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# A GEOLOGY OF MEDIA A GEOLOGY OF MEDIA JUSSI PARIKKA Electronic Mediations, Volume 46 MINNESOTA University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London A version of chapter 2 was published as *The Anthrobscene* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Portions of chapter 4 appeared in “Dust and Exhaustion: The Labor of Media Materialism,” *CTheory*, October 2, 2013, net. The Appendix was previously published as “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method,” *Leonardo* 45, no. 5 (2012): 424–30. Portions of the book appeared in “Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste,” in *Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste*, ed.

Jussi Parikka (Ann Arbor,: Open Humanities Press, 2011), and in “Media Zoology and Waste Management: Animal Energies and Medianatures,” *NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies*, no. 4 (2013): 527–44. Copyright 2015 by Jussi Parikka All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parikka, Jussi. A geology of media / Jussi Parikka. (Electronic mediations; volume 46) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-9551-5 (hc: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8166-9552-2 (pb: alk. paper) 1. Mass media. 2. Mass media—Social aspects. 3. Mass media and culture. I. Title. P3355 2015 302.23—dc23 2014028047 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii 1 Materiality: Grounds of Media and Culture 1 2 An Alternative Deep Time of the Media 29 3 Psychogeophysics of Technology 59 4 Dust and the Exhausted Life 83 5 Fossil Futures 109 Afterword: So-Called Nature 137 Appendix.

Zombie Media: Circuit Bending 141 Media Archaeology into an Art Method Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka Notes 155 Index 193 vii PREFACE In Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell offers one of the early definitions of the discipline: Geology is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and the inorganic kingdoms of nature; it enquires into the causes of these changes, and the influ- ence which they have exerted in modifying the surface and external structure of the 1 This iconic take from 1830 outlines geology as one of the main disciplines of planetary inquiry, leaving the regime of morals to the humanities.

It is both an emblem of the division of labor in the academia and a genealog- ical record that could not be more central to our concerns. The geologi- cal manifests in earthquakes, mass extinction of species, pollution of the globe, and the debates about the Anthropocene, which demonstrates that morals, culture, and geology after all have something to do with each other. The book argues that the world of thought, senses, sensation, per- ception, customs, practices, habits, and human embodiment is not unre- lated to the world of geological strata, climates, the earth, and the massive durations of change that seem to mock the timescales of our petty affairs.

And yet, the human affairs have demonstrated an impact. Science and engineering has a significant impact on the earth. The idealized object of knowledge itself registers the observing gaze that was supposed to be at a distance. Geoengineering is one practice of intertwined naturecultures, viii Preface and our continuous trespassing over the boundaries of sciences and humanities cannot be neglected by closing our eyes and thinking of semi- otics. The relations to the earth are also part of the social relations of labor and exploitation that characterized emerging industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century as much as they characterize contemporary digital capitalism of the twenty-first century from mining minerals, geo- politics of the hunt for energy, and material resources to the factories of production of computational equipment.

This short book is about scientific cultures, technological reality, and artistic perspectives. It engages with science and technology as one per- tinent multidisciplinary context for media studies and media art history. It does not claim to be a full-fledged account of the relations of geology and technology. However, it offers an insight relevant to many of us work- ing in the field of media, arts, and contemporary technology studies, in- cluding media archaeology. There is more mining than data mining in A Geology of Media. More specifically, it is interested in the connections of media technologies, their materiality, hardware, and energy, with the geophysical nature: nature affords and bears the weight of media culture, from metals and minerals to its waste load.

The official Geological Surveys might be an odd place to start media analysis, but they do reveal the backstory of technologi- cal culture: the geopolitically important scientific mapping of resources from copper to uranium, oil to nickel, bauxite (necessary for aluminum) to a long list of rare earth minerals. One also finds a mix of nation-state inter- ests, scientific institutions, and, of course, military needs ever so tightly interlinked since the nineteenth century. One is led to consider the sys- tematic laboratorization of everyday culture: even the mundane is pro- duced through a mix of the archaic underworld and the refined scientific process.

