Looking for the Horizon: A Conversation between John Durham Peters and Chris Russill

Russill, Chris; Peters, John Durham

doi:10.22230/cjc.2017v42n4a3276

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Light also leads us toward thinking the planetary as co-composed by the micro and the cosmic: the energetic vitality of biological life existing only thanks to the cosmic condition of solar light hurtling through the void. As Russill puts it, Earth is "a medium of life because it is a medium of light" (Russill and Maddalena 2016). This mediality of the planet is thus not a product of computation but rather its necessary precondition.…”

Section: The Promise Of Envisioning the Planetarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pluralising the Planetary: The Radical Incompleteness of Machinic Envisioning

Richardson,

Munster

2023

Media+Environment

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Automated techniques have driven new approaches to visualising and acting upon planetary crises, such as Microsoft’s Planetary Computer and Amazon’s partnership with the start-up Overstory (formerly 20tree.ai). However, “planetary” machine envisioning, together with its critical theorisation, tends toward scalar equivalence and the assumption of interoperability across media, infrastructure, and optics. The “planetary” becomes a mode for and platform of seeing Earth and beyond in which AI vision systems conjoin seamlessly with a predictive imaging of the planet and have the effect of becoming mutually dependent and self-reinforcing. In this article, we argue for a more pluralistic and nonhuman set of Earth images and imaginings. We argue that such modes of imaging are multiscalar and are indebted to what Paul Edwards calls “data friction.” Here materialities of both media and Earth impede the seamless movement and exchange of data involved in machine vision; and disjunctive syntheses are instead constantly being generated. We examine eccentric modes of configuring the planetary via the artwork of Tega Brain, who deploys disjunctive and nonscalable relations of climate and environment in her use of data and AI imaging techniques. In spite of considerable financial, cognitive, and affective investment to entangle Earth with machine vision, we propose instead that imaging and imagining the planetary is a radically incomplete project. Drawing on Indigenous approaches to AI development via Country Centered Design and the process philosophy of William James and others, we propose that planetary “vision” operates within a pluralistic universe of seeing, in which ongoing and radical incompleteness is core to its imaging.

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Section: The Promise Of Envisioning the Planetarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pluralising the Planetary: The Radical Incompleteness of Machinic Envisioning

Richardson,

Munster

2023

Media+Environment

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“… 3 See also Russill (2017), who argues that media theory and environmental science can be constituted through the same problematics.…”

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confidence: 99%

Big data for climate action or climate action for big data?

Espinoza

Aronczyk

2021

Big Data & Society

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Under the banner of “data for good,” companies in the technology, finance, and retail sectors supply their proprietary datasets to development agencies, NGOs, and intergovernmental organizations to help solve an array of social problems. We focus on the activities and implications of the Data for Climate Action campaign, a set of public–private collaborations that wield user data to design innovative responses to the global climate crisis. Drawing on in-depth interviews, first-hand observations at “data for good” events, intergovernmental and international organizational reports, and media publicity, we evaluate the logic driving Data for Climate Action initiatives, examining the implications of applying commercial datasets and expertise to environmental problems. Despite the increasing adoption of Data for Climate Action paradigms in government and public sector efforts to address climate change, we argue Data for Climate Action is better seen as a strategy to legitimate extractive, profit-oriented data practices by companies than a means to achieve global goals for environmental sustainability.

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Looking for the Horizon: A Conversation between John Durham Peters and Chris Russill

Cited by 2 publications

References 13 publications

Pluralising the Planetary: The Radical Incompleteness of Machinic Envisioning

Pluralising the Planetary: The Radical Incompleteness of Machinic Envisioning

Big data for climate action or climate action for big data?

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