18/09/2023: Lee Moor, Devon

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.

Petrified Media: Book Launch

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?

GREENPEG Newsletter

Throughout 2022 I worked alongside a group of geophysicists working on the Horizon EU funded project GREENPEG. The project aims to find European reserves of Lithium bearing minerals and speaks directly to the EU’s policy papers on Critical Raw Materials. Having just concluded work on the video that came out of the project I was asked to write an edition of their newsletter, discussing my project, our collaboration and my thoughts around energy transition:

How do human technologies physically sculpt the surface of the planet? How does the now commonplace remote perspective from satellites and drones change the way we perceive Earth? To what extent do these activities turn landscapes themselves into technologies that exist only for human purposes? As a visual artist whose work deals with the relationship between technology and landscape, these are the things I spend my time thinking about.

In searching for scientific collaborators using hyperspectral imaging to look for critical minerals I came across GREENPEG. My interest in multi and hyperspectral imaging is less to do with their aesthetic qualities than it is their epistemics. Applying a spectral index, shifts the vertical gaze into an instrumental colour space designed to reveal certain material qualities, so looking at a landscape through this lens presupposes the function of that landscape: to provide food, to provide metals, to sequester carbon.

When I arrived at Hakonhals in Norway, the effect of this instrumentalising of landscape was plain to see. This is one of the most beautiful wildernesses that I have visited, right next door to an open quarry. I can’t pretend I wasn’t horrified at the thought of the quarry extending across the entire hilltop, which seemed the likely consequence of the surveys being conducted. Yet, resourcing energy transition from landscapes such as this, within Europe, would—if refinement and manufacturing were also onshored—dramatically shrink the distance these metals travel and their contingent emissions. But that cost coming from the habitat of the sea eagles who glided above us seemed unjust. This is just one of the many double-binds that energy transition presents us with.

For the last five years I’ve been thinking about how visual cultures and digital technologies are implicated in the climate crisis. What are the environmental impacts of an artistic practice that relies on new cameras, laptops and ever increasing file sizes? Industry may have spent much of the last decade persuading consumers that the digital is immaterial, but the closer one studies its resource requirements the more catastrophic they seem. Under the present extractive model, and with planned obsolescence still standard practice, perpetuating a digital economy seems to simply be incompatible with a habitable planet.

Working with GREENPEG made me realise the extent to which the digital media I work with and spend my time thinking about are materially contiguous with the turbines and photovoltaic cells required for energy transition. The culture industry is just as implicated in the climate crisis as the automobile industry. But visual culture is also embedded in the practices of science and the technics of geophysical prospecting. We make images from the metals in the ground, but images of the ground also make those metals available to us. There is then a cyclical relationship between images and minerals: we use images to produce minerals that are then used to produce images, another kind of circular economy.

In Norway I met the NGU and IFU teams for the first time and quickly became fascinated with the different survey techniques used to render the landscape. Long cables stretched across  outcropping bedrock seemed to pre-empt the fibre optics that those same rocks could later become, the sledgehammer strikes of the piezoelectric tests sounded like premonitions of mining activity in the region. In Ireland, looking at capped drill holes so close to bronze age archaeological sites brought home the long entanglement of human histories with rocks: from casting spear heads to powering motors. And in Austria, the proximity of the radar station positioned GREENPEG’s ground penetrating radar in relation to an inquisitive exploration of the cosmos: simultaneously gazing inward and outward.

Many of the scientists who generously accommodated me will be surprised that, of all the video I shot on location, only a couple of minutes have been used in the final work. But looking at specific locations also tended to localise the scope of the work. To think about the planetary consequences of multispectral imaging required the planetary perspective of Sentinel. However, much of the audio is sourced from GREENPEG’s survey gear, particularly the radiometric and conductivity equipment. Using these sounds emphasises the machinic nature of these landscapes.

It has been a long road for me to arrive at making this work. One which probably began with taping music from the radio as a boy: making magnetic recordings of spectral transmissions on a portable stereo. Technology, people often seem to say, has come a long way since then, and yet it now threatens our very survival, so maybe it has actually regressed.

When I was a child, French philosopher Paul Virilio wrote of how technologies had collapsed the horizon, imploding planetary expanse into instantaneous communications. Perhaps the opportunity presented by an energy transition combined with rapid degrowth is to once again experience the vastness of Earth and the slowness of its geologic time.

The resulting video, Spectral Index was commissioned and is now hosted by the Australian festival Avantwhatever, and will hopefully be exhibited elsewhere in the near future. For me, the journey continues. Next month I drive to the Netherlands to visit a spectral geologist who is experimenting with using rocks as batteries. On the way back, I will stop to oversee the printing of a book from a previous project, Petrified Media, which will be published by The Eriskay Connection this autumn. I would like to thank everyone at GREENPEG who contributed to this journey.

Spectral Index

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.

Richard Mosse – Broken Spectre

On Sunday I went to see the new Richard Mosse show at 180Strand, and I wanted to write down some of my thoughts so below is what began as a Mastodon rant hurriedly typed into my phone while standing on the train back to Bristol:

 

Entering the room in which the film’s installed the first thing that screams at you is the format – it’s a 32:9 widescreen-on-steroids projection. I think Akomfrah’s Vertical Sea was projected in this same space during Strange Days, and I have been lucky enough to see Tscherkassky’s Outer Space projected in cinemascope, but this is easily the widest projection I’ve encountered in many years of video-art-audiencing (and part of me feels like Mosse wanted to make sure of this). Of course scale is vital, the subject here is the wholesale destruction of the largest forest wilderness on the planet. To capture that scale – as Mosse says in the accompanying interview text – “you need to get above it” and you also need to dwarf your audience within it. The whole film is immaculately produced, it’s compelling (and exhausting) to watch. It does a good job of evidencing the entangled economic pressures on the landscape it’s shot in: the cattle breeding, the illegal logging and mining, the tourism, the prospecting, the indigenous subsistence. But all of these are rendered and interwoven in gob-smacking cinematic spectacle. Both up close – we see cattle being eviscerated and miners panning for gold – and from overhead – multispectral helicopter shots from a purpose built camera – the apocalypse looks incredible. Of course it does, nothing makes more compulsive viewing than a cataclysm in slow motion.