Even if cultural and media theorists are now aware of the impor- tance of minerals such as coltan (tantalum), it was actually already before digital culture that this specific mineral (often mined in the war-ridden territories of Congo) became mapped as part of the geophysical politics of the twentieth century: “The S. Bureau of Mines observed that these materials were ‘among the rare metals most vital in 1952 to the United States defense program’”2 because of tantalum’s (and columbium’s) use- fulness for special “high-strength steel ” 3 Preface ix The book was finished primarily in Istanbul in 2013 and early 2014, a city where one has a privileged view to some of the issues that we face with technological projects and disastrous environmental consequences.

Such are often underpinned by shortsighted and just blatantly exploit- ative violent politics. The story, and the book, was started during the Gezi protests of summer 2013, sparked off by an environmental protest but resonant of a wider political situation where issues of capitalism, reli- gion, technology, knowledge, and the environment folded into a complex historical event. Istanbul is a tectonic city, sitting on top of geological formations promising another major earthquake in the future. It is a city branded by massive geologically significant building projects. Some are already ready, some are in planning. The recently opened Marmaray tun- nel connected the two continents through a tunnel under the Bosphorus; a canal project suggests to link the Black Sea with the Marmara Sea; a lot of the projects are reminiscent of the national engineering of modernity but also now the corporate capital investment in this geopolitically impor- tant region.

But the protests were also highlighting the aspects that tie location to politics, the life of the earth with increasingly authoritarian rul- ing powers with corporate interests in the construction business and other businesses. The events demonstrated the impossibility of detaching the political from the natural, the geopolitical from the geological. The short- term political struggles had to do with political freedoms as much as with the awareness of what would happen if some of the massive building pro- jects, including a new airport and a third bridge, would wipe out impor- tant parts of the forestry around Istanbul as well as creating extremely dangerous risks to the underground water resources of the city.

This political situation and its link with capitalism was present already in the nineteenth-century evaluation of the changing modes of produc- tion. Of course the environmental catastrophe is not merely a capitalist aftereffect. We should not ignore the impact “real socialism” of the twen- tieth century left in the natural record as radioactive radiation and indus- trial traces in soil and rivers. But there is a connection to the capitalist intensification of modes of production with the necessity to expand into new resource bases to guarantee growth. What we now perceive as the environmental catastrophe at times branded as the “Anthropocene” of human impact on the planet matches in some periodization also what

x Preface Marx and Engels narrativize as a crucial political economic shift. From The Communist Manifesto, in 1848: The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agricul- ture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole popu- lations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social 4 Marx and Engels’s political characterization of capitalism as a mode of mobilizing science and engineering into productive forces is also what now we live as the aftereffect coined the

” The modern project of ruling over nature understood as resource was based on a division of the two—the Social and the Natural—but it always leaked. Bruno Latour constantly has reminded of the impossibility of dividing Nature from Culture. We have various names for the entanglements of the natural– geophysical, including Gaia and the Anthropocene; but both indicate the arrival of something new that points out as insufficient any Modern attempt to name the two, Nature and Culture, separately. 5 Yet we need to remember that nothing necessarily arrived. The geo- logical past in its persistent slowness; the earlier accounts of the Anthro- pocene before its time in the nineteenth century by Antonio Stoppani (the Anthropozoic) and by George P.

Marsh; 6 the early phases of the sci- entific and technological systems, such as metereology, that visualized and modeled the natural planet as a global system—they were already there. 7 In 1873, in his Corso di Geologia, Stoppani paints an image of the human as an inventor who penetrates the earth, the sea, and the air with his technologies and builds from and on the earth’s already existing 8 The future fossil layer is already in Stoppani’s analysis branded by human technological and chemical traces. Humans leave their mark, and the earth carries it forward as an archive.

