there will always be a remainder – perhaps as much as 70% – which constitutes slag that cannot be recovered industrially.

Technologies are internally awash with circular systems, feedback loops, and recursive processes. But science is yet to design an apparatus for the re-crystallization of media into minerals, hence there is no means to metabolize all the “integral waste” of the technosphere. We can turn rocks into cameras but we cannot turn cameras into rocks. Having folded the planet into urban environments, scientific apparatus, and media technologies, the question remains as to how we might selectively unfold those actions.

I recently visited the geologist – Dr Arjan Dijkstra – who blended his phone to perform the compositional analysis that I just listed , and I put this question directly to him. He is now working on a means of synthesizing rare earth minerals in the lab, dissolving pure neodymium in phosphoric acid, filtering and baking the resulting residue to produce monazite powder. When asked whether such a procedure could be applied to objects of e-waste like batteries it quickly becomes clear that the only means of doing so would be to shred it into a fine powder, dissolve this in acid and bake the resulting sludge to powder at high heat over long durations. To turn technical media back to earth media, is as toxic and energy intensive a process as the manufacture of the technology in the first place.

Every juncture in the formation, transformation and deformation of minerals and media discussed here is shaped by intense thermal energy. From the production of metal-rich magmas in subduction zones to their scientific synthesis in the laboratory furnaces, from the notional technofossil of my molten smartphone to the selective smelting of e-waste recycling; these processes are all powered either by the “high-temperature internal heat source of the planet”, or by the cheap, widespread availability of geologically fossilized sources of fuel. Even in the currently science-fictional proposition of a completely circular economy, the maintenance of the technosphere would remain dependent upon such energy intensive combustion to de- and re-manufacture its component parts – unless of course everything can be built to last as long as Voyager 1 which was launched two years before my birth and yet continues to broadcast successfully to earth from a distance of 23 billion kilometres – perhaps the furthest extent of the technosphere. I wanted to end today with a somewhat facetious science-fictional proposal of my own. On the wall over there is the first work I have made of this type, a proposal to perpetually generate renewable electricity from the magnetosphere by constructing a continent-scaled copper coil in Antarctica. According to the Anthropocene Working Group the industrial extraction of minerals and metals has now altered the geological functioning of the planetary system that we inhabit. On the surface of that planet the effluents of industry and wastes of overproduction and rampant consumption poison the biosphere and atmosphere. So perhaps we need to find a way to reintegrate these solid waste products – the unrecyclable dross of this circular economy we are supposedly building – into the lithosphere from which it came, to allow the planetary process of subduction to process our waste. Rather than dumping waste in the so-called sacrifice zones of Baotou in China, or Agbogbloshie in Ghana, perhaps we should dump our waste in Subduction Zones, to be sucked at a tectonic pace back into the mantle of the earth, molten and erupted again as metal-rich minerals for novel production. What would happen if we tried to start recycling our waste using tectonic movement and volcanic heat instead of the mechanics of the shredder and the fossil-fuel furnace? Imagine for a second a civilization so convinced of their own ingenuity and so addicted to the speed of their engines that they routinely dump end-of-life tesla batteries into magma chambers to speed the recrystalisation of their nickel-cobalt cathodes for remanufacture. And then wonder: how far are we really from such a futile fantasy?

Next week a new video work, commissioned by Avantwhatever, and the culmination of almost two years thinking about earth observation and the epistemics of false colour images will be launched in Melbourne. So, in anticipation, I am publishing here the text voiceover from it, which in the video is delivered by Finnish performance artist Suvi Tuominen:

Alunite Index
Atmospherically Resistant Vegetation Index
Atmospheric Penetration Index
Atmospheric Removal Index
Bare Soil Index
Burn Area Index
Calcite Index

In astronomical photography colour images are constructed by coding and displaying invisible wavelengths of the infrared spectrum as red, green and blue: visualising radiation as colour. Multispectral remote sensing turns this technique back upon the Earth’s surface to analyse its composition. Satellite imaging has taken a photographic logic developed for understanding the cosmos and applied it to the analysis of lived landscapes.

Carbonate Index
Carotenoid Reflectance Index
Cellulose absorption Index
Clay Alteration Index
Deforestation Index
Difference Vegetation Index
Disease Water Stress Index

In geology, colour has long been used to identify minerals. In the traditional geological practice of optical mineralogy, polarised light is shone through a thin-section rock sample, which can then be identified by its colour: its index of refraction. In present day geophysics it is not the refraction of white light, but the reflection of the infrared spectrum, that’s used in the remote identification of minerals.

Dolomite Index
Enhanced Vegetation Index
Ferric Iron Alteration Index
Ferrous Silicates Index
Fire Detection Index
Forestry Coverage Index
Global Environment Modelling Index

A computer mouse scans across the desk beneath it with a monocular eye, navigating among the red, green and blue pixels of the screen by measuring pulses of reflected light bouncing back from the surface beneath. Rapid reflections guide the cursor across simulated landscapes. A bounding box is drawn on the screen. A prospecting target is marked on the map.