 

 

When I saw Mosse’s show at the Barbican I was avidly reading Ariella Azoulay’s civil theorisation of photography in which she tries to establish some space, even agency, for the objectified subject in the interpretation of the image. Mosse’s rather blatant objectification of the strife of his migrant subjects felt deeply exploitative. He stood poised at an untouchable distance from their lives, snatched their torment and tried to treat the resulting footage sympathetically, as if its inherent power dynamic was invisible. Here he does better, although largely through the intervention of someone his lens captures. The only voice that we hear throughout – in fact the only sound given any space in the otherwise grandiose Ben Frost soundtrack – is a furious and impassioned speech delivered direct to camera by a young indigenous Yanomami woman, who excoriates Bolsanoro, the miners and white men for their destruction of the forest. There’s a wonderful moment when she turns her tongue on the film crew stood before her. Just as the London audience can see the budget of this production so can she, and she challenges them to do something with their money, demanding: “Are you here to film us and then do nothing?”. This is the punctum of the whole piece, the moment when the people of the forest speak out against the abuses done to their land not just in the name of profit, but also in the name of art. To his credit, Mosse gives her centre stage, letting the sound recording of her speech run on while the projection goes dark as the crew load more film. But without this woman’s performance would this film be any different in its positioning of its own agency within its chosen subject matter than Incoming was?

Her accusation of the film crew, her implicit equation of them with the miners and with Bolsonaro’s regime raises questions that would otherwise be sidelined: How is Mosse’s film, extracting images from a landscape pushed to collapse in order to build cultural capital in the art world, any different from the extractive mining and logging practices that he documents? Do the good intentions of the project and his and our awareness of the existential nature of the damage shown really make any difference to this fundamentally exploitative action of taking images from one part the world to project them elsewhere? Doesn’t this just reproduce a colonial power structure between camera and subject? Does the helicopter vantage not, again, reproduce a vertical, colonial gaze, a sense of commanding the landscape and occlude – with exception of the thankfully vociferous woman – the embodied perspective of its inhabitants. It’s clear what Mosse’s intentions are, we are to stare into this critical site of the crisis, to face the terror of the ransacking of one the planet’s few remaining forests with all its support of rich biodiversity, an untouched wilderness in which the ongoing speciation of potentially medicinal plants and undocumented creatures continues, its carbon sink capacity. The work is intended to raise the alarm. TJ Demos wrote some years ago that we need to switch from “apocalyptic imagery to utopian prophecy”, about the urgency of imagining the alternative, of prioritising regenerative practice over continually documenting the disaster, whether in technicolour, or, as here, in the vivid multispectral colour shifts used in satellite and scientific imaging. Broken Spectre is a mighty powerful film, but I came away feeling that we are in desperate need of some new models for well-funded camera-toting artists to deal with these subjects that move beyond yet more heart-wrenching documentation of planetary ecology in freefall. We know that we are on the brink and more aerial footage is as unlikely to fix that as adding another lane is to solve the traffic.

In the accompanying interview Mosse makes an excellent point about the role the multispectral imagery techniques he uses play in the crisis, stating that he likes working with what he describes as “aggravated photographic media” that have a role to play in both the conservation and decimation of the Amazon. And yes, the potential of scientific imaging techniques to exacerbate, moderate or regenerate is fascinating, particularly in the context of such contested landscapes as the Amazon. But my question is where the documentary impulse followed by Mosse, and currently so popular among video artists, sits on this spectrum of conservation and decimation? And I can’t help thinking that it fails to tip the scales towards conservation – or to move the goalposts a little: regeneration. How can the arc of consciousness raising, public opinion shifting (which is essentially how works like this might make a difference in the world) keep pace with the acceleration of this current crisis. When will the incremental impact of individual artworks consumed by audiences lead to the paradigm shift required in not only our consumption habits, but also our cultural production habits? It seems to me that if, as artists, we are to set our sights upon tackling the subject of the climate crisis then we must hold ourselves to an exemplary standard of sustainability and decolonialism that adopts and manifests the principles of activity that might actually enable a longevity of cultural production to continue, rather than reproducing in our behaviours the tropes of cinematic spectacle that are after all part of the industrial complex for which gold needs to be panned.


Of course, in writing this I am placing these challenges and questions at my own door more than I am at Mosse’s. It is to his credit that his work is provocative enough that I want to think through these questions, and I would highly recommend everyone see the show, because if this doesn’t catalyse you to think about the role that you play in the collapse of planetary biodiversity, nothing will. I just wish that there was more than the occasional glimmer of critical self-reflection in Mosse’s film.

Petrified Media: opening talk

This is the text of the talk that I gave at the opening of my solo exhibition Petrified Media, at the Earth Art Gallery in Bristol. Some of it may find it’s way into an article that I’ve been asked to write for Cultural Politics, but for now here are my thoughts about the residency I began in November 2019, that was supposed to last 6 months and is now wrapped up more than 2 years later.

At its core this project 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 produced (or grown) from the resources beneath our feet. By changing the physical state of rocks we have made hammers, cars, iPads and Rheometers. However, over the two year duration of this residency I have come to question the anthropocentric perspective of such statements that confers decisive agency exclusively upon human actions. Geologist Peter Haff articulates an alternative – that technological agency is not entirely subordinate to human agency. Haff conceives of a technosphere, with equal planetary impact as 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”.

Coming into the School of Earth Sciences two years ago, these were the sorts of questions I began the project with (some of which will likely seem absurd):

– 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 Earth’s crust). Does it return to a previous lithic state or will it sediment new minerals to be unearthed by future geologists?

It was questions such as these that led to the statement that opens the video I made during the residency: “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 crust, refined, and wired to a series of also-silicon computer chips to process light into image data. But, haven’t rocks always been processing light into image 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  – the image being triangulated from simultaneous telescopic exposures at multiple sites. But hasn’t the earth – absorbing solar radiation and developing a photosynthesised bio-image across its land masses – always been a camera?

Speaking with Heidy for the first time I was struck by the centrality and continuity of silicon in the experiments being conducted on the disequilibrium project. Silicate rocks are collected from volcanic sites, they are imaged onto silicon image sensors at Diamond Light Source and these images are analysed and the data 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 their experiments has captivated me. To summarise it in a single phrase: Minerals are melted into machines to analyse minerals while they melt.