The supposedly unexpected event of the Anthropocene had already arrived beforehand. These sudden revelations embedded in geological Preface xi slowness offer a view both to the historical layers of discourse concern- ing technology, waste, and time and the geological realities where we col- lect and dispose of resources. Stoppani’s vision of the earth archive is the afterglow of the scientific and technological culture. It’s the trash in midst of which we live. And it’s the trash we have to sort out in case there would be a human future, in the midst of our constitutive nonhuman fellows.

This page intentionally left blank xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A Geology of Media forms the third and final part of the trilogy of media ecologies: from the viral worlds of Digital Contagions (2007) to the swarms of Insect Media (2010), the focus has been on the digital materialism that tied animals and ecology as part of theory and narratives of history. A Geology of Media is more focused on the nonorganic and yet connects with the concerns of the two: how to think the continuum between nature and technology? This book owes its existence to so many friends and colleagues I have met, worked with, and talked with over the years.

A lot of my inspi- ration comes from Sean Cubitt’s work on related topics. The colleagues at Winchester School of Art offered great support, and discussions with Ryan Bishop were especially instrumental in form- ing some of the arguments. Several people read the text or offered other insights and sources, knowingly or unknowingly. Thanks go (in no par- ticular order) to Garnet Hertz, Steven Shaviro, Sean Cubitt, Ed D’Souza, Seb Franklin, Tom Apperley, Michael Dieter, Benjamin Bratton, Alison Gazzard, Darren Wershler, J. R. Carpenter, Ed Keller, Jordan Crandall, Richard Grusin, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Till Heilmann, Paul Feigelfeld, Florian Sprenger, Robin Boast, Kelly Egan, Gary Genosko, Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois, Ebru Yetiskin, Olcay Öztürk Pasi Väliaho, Ilona Hong- isto, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Teemu Taira, Milla Tiainen, Matleena Kala- joki, Rosi Braidotti, Trevor Paglen, Gregory Chatonsky, Jonathan Kemp, Martin Howse, Ryan Jordan, Jamie Allen, David Gauthier, and YoHa.

The xiv Acknowledgments University of Minnesota Press has again been a pleasure to work with. Doug Armato and Danielle Kasprzak are two people I want to name in particular, but the entire team deserves a warm thank-you. Similarly, I thank the editors of Electronic Mediations for including this book as part of the series. Thank you also to Diana Witt for preparing the index. I benefited from a visiting scholar position at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul during autumn 2013. The book was finalized with help from a senior fellowship at the Leuphana University MECS–Institute in early summer 2014.

Preliminary ideas for this book were presented at many events, conferences, and other talks, including at transmediale, Bochum University, Slade School of Art at University College London, Cornell University, Goldsmiths College, Giessen, Mnemonics Cultural Memory summer school in Stockholm, Winchester School of Art, and the Cana- dian Communication Association Annual Congress. I would like to dedicate this book to my mother and my father, both in their own ways such a solid ground and support. 1 1 MATERIALITY GROUNDS OF MEDIA AND CULTURE The future is out there on the permafrost. —THOMAS PYNCHON, THE BLEEDING EDGE Technology...

constitutes the abyss of the Anthropocene. — ERICH HÖRL An Alternative Media Materialism To label yourself a materialist does not necessarily by itself mean much. The term is something that demands explication, instead of explaining by its own powers. The long histories of materialism and idealism in philos- ophy are one reference point, but so are the everyday uses of the term: do we refer to it as the opposite of spiritual or ethical (as in expressions of disgust toward the materialist aspects of consumer society) or refer to the reality of machines and technology that structure our life.

