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- Isberg, Erik, 1994-
(author)
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Planetary Timemaking : Paleoclimatology and the Temporalities of Environmental Knowledge, 1945-1990
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis concerns the history of paleoclimatology in the postwar period. It follows the trajectory of two climate proxy records – ice cores and deep-sea cores – in the North Atlantic region, from their emergence as scientific objects in the 1940s to their incorporation into Earth System Science in the 1980s. In doing so, the thesis highlights how scientists have used these records to produce time and how this has affected the temporalities of the environment as a scientific and political concept. As anthropogenic impact on the planet arose as a political problem, the vast timescales of paleoclimatology became increasingly interwoven with climate modeling and environmental policy. Often, the records were understood as “natural archives”, providing unmediated access to past environmental conditions. This thesis shows how the times of ice- and deep-sea cores were, on the contrary, constantly re-shaped by scientific practices, institutional frameworks andcompeting temporal sensibilities in different scientific fields.With the rise of the Anthropocene concept in the last two decades, historians have begun to question the division between historical and natural times. Scientifically produced times, such as those made by ice- and deep-sea core drilling, have permeated discussions about the properties of historical time in the twenty-first century. Yet, the origins of thesetimes often remain out of view. This thesis argues that environmental historians and historians of science can contribute to these discussions by treating environmental times as objects of historical inquiry. Looking beyond planetary-scale models and following environmental times in situ, as they emerge, form and travel, can open up for more multi facettedapproaches to historical time in the proposed new geological epoch. The history of postwar paleoclimatology is therefore both a history of how scientists have produced environmental times and how planetary pasts enter the political present.
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- Peters, John Durham, et al.
(author)
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Media : The Case of Spain and New Spain
- 2022
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In: Critical Inquiry. - Chicago : University of Chicago Press. - 0093-1896 .- 1539-7858. ; 48:4, s. 676-696
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article develops the new concept of environing media against the case of Mexico’s complex history over the past five centuries. To do this, it stakes out a theoretical development consisting in a shift in understanding from media as content-delivery systems to data processors, combining it with a processual understanding of environment as an ongoing and historical process of environing. In addition, the article discusses examples of indigenous media, an area that has so far received very little attention. The Aztec empire was as dependent on media forms as the Spanish colonizers who replaced it, and there are numerous cases of knowledges and practices surviving in hybrid forms, for example as part of maps. For much of its history, the field of media studies has been biased toward questions of (1) ideological or attitudinal influence caused by (2) modern or emergent technologies. This article goes in another direction by thinking about media as (1) environing and (2) residual. Media are agencies of civilizational and environmental order. The rise of digital media in recent decades has reinforced the fundamental logistical role of media as agencies that arrange, catalog, organize, network, and index people, places, and things. Our understanding of media as fundamental constituents of organization joins the recent interest in infrastructures. Calendars, clocks, towers, names, addresses, maps, registers, arms, and money are all infrastructural media. Such media become second nature, morphing biorhythms and altering ecosystems. Today’s planetary digital infrastructure builds upon the long legacy of resource management via databases. We argue for a longer genealogy of the nature shaping logistical role of media that is so evident today. In this article, we refine and exemplify these claims via a case study of some environing media in Mexico, a country with a deep and rich media history.
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- Wickberg, Adam, 1985-
(author)
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Anthropogenic Markers as Environing Media
- 2022
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In: Anthropocene Curriculum. - Berlin : Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Media technologies have always been decisive for the epistemic registers and imaginations humans create and associate with nature. In his essay, media scholar Adam Wickberg outlines how knowledge about the environment and media technologies have always evolved in tandem; the history of anthropogenic markers can therefore be understood as a process of environing media. Getting us from the chemical composition of the atmosphere to pre-Columbian Amazonia to the rise of computational media in the late twentieth century, Wickberg chronicles and illustrates how anthropogenic markers are now a subset of a generically mediated planet.
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- Wickberg, Adam, 1985-, et al.
(author)
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Computation, data and AI in Anthropocene history
- 2023
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In: History & Technology. - : Taylor & Francis. - 0734-1512 .- 1477-2620. ; 39:3-4, s. 328-346
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This essay engages with recent scholarship on the epistemology of AI, data and automation, to assert how these practices are becoming increasingly central both to the projects of monitoring and of managing a global environment. We also review Jurgen Renn's recent contribution The Evolution of Knowledge (2020) in relation to the history of environmental data. Using Renn as point of departure, we stake out a way for understanding the Anthropocene through the interaction between data and environment, taking into account the deeper political implications of datafication. We conclude with discussions about how historians of technology and environment could play an important role in assessing the opportunities and risks of AI for global environmental justice before their full-scale implementation is a fait accompli. In face of the Anthropocene, there is a general need today for integrative efforts of bridging knowledge from natural, technical, social and humanistic domains, and therefore a strong imperative for humanistic studies to transposetools, methodologies, and insights into the realms of policymaking, and legislation. Thus, assessments of AI and environment must account for these historical processes in the present as well as offer critical analysis of the full ontological spectrum from object to epistemology via data and mediation.
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| 7. |
- Wickberg, Adam, 1985-
(author)
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Contingency and Causality : Post-digital Handwriting
- 2020
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In: Media Theory. - 2557-826X. ; :1
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article analyses specific acts of handwriting on paper in relation to digitization. It frames the artifact of the digital image of the handwritten note as a post-digital object, which is defined by the inseparability of analogue and digital and also highlights a relation to the digital in which internal opposition is a part of it. The article discusses the media function of post-digital contingency through two particular cases of handwriting on paper that circulates online. Firstly, it analyses post-digital handwriting in the political sphere using the example of the social media posting and sharing of Donald Trump’s signature after he took presidential office. Secondly, it elaborates post-digital handwriting as an aesthetic phenomenon by discussing the Instagram account of renowned Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist who has posted nearly 4,500 handwritten notes to 320,000 followers over eight years. Finally, it places these discussions into the context of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to arrive at a better understanding of how the ontological difference of post-digital handwriting is produced.
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