 

One of the central problems addressed by the Disequilibrium project seemed to me be 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 mostly plastic, and no one takes photos with a camera anymore, so perhaps inevitably, I turn my attention to my recently broken iPhone 5, the camera of which also has a scalar relationship with the samples used by the volcanologists. Heating a contemporary technical artefact to a temperature higher than the melting points of its components 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, once located to control electrical currents flowing between them – now flow together: cobalt, copper, titanium and zirconium 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 then – 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 palaeontologists. 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 the computer chips now embedded in almost every electrical device 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, for the non-geologists among us is 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 this brief discussion of the futurity of media objects, it is clear that the samples I produced during the residency will bear no resemblance to the real effects of deep time on today’s e-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. When I began the residency in November 2019 I was given a tour of the building that navigated its facilities from the surface to the core, according to the depth of the processes synthesises by their apparatus. But science has not yet designed an apparatus for the re-crystallisation of media into minerals, hence – as Haff states – there is no means to metabolise the inherent waste of the technosphere.

In another essay Zalasiewicz uses the example of this object, known as the Antikythera Mechanism, which was found 120 years ago in the Aegean Sea inside a 2000 year old shipwreck. 72 years later 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 2000 year pre-echo of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. It is somehow inconceivable that our current technologies of computation could be forgotten, reinvented and then rediscovered in as little as 2000 years, but it has already happened in the short time of human history. And when computation is reinvented it use the same techniques?

To tomograph an object is to image its interior in slices or sections. Volcanoes and computers can both be understood by tomography. At Diamond the volcanologists rotate a high-pressure furnace in the path of a high-energy X-ray, observing pyroxene crystallisation in real time before reconstructing a 3D model of crystal growth in a chip of pure silicon. I remain incredulous that it is possible to study an object of the magnitude of a volcano in a space smaller than the camera in my phone. Tomographing that camera allows me to scroll back and forth through the object, to excavate its not-yet-fossilised form. Which of these shapes will erode? Which cavities might be filled with pyrite? And which might survive the chemical weathering of deep time?

Tomography has become an epistemic tool applied across disciplines and scales. A few years ago while researching the role of photography in the Fukushima clean-up I came across an experimental technique called muon tomography being trialled to image the interior of the melted-down reactors. Muons are produced by the collision of cosmic rays with particles in the upper atmosphere, and are capable of penetrating deep into the earth’s crust. At Fukushima, scientists built an instrument capable of measuring the frequency and trajectory of muon strikes. The theory being that as uranium is dense enough to scatter muons, the nuclear fuel should theoretically produce a shadow in the resulting photograph. So, from one perspective, the barrage of cosmic rays perpetually striking the planet and all of the structures built upon it, can be conceived of as a kind of imaging. We have always been being tomographed, continually imaged from every direction by penetrating radiation.

 

For me, the tomographed image of the camera is interesting in and of itself, but for the scientists working on Disequilibrium the image is valuable only once its contents have been analysed. Observing the scientists work on this project I became fascinated by another epistemic technique which seems to suddenly be everywhere: segmentation. Segmentation is the process of annotating or labelling an image, and is a vital precursor to all machine vision systems. Nolwenn, one of the post-docs employed at Diamond on the project, was spending much of her time segmenting different crystals within the sample. But segmentation has become ubiquitous and is also performed as a kind-of piece-rate digital labour by a globalised workforce to whom image annotation is outsourced by services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Cameras and images can become operationalised within automated systems, but only with reference to dataset that has been ascribed labels by a human user. I can hardly imagine a more emphatic illustration of Haff’s conception of the technosphere as “a system that operates beyond our control and that imposes its own requirements on human behaviour” than this decentralised precariat obediently drawing boxes around every pedestrian in an image database to underwrite the eyesight of autonomous cars. In this inversion of anthropocentric perspective, a human life is only valuable once it has been segmented.

After a period of lockdown I return to the samples of molten iPhone cross sections in the basement. 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 and stretched into fibre optics, the gradual accretion of heavy minerals in the coastal sands of Western Australia and Senegal from which Zirconium is refined for the manufacture of nuclear fuel rod casings, or the coursing of thermal springs through volcanic pumice that precipitates a lithium-rich brine now pumped from beneath the Atacama desert for our phone batteries. But, in practice, the dark grey ingots of no-longer-smartphone are relatively unyielding to the experimental tools of geology. Perhaps to work with the material aftermath of technology requires more a Metallurgist 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                    

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                       

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 the fragments of white lattice found in this section of iPhone screen heated to 1000ºC are made of pure Zirconium, and that the contacts around this capacitor contain Bismuth as well as gold and silver.

Among the temporalities of geological processes such as sedimentation, metamorphosis, and compaction, the assembly of a mobile digital technology of the early twenty-first century occurs dizzyingly fast and with a startling planetary reach – sourcing metals from every continent. We might even go as far as to describe these mutually alien timescales as existing in a state of disequilibrium. Volcanic activity is often produced by the geologic process of subduction, in which one tectonic plate is pushed beneath another. Subduction zones are sites of geological recycling, folding portions of the crust back into the metabolism of the lithosphere. But there there is also a state of disequilbrium between this planetary capacity to regenerate material and the technosphere’s inability to metabolise its own waste.

Spectral Earth: Electromagnetic Geo-Technics & Climate Governance

In 2019 the announcement of the spectrum allocations for 5G mobile communications caused a widely publicised uproar among meteorologists (link). The controversy surrounded the frequency of 23.8GHz, used by weather forecasters for the passive sensing of atmospheric water vapour. Their concern was that 5G radiation between 24.25GHz and 27.5 GHz would interfere with measurements made by weather satellites, affecting the accuracy of forecasting. The impossibility of broadcasting communications at a wavelength of 1.23mm without disrupting sensors tuned to radiation at 1.26mm highlights the increasing competition between science and industry for narrow bandwidths of this frequential space, exemplifying the entanglement of technical media with geophysical phenomena through which the planetary is grasped and produced.

 

During the 1999 talk in which she coined the term ‘planetarity’, Gayatri Spivak asked us to “think the planet as the proper receiver and transmitter of imperatives”. For Spivak, these ‘imperatives’ are principally the policies and practices of civil society; she speaks for example of “bio-prospecting leading to bio-piracy, leading to monocultures, leading to the death of biodiversity”. But here I would like to focus on understanding Earth as a receiver and transmitter – not so much of imperatives as of signals, frequencies and vibrations – to think the planet spectrally.