The Marxist legacy in political thought and theory has given us indication what historical materialism is, but so have scholars in media theory: media materialism refers to the necessity to analyze media technologies as something that are irreducible to what we think of them or even how we use them. It has come to refer to technology as an active agent in the ontological and epistemological sense. In other words, media structure how things are in the world and how things are known in the world. In fact, media analysis is an excellent way of “giving material specificity to

2 Materiality our descriptions of... abstract concepts”1 of which materiality is oddly enough too easily one. Cultural and media theory have benefited in the past years from an emergence of several accounts of materiality. In media theory, material- ism has often been attached to the term German media theory—a term that has brought unity to a wider field of scholars engaging with material accounts of media culture in rather different 2 Friedrich Kittler is the most famous reference in this context. Kittler inaugurated various provocations regarding computer culture, hardware, and the technologi- cal framing of our contemporary life, which implied a certain nonhuman perspective: the human being is primarily a “so-called Man” formed as an aftereffect of media technologies.

At times, Kittler was even branded a media archaeologist because he picked up on Michel Foucault’s archae- ological and archival cultural history in a new way in his early 3 There’s a truth to that label: Kittler was adamant that we need to make sure that Foucault’s understanding of what governs our contemporary life— its archive—is not only about the statements and rules found in books and libraries. Instead, it is to be found in technological networks of machines and institutions, patterns of education and drilling: in the scientific-engineering complex that practices such forms of power that the traditional humanities theory is incapable of understanding or grasping if it continues to talk about hermeneutic meanings or persists to operate with traditional sociological concepts.

Kittler was a provocateur in a theo- retical psy-ops operation who believed that humanities scholars should work with technology. He himself did. Kittler left behind unpublished writ- ings but also software manuals and hardware, to be part of his Nachlass. His early synthesizer from the 1970s was resurrected and included in an art performance by Jan-Peter Sonntag to demonstrate this metamorpho- sis of Kittler: the Goethe scholar turned synth-geek and tinkerer. At times in accusing, pejorative ways, and at times in more celebra- tory tones, the likes of Kittler became an emblem of media materialism: to study media, you need to have a proper understanding of the science and engineering realities that govern the highly fine-structured computer worlds in which we live—without ignoring the fact that technical media did not start with the digital.

Older technical media play an important part in the histories and genealogies, the archaeological layers conditioning Materiality 3 our present. Media archaeology has been one field to constantly empha- size this point. For Kittler, media studies was never to be reduced to the play of interpretations, semiotic connotations, or modes of representation, which were only secondary effects, second-order phenomena. Media work on the level of circuits, hardware, and voltage differences, which the engi- neers as much as the military intelligence and secret agencies gradually recognized before humanities did. This mode of argumentation ignored, however, a wide range of politically engaged work that tried to make sense of why media govern us humans on a semiotic level too.

Such creeping suspicions that any inclusive account of materiality definitely filtered out many competing ones triggers the question, what is being left out? What other modes of materiality deserve our attention? Issues of gender, sex, embodiment, and affect? Of labor, global logistics, modes of production? In other words, from where do our notions of materiality stem, and what is their ground? What if there is another level of media materialism that is not so easily dismissed as we would think? What if media materialism is not something that hones in on the machines only? Where do machines come from, what composes technology in its materiality and media after it be- comes disused, dysfunctional dead media that refuse to die?

This book is structured around the argument that there is such a thing as geology of media: a different sort of temporal and spatial materialism of media cul- ture than the one that focuses solely on machines or even networks of technologies as nonhuman agencies. It echoes John Durham Peters’s point that the axis of time and space—familiar also from the Canadian media theory tradition of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan—is not restricted to traditional ideas about media as devices but can refer back to cosmol- ogy and geology: that the geological sciences and astronomy have already opened up the idea of the earth, light, air, and time as media.

4 This is a green book—in the sense of referring to the ecological con- texts in which we should make arguments about media technological culture—as well as a book covered in dirt and soil. Instead of leafy meta- phors of animals, technology, and ecosystems, it insists on a particular aspect of this relation between media and the geophysical environment. Scholars such as Douglas Kahn have recently made the same point that 4 Materiality Kittler’s agenda could have been more radical and continued from the circuits to what enables hardware: the environmental contexts, questions of energy consumption, and, one could add, the electronic waste that sur- round our contemporary worries of what transmission, calculation, and storage mean in a material

5 The guiding conceptual ground of this book refers to geology: the science about the ground beneath our feet, its history and constitution, the systematic study of the various levers, layers, strata, and intercon- nections that define the earth. It implies the work of geoengineering and geotechnics as specific ways of interacting with the solidity of the earth but also the fine measurements that relate to a wider awareness of the environmental constitution of our lives. Hence geology is not only about the soil, the crust, the layers that give our feet a ground on which to stum- ble: geology is also a theme connected to the climate change as well as the political economy of industrial and postindustrial production.