Green Atmospherically Resistant Index
Green Chlorophyll Index
Green Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index
Healthy Vegetation Index
Infrared Percentage Vegetation Index
Kaolinite Index

A specific combination of wavelengths enables the identification of an individual mineral or the analysis of a certain variable. This is known as a spectral index. There are a potentially infinite number of spectral indexes. Each one requires a chromatic calculation to be made, a false colour image made from three or more discrete frequencies of light radiation: added, subtracted, multiplied or divided by one another mathematically.

We are living through a dramatic acceleration of spectral resolution. It is no longer sufficient to image the world in colour. To target its minerals accurately requires hyperspectral perception: the ability to image individual frequencies separately.

Laterite Index
Leaf Area Index
Leaf Chlorophyll Index
Leaf Water Vegetation Index
Magnesite Index
Methane Index
Modified Chlorophyll Absorption Ratio Index

The LEDs in each pixel of this image are made of a compound of indium, gallium, and either phosphorous—for the reds—or nitrogen—for the blues and greens. Gallium is produced from bauxite, and Indium from either cassiterite or sphalerite. The connection between colour and minerals, so apparent in the history of pigments, persists in digital photography. In electronic images, colour is metallurgy: the mixing of colours is the mixing of metals. The glowing pixels of this image are illuminated metals: colour wrought from rocks.

Modified Triangular Vegetation Index
Moisture Stress Index
Muscovite Index
Normalised Difference Built-up Index
Normalised Difference Glacier Index
Normalised Difference Lignin Index
Normalised Difference Nitrogen Index

When acid is poured onto an image sensor the spectrum spills out. Every colour it has imaged, seeps across its surface in saturated hues. When you cut into pixels, colours pour out. The spent silver of mass analogue photography and the rare metals from the screens of last century’s televisions are settling on sea beds and leaching from landfills to sediment future lithologies. Meanwhile, overhead, orbital eyes analyse reflected spectra, scouring for new deposits.

Normalised Difference Snow Index
Normalised Difference Vegetation Index
Normalised Difference Water Index
Normalised Multi-band Drought Index
Normalised Pigment Chlorophyll Index
Optimised Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index

Hyperspectral imaging operates by vibrating a quartz crystal with specific, audible frequencies to manipulate its refractive index. This compression and decompression of its molecular structure selectively filters the wavelengths of light passing through it. To analyse the composition of the landscape we must look through a resonated rock.

Photochemical Reflectance Index
Plant Senescence Reflectance Index
Quartz Rich Rocks Index
Red Edge Position Index
Renormalised Difference Vegetation Index
Silica Dioxide Index
Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index

Due to its extreme dryness and high exposure to ultra-violet radiation, the Atacama desert has been used as a terrestrial analogue for a Martian landscape. The low levels of nitrates in the soil make both unsuitable for supporting vegetation. To image these remote landscapes with a spectral index is to assume their future function in the production or transmission of energy, data, or images.

To apply a geological index to a landscape implies a concession to its minerals. The extraction of images from the ground precedes the extraction of minerals from the ground. Imaging the planet with this mineral hungry gaze assumes that it exists only to provide for the production of images.

Structure Intensive Pigment Index
Sulphate Index
Transformed Difference Vegetation Index
Triangular Vegetation Index
Water Band Index

My mouse scrolls over landscapes colourised by spectral calculations: pixels of pegmatite and quantified quartz, that will all be refined to reflect and record, transmit and illuminate images. Landscapes optimised for the production of images, images optimised for the production of minerals. Landscapes reproduced on screens, screens reproduced from landscapes. Even when a digital image doesn’t move — the screen it appears on has a ‘refresh rate’. What is the refresh rate of a landscape?

Worldview Improved Vegetative Index
Worldview New Iron Index
Worldview Soil Index
Worldview Water Index

Cameras of crystalline metal survey landscapes, capturing the reflectance of rocks to feed their own futures. Satellites and screens feed on soil adjusted landscapes, transmitting indexed images of normalised deforestation. Colour has become a technology of quantification: endlessly indexing every inch of the earth to calculate the profit from its pixels. What are the worldviews embedded in these spectral indexes? What worldviews do they exclude?

The meaning of the word index is dependent on context. Here it signifies the measurement of a specific condition, or the presence of a certain mineral. In financial markets an index measures the average change in value, of a single commodity or a range of products. To measure the economic viability of a mineral deposit, its volume is calculated by rendering the subterranean space in blocks: pixelating rocks quantifies their value.

Bloomberg Copper Index
Dow Jones Commodity Industrial Metals Index
Dow Jones UBS Aluminium Subindex
Nasdaq Commodity Silver Index
Precious Metals Basket Index
White Metals Basket Index

Indexes of visibility and indexes of valuation. Indexes of visibility and indexes of valuation. Indexes of visibility and indexes of valuation. Indexes of visibility and indexes of valuation.