 

In Introduction to Comparative Planetology Lukáš Likavčan proposes the model of a ‘Spectral Earth’, but whereas his understanding is focused on spectres: a planet haunted by the species of its multiple mass extinctions; my understanding of Earth’s spectrality is grounded in the electromagnetic spectrum that surrounds, forms and transforms it, a spectrum that traverses geophysical, technological and geopolitical understandings of the planetary.

The electromagnetic spectrum connects the sensible phenomena of light, sound, heat and vibration in a continuum with the resonant Schumann frequencies of the planet, the toxic wavelengths of ionizing radiation, and the entire history of media communications from radio to 5G. If we centre these spectral phenomena, afford them an equivalent importance in sustaining the biosphere as we commonly do Earth’s unique atmosphere and moist environment, then we can understand the planet as a mass of mineral and organic matter that is immersed in and produced by – that emits, reflects, and absorbs – radiation across the full breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum. The conditions for abundant biodiversity are not only the chemistry of an oxygen-rich atmosphere and water-rich surface but also continuous solar radiation and the cyclical re/production of minerals by tectonic movement and volcanic activity. The infrared spectrum provides warmth from above, while a combination of seismically induced magma flows in the Earth’s core and radioactive isotopes (which, counter-intuitively, are found in greater concentrations in the crust) provide warmth from below. Changes in the absorption and reflection spectra of the planet’s surface directly impact planetary albedo which, as James Lovelock’s Daisyworld model showed, can inflect climate change. According to current climate science “the balance between net incoming solar radiation and outgoing terrestrial radiation at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere fundamentally drives our climate system” (link). Many of the phenomena central to geophysics can therefore be understood spectrally, as the interaction of electromagnetic frequencies with mineral bodies, of the physical repercussions of a spectrum of vibrations spanning the tactile and toxic, in short – of matter in media.

Planetary spectrality however is not only conditioned by these cosmic and geophysical phenomena, but is equally produced by technical media’s harnessing of the electromagnetic spectrum. Earth is wrapped in an atmosphere of broadcast frequencies and microwave communications as well as one of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Cables stretched from molten sand transmit words and images encoded as pulses of invisible infrared at three discrete wavelengths of 850, 1300 and 1550nm. And above ground, the air is so densely packed with transmissions that the allocation of this saturated spectral space increasingly poses logistical challenges and potential interference between competing functions of the same bandwidth. But the spectral relationship between geophysics and technics is not always one of friction. As Gilbert Simondon pointed out, radio wavelengths over 80 metres reflect partially off the Heaviside layer of ionised gases between 90 and 150km altitude in the atmosphere, and wavelengths longer than 800 metres “undergo a veritable metallic reflection” enabling radio transmissions to reach beyond the province of their origin and traverse national borders in a way that the shorter wavelengths used in broadcasting television are unable to. Through such examples we can observe what Yuk Hui describes as a “unity between the geographical milieu and the technical milieu” (link). Spectral technics can conjoin constructively with geophysical conditions to ensure an uninterrupted propagation of the worldview they articulate, or their signal can equally be inhibited, for example by the magnetic pull of large ore bodies in the ground. But, through planetary sensing and monitoring, spectral technics also translate geophysical and atmospheric conditions back into the orbit of the technosphere, visualising and quantifying the planetary. If we accept Peter Haff’s convincing thesis that the technosphere now constitutes a provisional global paradigm (link), then surely it is in large part the harnessing of the full electromagnetic spectrum that has enabled technics to become a geologic force.

DIS/CONTINUITY

This complete technical mobilisation of the electromagnetic environment is entirely reliant on a strict partitioning of the spectrum, on the allocation of discrete bands for specific purposes. In the same way that the prefixes infra- and ultra- (infrared, ultraviolet, infrasound, ultrasound) imply the centrality of anthropologically perceptible regions of the spectrum, the division of wavelengths into long-, short-, radio-, or micro- reference only their technical apparatus or function. For Simondon “these distinctions are never founded on the very nature of the phenomenon considered; they do not exist properly speaking according to physical science but only according to technics”. This is not to say that all such spectral semantics are arbitrary, it is surely no coincidence that the two frequencies of light most productive in photosynthesis correspond with two of the colours to which the human retina is sensitive: red and blue. The dominant wavelengths of our shared spectral environment have shaped the evolution of biological sight and vegetal metabolism. But thinking the spectrum from a purely technical stance leads to thinking of multiple channels of interpenetrating communication and radiation as separable and discrete entities, whose effects can be contained.

 

Discontinuity is essential to understanding the relationality of spectral phenomena, but continuity is essential to totalising the exchanges of energy between reflected shortwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere and outgoing longwave radiation emitted from Earth, or in Haff’s terminology the “incident solar flux” and the absorption by the biosphere. Simondon illustrates this “antinomy of the continuous and the discontinuous” [2020, p.98] with the example of the photo-electric effect, a phenomenon closely related to the technics photo-voltaic cells and digital photography and one that can be seen as a microcosm of the relationship between solar radiation and terrestrial surface. To understand this energy exchange between photon and electron we must conceive of the photon and electron as discrete particles and yet, as Simondon describes, “when a plate of alkaline metal is illuminated by a beam of light … the free electrons [in the metal] behave as beings equivalent to the continuum”. Particles can exist relationally with one another and behave homogenously.

 

Understanding the planetary as a spectral entity might help enable us to undo what Simondon refers to as the “two complementary representations of the real” which are “perhaps not merely complementary but really one” and to perceive of the planetary system as one in which the apparently distinct spectral signatures of technical and geophysical phenomena are imbricated and entangled in an energetic exchange whose output fundamentally governs climatic conditions.

CHARGE TRANSFER

I want now to move on to the discussion of a specific spectral technicity that exemplifies the sort of geo–technical entanglements discussed above: Remote Sensing. This technique of infrared data visualisation makes direct use of the photo-electric effect to capture terrestrial surfaces, providing the technosphere with a geological analysis of its bedrock. Depending on how this data is employed, hyperspectral remote sensing has the potential to exacerbate, monitor or perhaps even curb anthropogenic climate impacts.