It con- nects to the wider geophysical life worlds that support the organic life as much as the technological worlds of transmission, calculation, and storage. Geology becomes a way to investigate materiality of the techno- logical media world. It becomes a conceptual trajectory, a creative inter- vention to the cultural history of the contemporary. Geology and various related disciplines and fields of knowledge, such as chemistry and, indeed, ecology, frame the modern world and give it one possible scientific structure. Such disciplines are strongly implied in the emergence of the technological and scientific culture, which feeds to our media cultural practices.

It is in this sense that I am interested in finding strains of media materialism outside the usual definition of media: instead of radio, I prefer to think what components and materials enable such technologies; instead of networking, we need to remember the im- portance of copper or optical fiber for such forms of communication; instead of a blunt discussion of “the digital,” we need to pick it apart and remember that also mineral durations are essential to it being such a cru- cial feature that penetrates our academic, social, and economic interests. Consider, then, lithium as such a premediatic media material that is essen- tial to the existence of technological culture but also as an element that traverses technologies.

This chemical element (Li) and metal is essential for laptop batteries as well as future green technologies (again, battery Materiality 5 technology, but for hybrid cars). Platinum-grouped metals might be famil- iar from jewelry but are as important for “computer hard drives, liquid crystal displays, and miniaturized electronic circuits”6 as for hydrogen fuel cells. Lots of critical materials are in a crucial position in relation to a variety of civilian and military technologies, including what we tend to call just bluntly “media”: screens, networks, computers, and more. Track- ing chemicals, metals, and minerals is one aspect of this book, extending traditional notions of media materialism into a more environmental and ecological agenda.

Artist Robert Smithson spoke about “abstract geology,” referring to how tectonics and geophysics pertain not only to the earth but also to the mind; abstract geology is a field where a geological interest is distributed across the organic and nonorganic division. Its reference to the “abstract” might attract those with a Deleuzian bent and resonate with the con- cept of “abstract ” But before the philosophical discourse, Smithson’s interest was in the materiality of the art practice, reintroduc- ing metals (and hence geology) to the studio. What’s more, Smithson was ready to mobilize his notion emerging in the artistic discourse of land art in the 1960s to a conceptualization of technology that we can say was nothing less than anti-McLuhanian: instead of seeing technology as exten- sions of Man, technology is aggregated and “made of the raw materials of the

”7 From our current twenty-first- century perspective approxi- mately fifty years later, it starts an imaginary alternative media theoreti- cal lineage that does not include necessarily McLuhan, Kittler, and the likes in its story but materials, metals, waste, and chemistry. These mate- rials articulate the high-technical and low-paid culture of digitality. They also provide an alternative materialism for the geophysical media age. So how does a media theorist turned pseudo-geologist operate? To where does such a hybrid and hyphenated scholar turn? At least in this book, this leads us to track the importance of the nonorganic in con- structing media before they become media: the literal deep times and deep places of media in mines and rare earth minerals.

