Environing Media

Afterword: Medium America and the grounds of a transnational history of farm media

“…The term medium itself owes a special infrastructural debt to agricultural and environmental sources: as Miles describes in this special issue, the keyword medium in the nineteenth-century meant a florid yet constrained environment, a conduit for domesticated or civilized growth (such as what lab scientists call a growth medium or culture medium) before media came to refer to mass broadcasting, dissemination, and precision metaphors. For centuries, the meaning of medium might regularly be found on the farm as the environmental medium, a transhistorical petri dish, or a fenced space inscribing seed into the soil (Wickberg and Gärdebo 2023).…”

Towards an Intermedial Theory of Medial Agency: Environing Media

“…d I will do this by discussing a theoretical concept offered by Adam Wickberg and Johan Gärdebo, who also argue that media studies and environmental humanities are a sub-developed combination. They develop a system of ideas in a few recent texts, but originally, I think, in the programmatic 'Where humans and the planetary conflate: an introduction to environing media' (Wickberg and Gärdebo 2020), which, with some modifications, became the base of their introductory chapter of the volume, Environing Media (Wickberg and Gärdebo 2022), where the idea of environing media is put to use on a range of diverse historical and geographical material.…”

Environing media and cultural techniques: From the history of agriculture to AI-driven smart farming

“…In this way, the analytical juxtaposition of media and environment can become an a gateway to study the varying expressions of ever-changing human-Earth relations beyond the separation of nature and culture. A significant body of critical work has contributed to overcoming this separation, which we may now on a conceptual level claim to have achieved, but we still lack a critical understanding of how and why humans are conflated with their surroundings (Wickberg andGärdebo, 2020, 2022). Stating that the separation was a mistake thus cannot be enough, nor dissecting the mistakes that led us there or replacing separate concepts with a composite one like natureculture.…”

“…In subsequent publications, Sörlin proposed that 'environing is what people do when they transform nature into environment' (2013) and, coupled with the word 'technology', that 'to environ is a process of making' (Sörlin and Wormbs, 2018) and key to this making is technology. As I have discussed elsewhere (Wickberg, 2022), even the now dense but rapidly declining rainforest of Amazonia was environed by its human inhabitants in the pre-Columbian era, before the mass death caused by Spanish colonization eradicated these people and resulted in massive regrowth of then abandoned farmland.…”

“…This has been true since early modern knowledge of the environment, which relied on the emergence of various print media, cartographic and pictorial techniques as well as new instruments for data gathering and processing, particularly in the marine environment. Since the post-war era however, and in parallel with the onset of the Great Acceleration and the proposed starting date of the Anthropocene, environmental knowledge has rapidly evolved through new approaches and techniques of modelling, computation and global networks of data collection (Stalder, 2022;Wickberg, 2022). This process of large-scale quantified knowledge production also entails that we have moved successively further from in situ observations of particular environmental phenomena to ever more mediated forms of knowledge that are also increasingly automated to such an extent that we may speak of a mediated planet, understood as an interconnected, increasingly detailed and continuously updated data-driven view of Earth and the life it supports.…”