 

The 1983 edition of the Manual of Remote Sensing begins with a note from its editor proposing that the geological analysis of infrared satellite imagery could be used as a means of planetary resource accounting. With the spectral resolution of contemporary instruments, it is well within the bounds of technical possibility that the perpetual orbits of remote sensing satellites could enable calculations of remaining reserves of key minerals. However, from today’s perspective, in which such far-sighted resource management still seems a distant goal and remote sensing is increasingly touted as a commercial tool of geological prospecting for the new mineral resources required by the digital economy, it also seems a somewhat naïve proposition.

Geological remote sensing operates by photographing the infrared reflectance spectrum of a terrestrial surface and analysing it with respect to the known spectra of certain target minerals. In this instance the photo-electric effect is central both to the function of the apparatus and to the phenomenon observed. In his 1977 article ‘Spectral Signature of Particulate Minerals’ (link), Graham Hunt discusses the phenomenon of charge transfer as one of the “intrinsic spectral features” of minerals. Charge transfer, he writes: “refers to the process whereby absorbed energy causes an electron to migrate between neighbouring ions”, and it is this differential absorption and transfer of radiant energy by minerals that defines the spectral signature by which remote sensing identifies them. Charge transfer, however, is also the process by which incident photons are converted into electrons in digital imaging, so in remote sensing there exists a unity not of milieu, but of the geological phenomenon observed and the technics of observation. The photographic operation performed in camera mirrors the absorption of radiation by the surface beneath: a purified metallic semiconductor quantifies the charge transfers occurring in terrestrial minerals by charge-transferring the photons they reflect back. The photosensitivity of silicon measures the photosensitivity of the predominantly silicate crust from which it was mined and above which it orbits.

 

The imbrication of remote sensing with planetary resource ecologies is emphasised by the target applications of current developers of hyperspectral cameras, which include: crop and infrastructure inspection, mining, and geological prospecting. All of these explicitly model or inspect terrestrial space to optimise its use for resource extraction, energy generation or commercial agricultural production. The hyperspectral imaging industry positions itself as the superior technology both to assess unchartered resources and to monitor the efficiency of established operations across multiple industries. These applications perpetuate the accelerating trend of outsourcing inspection and visual analysis as machinic processes, in which visualisation is synonymous with processes of quantification and terrestrial accounting: the image operationalised as a spatial display of geo-data for future economisation.

SPECTRAL GOVERNANCE

While the use of remote sensing as a method of geological prospecting is relatively recent, aggregating data from four decades of earth observation satellites enables climate scientists to analyse the spectral signature of global warming and calculate Earth’s radiation ‘budget’. Were the necessary political consensus achieved these techniques could potentially be used to enforce a kind of climatic governance.

 

Satellite images have three different resolutions, a spatial resolution – measured in metres/pixel, a temporal resolution (more commonly known as the revisit rate) – the number of days between each image of the same location, and a spectral resolution – measured in nanometres of bandwidth that are imaged separately. Each of these resolutions plays a role in the use of satellite remote sensing for climate governance. As with the example of water vapour above, many climatic processes exhibit peaks or troughs at specific frequencies, meaning a fine-grained spectral resolution is required to identify and monitor multiple atmospheric processes with a single instrument, whereas “broadband measurements effectively integrate all the energy across the shortwave or longwave [and] may mask signatures associated with particular climate processes” (link). Once again the technics used in climate modelling requires a segregation of the continuous spectral radiation into discrete bandwidths to disaggregate individual phenomena, as can be seen in the graph below comparing the reflectance of snow and ice with the spectral resolution of various satellite missions.

Among the future satellites currently planned by the European Space Agency is the earth observation mission CO2M or CarbonSat (link), which is currently scheduled for a 2025 launch. The development of CarbonSat was explicitly tied to monitoring global emissions targets at the local level. In the paper outlining the technique of remote sensing CO2 emissions at the pixel level of a satellite image (link), the authors frame their proposal as a means to address the Kyoto protocol’s requirement for independent verification of emission reporting. The ability to make reliable estimates of the carbon output of individual coal-fired power plants is the express target of the mission and the rapid increase in construction of coal power plants in India and China is mentioned anecdotally as a likely cause of future emissions growth. Implicit among the complex technical specifications described is the positioning of European scientific method as a moralising emissions monitor over the coal-fired future of the developing world. In this context it’s hard not to see this satellite mission as an act of what Jack Stilgoe refers to as ‘anticipatory governance’ (link), where the rush to meet the power needs of growing populations in Asia is met in Western Europe with a simultaneous scramble to devise a technocratic means to enforce their emissions commitments.

 

The spectral specifications for CarbonSat are for sensitivity to 3 bands, one in the near infrared (NIR) and two in the shortwave infrared (SWIR). Of these the NIR resolution is highest at 0.1nm, meaning that in the 747-773nm band 260 discrete measurements will be made for each pixel of the array. The main objective of the scientists developing CarbonSat however relies on its spatial resolution, where, according to their calculations, a 2km2 ground resolution will be sufficient to identify the emissions of a single power station. Spectral enforcement of emissions is only possible by a granular fragmentation of continuous solar radiation and terrestrial surface. As Holly Jean Buck writes (albeit in a different context): “engaging in this breaking apart, diagramming and modelling of the systems is how we have learned to think. Sciences both social and biophysical are doing just this. But it is not working. Another line of approach is needed”.

 

CarbonSat makes clear the potential for such remote sensed satellite observations to be used in implementing a form of spectral climate governance. And, if humanity were to actively engage in the kind of planetary scale geoengineering experiments surveyed by Buck in After Geoengineering, then these same hyperspectral instruments might provide our most immediate means of analysing their climatic effects. But the governance model suggested by the CarbonSat documents relies on satellite surveillance identifying local rogue polluters, which seems about as likely to reduce global emissions as CCTV cameras are to prevent crime. If another model is needed then it should be one that is capable of connecting both spectral phenomena and populations rather than establishing adversarial oversight. Perhaps conceiving of a spectral planetarity could enable us to abandon what Benjamin Bratton refers to as the “tenuous differentiation of geoculture from geotechnology” and instead realise and build upon the mutually constitutive spectral relations between geotechnics and geophysics.