It looks at aes- thetic discourses and practices, such as psychogeophysics—a sort of speculative aesthetics for the connection of technology and society with a special view to the geophysical—that offer insights to earth media arts. 8 The amount of material would be endless if one were to start looking 6 Materiality meticulously at the work of national institutions and geological methods. Geological surveys have moved on from the early work contributing to agriculture and mining to being an essential part of global geopolitics. One can track specific genealogies of geology, politics, and technology even through single institutions, such as the influential scientific agency the

S. Geological Survey. 9 Since its founding in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it has served an essential role in mapping the neces- sary natural resources part of nation building into a technologically advanced country—and now, one can see how the role has widened to a global scale; for instance, in Afghanistan, in parallel to the military oper- ations of the war against terrorism, geologists are mapping the resource basis of the country. It promises, besides copper, iron, and gold, also lithium—even enough for Afghanistan to be branded the “Saudi Arabia of ” Old geological surveys and methods are being complemented with aerial surveys by geologists collaborating with the Pentagon by using new gravity and magnetic measuring techniques.

10 To summarize the preceding preamble, this is a book about technical media culture—digital and analog—that starts from the geophysical. It investigates, employs, and mobilizes terms that refer to the geophysical— that is, not just geopolitical—spheres of media culture in a manner that is a combination of conceptually speculative but thematically and media historically grounded. In other words, a part of the book works through historical sources and examples, but with an emphasis on media arts. Indeed, it is the lens of media art practices and theoretical discourse that offers us a specific way to look at the recent years of climate change, the Anthropocene, and geophysics-embedded work: the ideas about deep time of the media,11 psychogeophysics, e-waste, the Anthropocene, chem- istry, and the earthly as a media history that works in nonlinear ways.

This idea of media (art) histories as one of nonlinear strata pushes even the media archaeological agenda of media history to its extreme. Human history is infused in geological time. 12 Temporality and Medianatures Among the variety of theories and methods in media studies debates of the past years, media archaeology has become a way to multiply and bend traditional media historical methods to incorporate new ways of Materiality 7 grasping the history of oddities, losers, and, more generally, conditions of media culture. It maps the real imaginary of how fantasies of media become part of the real technological projects and how media aesthetics contributes to new forms of political design of culture.

Media archaeo- logical writings from Erkki Huhtamo to Wolfgang Ernst, Friedrich Kittler to Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and many others have offered an exciting tool kit that expands what we even think of as media technolo- gies. 13 But media theory relates to notions of temporality as well: the var- ious different approaches are not only about material objects but how we think of (media cultural) temporality—media time that is recurring and based on topoi; the idea of deep times that will be addressed and radical- ized in this book; the focus on microtemporalities that define technical media culture on the level of machines and technological processes; the recursive methodology of time and the expansions of new film history into media archaeology in ways that offer new sets of questions and boot- strap a new sense of media historical time.

All of these are examples of media archaeology as executed media philosophies of time, which offer an important subcurrent to thinking about materiality. In Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeology and media archaeography, the focus is on microtemporalities and time-critical aspects of especially computational media. Ernst’s focus on the agency of the machine as a temporal regime that forces a reconsideration of media historical macro- narratives works in alternative ways. The methodological mode of media history based on writing has to encounter the specific Eigenzeit14 of the machine: how technological culture and its specific instance in machines are not just in time but also fabricate time.

The revolution speeds of hard drives, clock times of computers, network pings, and so forth are exam- ples of the temporalities in which machines themselves are embedded and which they impose on the human social world. Machines don’t just write narratives: they calculate. In Ernst’s words, the difference between this sort of media archaeology and media history is this: “A computing culture, from a media-archaeological view, deals not with narrative mem- ory but with calculating memory—counting rather than recounting, the archaeological versus the historical ” 15 But then there is the other pole of extremely long durations.

As we engage with in more detail in chapter 2, Zielinski’s adoption of the concept 8 Materiality of deep time to media art discourse has offered a way to think and oper- ate like a geologist of media art culture. For Zielinski, this concept has been a way to bypass the short-term “psychopathological” capitalist media discourse to understand that the interactions between media, art, and science have long roots. Indeed, Zielinski was after ways of modu- lating seeing and hearing before we historically rather recently thought to call them 16 In stories of inventions by Empedocles, Athanasius Kircher, and many others, Zielinski uncovers the layered history that offers a way to engage with the past that is suddenly animated in front of our eyes and more alive than the repetitious advertising-based digital media innovations.