Pixel Mining

From Friday 23rd to Sunday 25th July I will be showing a new video installation at  D-UNIT, Bristol:

 

We mine and refine rocks to make pixels glow. Digital electronics now outnumber human beings, each individual unit uses the vast majority of terrestrial metals in its components. According to the US Geological Survey 22 billion handheld electronic devices were manufactured in 2014. The LED screens in these devices used 130kg of gallium, 170kg of cerium, 120kg of arsenic and 180kg of lanthanum. If we knew the average number of pixels in each device we could calculate the geological cost per pixel of our screen time. The earth observation satellite Sentinel II produces another image of every site from which its raw materials were extracted every five days. These images have a ground resolution of 10 square metres per pixel, but we can’t calculate how many square metres of terrestrial surface were turned over to produce each pixel in its camera. If we could we might be able to derive a planetary resolution: the total number of pixels the Earth can support.

 

Using hacked PC monitors, satellite time-lapse, and found footage of electronics manufacture and recycling, this new video installation connects the flickering screen image with the cycles of extraction that make its appearance possible, asking how many pixels and how much screen time the planet can sustain.

D-UNIT has been initiated by artist Megan Broadmeadow and her partner Ed Metcalf with an aim to provide opportunites for 2020 graduates who were unable to have degree shows as well as artist-led initiatives from Bristol based artists and exhibitions for UK based mid-career artists. They will also be running public workshops in practical work and digital skills over the winter months.

 
 

D-UNIT is located at:

Durnford Street

Bristol

BS3 2AW

 

www. dunit.space Instagram – d.unit.studios

Current Concerns in Artistic Research

I was recently runner-up in applying for a new job. For the interview I was asked to give a presentation on this title, and as I spent some considerable time working on a response I thought I would post the text of the talk here (apologies for length, I was asked to talk for half an hour):

I find it increasingly difficult to separate the most pressing concerns of artistic research from those of society at large. Looking at my current students’ research topics sketches the territory clearly. Among them are students working on and writing about, the microbial health of the oceans, the surveillance of populations by data collection through smart speakers, and the effects of capitalism on the methods, markets and aesthetics of the arts. These same threads of ecological, technological and political critique seem to recur year on year, with ever more urgency. Over the coming decades we face an unprecedented triangulation of crises that will surely require extraordinary levels of co-operation between people of different cultures and disciplines.

 

Artistic research may not be equipped to provide solutions, but artists continue to engage with and contribute to these debates, to foster dialogue, to visualise possible futures, and to bring that which is obscured to the foreground.

 

Hopefully, faced with such challenges, we can declare the question of what exactly might or might not constitute artistic research to be irrelevant. I seem to have spent much of my professional life on the fringes of such fruitless semantic debates, for example about exactly where to draw the line between music and sound art. And I think we need to take seriously Hito Steyerl’s warning that such arguments over inclusion and exclusion in any one discipline become in themselves disciplinary. So – (as much as I don’t believe that science has a monopoly on truth) – I’m very happy to refer anyone still interested in drawing lines between disciplines to Karen Barad’s observation that the closer one looks at an edge .. the more it disappears, dissolving into a diffraction pattern, oscillating between dark and light, interior and exterior.

Before considering the current concerns of artistic research I would first like to quickly identify one of its strengths, one that has previously been highlighted by Michael Dieter in his writings on Critical Technical Practice , that is the creation, formation, or articulation of problems. This is of course not the exclusive domain of artistic research. As Dieter reminds us Foucault considered his writing to be ‘an act of thought involving the process of defining a problem’ and surely the work of much critical writing in the humanities today continues that tradition. But artistic research is perhaps unique in working with these problems materially, articulating them through practice and therefore often directly engaging with the very materiality that defines the problem in the first place.

 

Holding this fondness for realising problems in our heads I would like to propose that one crucial concern for a discipline with such heterogeneous foundations as artistic research, a discipline whose boundaries must necessarily remain flexible, pourous and indistinct is surely how it negotiates its relationship with other disciplines, both within and beyond academia.

 

Henk Borgdorff’s concept of the ‘boundary work’ continues to prove useful in this regard, because as much as artistic research will always be a located between art and academia it’s knowledge also often inhabits the boundary of another practice, another discipline, another field. If, as Borgdorff has written elsewhere “an important distinction between art practice in itself and artistic research” is that “artistic research seeks to contribute not just to the artistic universe, but to what we know and understand” and that knowledge and understanding is often targeted beyond the boundaries of what he refers to as the ‘artistic universe’. If artistic research is good at framing problems, and asking questions then those problems and questions are often addressed to another sphere beyond the arts. This is perhaps both why researchers outside the arts like to collaborate with artists, and also why others become frustrated by working with artists, because we revel in creation of problems outside of their own discipline.

 

This concern is not particularly new, the framing of the 2009 Sensuous Knowledge conference at Bergen National Academy of Arts for example included the question: “How can artistic research make a meaningful and relevant contribution outside of itself?”, but it is a question that persists today and, shows no sign of either abating or becoming satisfactorily resolved just yet.  

 

One presumption of the arts that appears to be being actively challenged by creative practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds, is of the ambiguous relationship between the arts and functionality or maybe more accurately – purpose. We are, it seems to me, at a moment in which decreasing numbers of artists are content with the paradigm of ‘raising awareness’ of the issues with which their practice engages, while more and more are producing works that seek to operate actively in cultural spheres beyond their own

From Amy Balkin’s Public Smog project, the long-term ambition of which is to have the earth’s atmosphere listed as a UNESCO Heritage Site, to the legal testimonies of Forensic Architecture,  artist-researchers are creating work that no longer merely formulates problems, serves as a provocation or publicises its concerns but instead seeks to actively submit evidence, build a case, propose an alternative or challenge an existing power structure.

 

Examples such as these seem to me to move beyond what Tom Holert identifies as the demand “voiced in various sections of public culture” that artists “work on appropriate, adequate and timely responses to historical events, political change, social crises, or environmental catastrophes”. Conversely, the demands made by these practices refute the artists position as simply a ‘respondent’ to their geopolitical context, invoking in its place a role in which the work of art serves to actually alter that context.

 

Peter Sonderen has said that “artistic research actualises what it wants to show, it makes its knowledge tangible”, but in works like these there remain emphatic aspirations that are not realised, and that are often considered unrealisable, or perhaps even unrealistic.

It is then somewhat ironic that artist, activist and occasional curator Paolo Cirio used the title Evidentiary Realism for a group show encapsulating the work of artist-researchers who investigate, document and “examine the underpinning economic, political, legal, linguistic, and cultural structures that impact society at large”. Balkin and Weizman were both included in the 2018 exhibition alongside work by Suzanne Treister who exhibited these print-outs of documents from the Edward Snowden files, defaced or redacted with doodles that appropriated the graphic content of the original slides to partially obscure the leaks – and Ingrid Burrington whose lenticular prints overlaid before and after satellite images of locations in which major data centres had been built, evidencing the physical scale and environmental impact of the data storage that we have all come to rely so heavily upon. Alongside these contemporary examples were what might be thought of as historical precedents for such research-based evidential practices, exemplified by the work of Hans Haake, Mark Lombardi or Harun Farocki.

The controversy surrounding Cirio’s own most recent project Capture, which was censored prior to the opening of the exhibition Panorama 22 in France, exposes the difficulties of producing work on the boundary between art and politics. The work consists of a collection of widely available press and social media images of the faces of French riot police officers, processed by facial recognition software and then pasted both on the interior walls of the gallery and exterior walls throughout the city. The project is intended to highlight the danger to privacy represented by facial recognition, and is accompanied by a provocative online platform that proposes to crowd-source the officers’ identities. Cirio adopts the now familiar strategy of inverting the gaze of such technologies back upon the authorities who usually wield them.

 

The controversy surrounding the work and its subsequent censorship highlights the fact that when the research questions posed by artists raise implications beyond their own discipline, the consequences can also extend beyond the control of cultural institutions. In this case it is too soon to know whether the outrage and demands by the French Interior Minister to withdraw the work from the show will eventually serve Cirio’s own aim to challenge the increasing use of facial recognition systems, or are merely a demonstration that such inversions of existing power structures will never be tolerated. For the artist stepping beyond their discipline into a political arena, there can also be disciplinary consequences.

Stepping back to consider the relationship between a project such as this and research in other disciplines, I am struck by how often the agenda of research in engineering, technology and the sciences has – intentionally or otherwise – established possibilities, protocols and systems which end up becoming embedded in society at large. The streaming of this talk, and in fact the vast majority of University lectures this semester, are made possible by two research projects from the 1960s, one in the University of Southampton which pioneered the transmission of data in fibre optics and another in Bell Telephone Laboratories which invented a rudimentary image sensor capable of digitally encoding the incident light on its surface. We all carry the outcomes of innumerable research projects in these fields in our pockets and produce critical artworks or write theoretical tracts about their societal impact either too late or from too marginal a position to have an impact on their widespread adoption.

 

It will doubtless sound like what in business talk is referred to as blue sky thinking – which is also surely not so far from having one’s head in the clouds – to think that an artistic research project could ever realise such widespread impact. But nevertheless one of my questions today about the future of artistic research is: How we might develop mechanisms or means for its knowledge and understanding to be put into action, for the problems which it formulates to become part of our shared social discourse?

 

Another question that I believe remains unresolved is how exactly to make use of the position of artistic research within the academy or University. Now that it has become institutionally accepted that artistic projects can constitute research might it be possible to leverage this privilege into some actual influence? And if one of the strengths of artistic research lies in its ability to formulate problems outside of itself – then might it be possible to cluster around those problems a transdisciplinary team of researchers, practitioners or experimentalists who between them have the expertise, facilities and resources to adequately address those problems.

Interdisciplinarity itself is also certainly rife with the familiar difficulties brought about by collaborations in general and the conflicting interests and frames of reference that arise when people from different backgrounds work together. This has been highlighted by a current artistic research project at Central Saint Martins in London. Manifest Data Lab is a transdisciplinary research group “employing climate data within critical arts settings”. The project aims to provide a visual imaginary of climate change that is “capable of accounting for how the planet and its climate functions as a set of connected material, social and cultural relations within which we are implicated”.

The first in a series of slides mapping the problematics of art, data and climate states: “artists illustrating science rather than imaginative transformations of climate knowledge” highlighting a particularly intransigent issue that was also identified by Hans Jorg Rheinberger, almost a decade ago. As he puts it art science collaborations have often been “nurtured on the part of sciences, mainly in the name of renewing understandings of science”. Indeed in my own experience of such collaborations scientists often seem naïve of – or surprised by – the ability of the arts to formulate and address many of the same questions that inform the ethics and ambitions of their own discipline.

 

The expectation that hiring an artist-in-residence will increase public engagement with – or comprehension of – your scientific research outcomes seems exemplified by a recent call from the Sinfonia research project at the Center for Biosustainability of the Technical University of Denmark. Their specification that a musician or composer is “especially welcome” to apply conveniently aligns with the project’s youtube explainer which relies heavily on musical metaphors of cellular harmony to argue the benefits of their synthetic biological methodology.

To break out of this pattern it might be necessary to develop the current model of the artist-in-residence in which an individual artist is embedded in a discipline or organisation to produce work responsive to that context. Within this model there exists a structural imbalance between the organisation – which is always in the role of the host and sometimes also that of the funder or the commissioner, and the artist, who is bound by the etiquette of the guest, and usually also grateful for the opportunity, expenses or fee, and may also be isolated, immersed in a practice or disciplinary culture which is alien to them.

 

A precedent from before the time of artistic research is perhaps instructive here. The Artist Placement Group, conceived and founded by Barbara Steveni in 1965 arranged long-term placements for artists in various industries and government departments in an explicit attempt to “shift the function of art towards decision making”. Its ground-breaking activities throughout the 1970s are often cited as establishing the model of the artist-in-residence that is now so familiar to us. As John Walker wrote in 1972 “the Artist Placement Group’s position was one of realism: in the present society it is decision-making that counts, and therefore the greatest hope for change resides in the attempt to influence decision-makers”. This hope is, I believe, is the same as that which motivated Amy Balkin to send 90,000 signed postcards to Germany’s Minister for the Environment in 2012. And it is the same hope which motivates the transdisciplinary team of researchers that make up Forensic Architecture to prepare meticulous reports into state-sanctioned atrocities.

 

Perhaps the model of the solitary artist-in-residence – striving to articulate problems in other disciplines of which they have little expertise, while surrounded by experts – is not one capable of delivering this influence. This is not intended to discredit the impressive legacy of APG’s pioneering work, but to say that perhaps we need to look to other models of transdisciplinary collaboration if the research agenda of the arts is to be taken seriously beyond it’s own boundaries.