Zielinski’s deep time is a methodology that bypasses the narrative of defi- nite origins and is interested in the quirky variations within media his- tory. There is an archaeological urge to dig out the uncovered, the sur- prising, the anomalous, and in Zielinski’s hands, this digging takes on the geological and paleontological concepts. But what if this notion based in geological time needs further radicalization? Indeed, what if we should think more along the lines of Manuel Delanda’s proposition of thousands of years of nonlinear history and expand to a geology of media art history: thousands, millions of years of “history” of rocks, minerals, geophysics, atmospheric durations, earth times, which are the focus of past decades of intensive epistemological inquiry and practical exploitation as resources— things we dig from the (under)ground, the harnessing of the atmosphere and the sky for signal transmissions, the outer space for satellites and even space junk, as a new extended geological “layer” that circles our planet, like Trevor Paglen reminds us in his photographic performance/ installation The Last Pictures, which takes place in the orbit around the Earth 17 (see Figure 1; see also chapter 5).

If the emergence of industrial- ization since the nineteenth century and the molding of the environment with mines, smelting facilities, and sulfur dioxide from coal energy was addressed by poets who either in adoring ways or critically narrativized the dramatic aesthetic and ecological change, our contemporary techno- logical arts do similar work, although often also engaging directly with the material world of geophysics in their practice. This geophysical media world manifests itself in contemporary arts. This book covers examples of projects from Paglen to microresearchlab Materiality 9 (Berlin), from technological fossil installations to the work of earthquake sonification.

Indeed, sound is one way to characterize the deep time media aesthetics and its epistemological background. The earth roars and has a sound. It was something realized already in the 1950s when Emory D. Cooke released his Out of This World vinyl LP containing earthquake soundscapes18 and then later by media artists as well as theorists such as Kittler. The following quotation from Kittler illustrates that with the tech- nologies of time-axis manipulation, also the long duration slowness of geophysics—often too slow, or otherwise working in frequencies inaudi- ble and invisible for human perception—becomes part of our aesthetic experience: Take an earthquake like the one in Kobe with thousands of casual- ties, seismographically record its inaudible slow vibrations, replay Figure 1.

Trevor Paglen, Spacecraft in Perpetual Geosynchronous Orbit, 35,786 km above Equator, 2010 (detail, part 2 of diptych). The artist was also interested in orbital technolo- gies as an extension of the geologic in his earlier Artifacts series. Courtesy of the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne. 10 Materiality the signals of the entire horrific day in ten seconds—and a sound will emerge. In the case of earthquakes that, like those in the Pacific, result from the clash of two tectonic plates, the sound will resemble a high-pitched slap, in the case of those that, like those in the Atlan- tic, are the result of the drifting apart of two continental plates, it will, conversely, sound like a soft sigh.

Thus, the spectrum, that is, a frequency composition, gives the violent events timbre or quality: America becomes Asia. A short time ago I was privileged to hear the timbre of such quakes and I will not forget it for the rest of my 19 Geophysics was already earlier adopted as part of the aesthetic prac- tices and vocabularies of the avant-garde. With a meticulous documen- tation with a special emphasis on the electromagnetic, Douglas Kahn demonstrates how this connection of the earth and the avant-garde com- posers ranged from Alvin Lucier’s experiments to Pauline Oliveros’s Sono- spheres.

Electronic music studios became allies with nature—or at times also demonstrated the obsolescence before their time of even having the need for an electronic music studio: it’s all existing already, in our brains, in 20 An aesthetics that comes from the vibrations of nature is a theme running through certain Deleuzian-inspired accounts—foremost among them Elizabeth Grosz’s 21— but it is also a way to tap into the geo- physical as an affordance for what we call ” Indeed, no wonder that we can summon the ideas of such physical nature like the Schumann resonances—a concept that “ties low-frequency electromagnetic reso- nances of the entire earth”22 with New Age discourse: the earth is a liv- ing entity with a specific frequency range.