 

How else then might we think of the interaction between disciplines? While one obvious alternative would be to formulate research agendas in a transdisciplinary context in the first place, I would like to suggest that perhaps a model of “co-inquiry” articulated by curator Nicola Triscott, founder of the Arts Catalyst and now director of FACT Liverpool might be more fruitful. According to Triscott, this model “enables different types of inquiry to work side-by-side, to cooperate rather than demanding collaboration which requires a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem”.

 

The desire of artistic research to have an impact on decision-making brings us back again to the evidential role played by some contemporary practices, because – as Susan Schuppli has said – “the notion of evidence has become crucial under the conditions of climate change and global warming, because one requires evidence in order to make a political claim and to influence environmental policy or political decision-making”. Schuppli’s practice, and writing, is to my mind particularly pertinent here, because in reframing the legal-linguistic term “material witness” in relation to artistic research, and in doing so she locates the evidential as a capacity of the material.

 

For Schuppli “Materials record, capture and carry traces of external events, and can be scrutinised and unfolded to produce some kind of history, sometimes even a counter narrative”. In her own practice this capacity is demonstrated most recently through her project Learning from Ice in which she has been working with Ice Core scientists who use the tiny bubbles of air trapped in an ice core to map the historic changes in the quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide, so in this example as Schuppli says “the thing itself is captured by the materials”. Ice then carries an irrefutable testimony in its very materiality, one which connects to theoretical debates in artistic circles around indexicality and material truths.

But examples such as this might also be seen by some artists as placing demands upon artistic research that move the field beyond its traditional concerns — or even imply that it is only through meeting this requirement for evidence which Schuppli cites that artists can contribute to such debates. As it is certainly not my intention to imply that the only way in which artists can make an epistemic contribution is through this sort of documentary practice. I would like to close by briefly discussing a work which – to my mind – equally contributes to ecological debates, but through a less earnest and more speculative means.

 

In their collaborative project Asunder the conception shared by Tega Brain, Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjölen is of network technologies being diverted from their current disturbingly authoritarian, extractive and accumulative practices to face the environmental challenges of a changing climate. At the heart of their installation for transmediale 2019, a supercomputer analysed satellite, climate and geological data to generate geoengineering plans for various terrestrial regions before simulating these possible futures. On the one hand the project seems to propose a viable technological solution to repairing environmental damage by tasking an algorithmic intelligence trained on our communal knowledge of climatology.

But in the absurdity of some of the solutions generated – including for example the straightening of coastlines and re-routing of rivers – it also demonstrates a healthy dose of scepticism about what the reality of such a system could entail. The project poses a plausible scenario in which artificial intelligence is used to inform environmental planning while simultaneously pointing to its likely pitfalls.

 

In extrapolating from current trends in machine intelligence and applying them to planetary problems, the artists pre-empt a speculative science, but also embed its critique within its prototype. It seems to me that this capacity to poke fun at one’s own creations, to problematise solutions while you are working on them will be indispensable if we are to envision and implement new relationships between biosphere and technosphere. And that artists should always be part of those conversations.

[some brief thoughts on] Semiconductor Supply Chains

As part of my ongoing Earth Art Fellowship at Bristol University I have been trying to research what raw materials might be found in the two iPhone 5s that we have been slicing up and melting. This in itself is a near-impossible task, as Apple are keen to obscure the details of their silicon and mirrors: the now widely available PDF of the PCB layout that I am using to locate possible raw materials is labelled ‘Foxconn Confidential’ on the top left. Luckily such secrecy breeds curiosity and we are awash in teardowns identifying the parts and functions within this schematic. But even armed with knowledge of the manufacturer, function and chip-code of each semiconductor, working out the materials used, their proportions and origins is far harder ask in the deliberate opacity of smartphone supply chains. For now I just want to make two quick observations based on what I have found out so far.

The iPhone 5 used the, then new, Apple A6 chip as its central processor. This chip, Wikipedia tells us, was the first to use a ‘high-k dielectric’ material as its substrate. Delving further it seems that the sole benefit of this substrate over the usual silicon dioxide material is that it enables ‘further miniaturisation’. (This could be considered somewhat ironic given that ever since the release of the iPhone 5, Apple’s subsequent smartphones have all got larger). This miniaturisation is – like much of the functionality of contemporary digital media – reliant on rare metals, in this case it is speculated that the A6 chip is doped with Hafnium. Hafnium is found in heavy mineral sand deposits, usually found in beach environments such as those in Western Australia and South Africa, where it exists in solid solution with Zirconium. Hafnium is produced as a by-product in the refinement of the high purity Zirconium which is required by the nuclear industry for the outer cladding of nuclear fuel rods. Current production of Hafnium is approximately 70 tonnes per annum, but the increasing shutdown of nuclear reactors globally is likely to hinder the growth of the Hafnium market. The miniaturisation of consumer electronics is therefore incidentally entangled with and reliant on the nuclear energy industry.

At the bottom left of the rear side of the iPhone PCB we find a chip called the Skyworks 77352-15, the precursor to this current chip. This chip amplifies global satellite signals and is based on an Indium Gallium Phosphide (InGaP) substrate. Indium has become synonymous with contemporary technology, as it is a vital component of both touchscreens and solar cells, all of which are coated with Indium Tin Oxide (ITO). If, as both Marinetti and YoHa have contended, Aluminium was the defining metal of modernity for the twentieth century, then surely the conductivity and transparence to the visual spectrum of ITO make it a leading contender for the defining substance of our technological present.

Indium is also produced as a by-product of a larger refinement process, this time during the production of Zinc from the mineral Sphalerite. Known indium reserves are estimated to be 15,000 tonnes. Although the true figure is likely to be considerably higher, as with Hafnium, its availability is limited by the cost of its production. Recycling Indium from end-of-life devices currently accounts for less than 1% of global production. In recent years  numerous scienitific papers have shown that the Indium from ITO can be reclaimed from solar cells and LCD displays by crushing them to millimetre sized particles which are then soaked in an acid solution from which the Indium can then be recovered electrolytically. However, as yet this process has not yet been implemented at a scale sufficient for the mass recycling of indium, largely because current price levels have not ‘justified’ the recovery of Indium from laptops, phones, and other e-waste. It is estimated that the price of Indium would need to exceed $700/kg to make recovery from end-of-life devices ‘profitable’. The myopia of the marketplace again takes precedence over an economy of means and materials. Once again the abstract numerical economy outweighs the material, planetary ecology on which even this brief foray into one commodity demonstrates it to be entirely reliant.