Birmingham City University

Material Natures:
From Media Materiality to the Anthropocene
Link to the video essay: https://youtu.be/pFIKXLTtG8M

Diana Padovac
January 2021
My topic of exploration is multimedia, and in that sense, I am interested in the outside
definition of it. In my studies, I contemplate what components and materials enable
technologies that media is built of, such as the importance of optical fiber and copper. My
interest lies within the seemingly invisible material contexts of such technologies and how
'the digital' is inevitably connected to nature, and it's systems.
Accordingly, I attempt to communicate these ideas within the essay film by collecting online
footage, creating my own experimentative clips, and using a split-screen approach to portray
"visible versus invisible structures".

Through chapters, I constructed a narrative of a spherical voyage of copper and other

minerals. The discovery and creation of such elements begins bellow the ground and ends the
journey in the landfills. Copper travels from Earth to Earth in the indication of electronic
waste, resource depletion and globally unevenly distributed labour relations (Parikka, 2015).
By visualising such concepts applying media, I reflect upon the technical and ideological
technologies versus the digitality's exploitative culture.

In that sense, I looked for a nexus between nature and media, or in other words, a symbolic
meeting point. Similarly, Jussi Parikka uses the term ''medianatures'' (mentioned in the
chapter: Batteries) to describe media technologies' connections, materiality, hardware, and
energy, with the geophysical nature (Parikka, 2015). In his words: "Our relations with the
earth are mediated through technologies and techniques of visualisation, sonification,
calculation, mapping, prediction, simulation, and so forth: it is through and in media that we
grasp earth as an object for cognitive, practical and affective relations."

With this in mind, the script follows physical elements of technologies (e.g. satellite) that
provide us with visuals and simulations, describing "the digital" as another layer of the Earth's
strata. That comes as a consideration since technology evolves from the ground and leaves
traces upon the Earth and its orbit.

In the first chapter, I mention 'the avenir' or what comes as a byproduct of our
creations (Latour, 1993). Our inventions have remodelled the world on a planetary scale, but
not without the price of massive changes to our environment. Writing in 1876, Friedrich
Engels reported a central problem that deals with before-mentioned concepts: "In relation to
nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about
the first, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects
of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite a different, mainly even of quite an
opposite, character." (Lewis and Maslin, 2018)

At that time, new manufacturing processes were well toward transforming rural societies into
industrialised, urban ones. By the late 18th century and the first part of the 19th century, coal
came into large-scale use during the Industrial Revolution (refer to figure 1). Equally to how
Friedrich Engels considered the remote effects of production, the resulting smog and soot air
pollutants had severe health impacts on the residents of growing urban centres (Water and Air
Pollution, 2009). In the past decades, scientists studied the effects human practices and
technologies have had on the environment.

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 Figure 1, Smog in London during the Industrial Revolution

Today we use Anthropocene as the leading concept that brought a geological awareness to
climate change discussions. If we study Anthropocene through the lens of industrialisation of
spaces, we are confronted with hypercapitalist exploitation of the Earth. This narrative comes
with relation to consumerism, the economic order of high levels of material affluence.
Ordinary consumption turns into consumerism when there is no longer any standard for what
constitutes "enough"—when one desire is fulfilled, another takes its place in a continually
escalating and insatiable way (Mould, 2018). Technology is integrated with consumerism as
both are accelerating in relation to each other. The Great Acceleration refers to the most
recent period of the proposed Anthropocene epoch during which the rate of impact of human
activity upon the Earth's geology and ecosystems is increasing significantly (Globaïa, 2009-
2021). Moreover, the expanded production began with the industrialisation of spaces.

In chapter one and two of the film essay, I introduce the human-made infrastructure space.
The automated voice addresses the construction as something that's occurring above and
below ground. With that, I recognise that there is more than one layer, link or wire,
assembling and connecting the digital space. Secondary to that, it's important to acknowledge
the variety of materials and manufactures that contribute to the development. For example, the
underground consists of skeletons of pipelines, making copper an essential material of the
modern city's futuristic vision. Simultaneously, its distribution, likewise to that of cobalt,
usually conceals its production through various sources.

The cobalt needed for a lithium-ion battery has a massively complicated supply chain. Each
consumer company has dealt with multiple suppliers — and their suppliers have dealt with
various suppliers (Frankel, 2016).

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 Figure 2, Cobalt supply chain

The supply chains grow gaps between rich and poor as some labour involved in generating
our digital infrastructures is exploited. Comparably, Keller Easterling would describe the
infrastructure space as a medium of information: "The information resides in invisible,
powerful activities that determine how objects and content are organised and circulated."
(Easterling, 2016).

Organisations that determine routes minerals take to build the cityscapes can be seen in figure
2 - from those who physically remove it from its soil to the hands that write the activities
minerals will endure. It's an unseen trajectory that enables the Earth's exploitation of resources
and labour while contributing to an already concerning global climate crisis.

Professors and critics Peter Galison and Caroline Jones usefully call attention to the
"invisibilities" that are part of "a system in which the seen is supported and enabled by the
unseen". "The circuit—of drill, spill, 'clean up,' and drill again—relies on such systems of
images and occlusions, in which the production of invisibility forms an aesthetic chiaroscuro
to all the tragic, sublime, and subaquatic flows", they write (Demos, 2018).

The essentiality of minerals for wiring (optical-fibre, copper), pipelines (copper), lithium-ion
batteries (cobalt, lithium, graphite) and rare earth elements (tantalum, tungsten, thorium,
cerium, iridium, manganese and chromium) shows an immediate sphere of connection of
digital culture with the extensive geology. A prominent example is the submarine cables, laid
on the ocean floor connecting continents with their physical nature while creating a globalised
data culture. Its materiality is intertwined with its function through layers of strata. Submarine
cables are essentially made out of optical fibers that are insulated with layers of other
materials. Lines are stretched out as layers of connection, becoming a part of the oceanic
ecosystem, disrupting its natural flow and only visible once ashore. Connections are made on
paths of past and expected trajectories while they're also unequally distributing data.

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As addressed by TJ Demos, Globaïa's 'Cartography of the Anthropocene' is a video narrating
a shifting data visualisation of the globe, showing schematic networks of light trajectories that
reference energy, transportation and communication systems (Demos, 2018).

Figure 3, Globaïa's 'Cartography of the Anthropocene'

Accurately as Jussi Parikka described our relations with the Earth as mediated through
technologies and visualisation techniques, Globaïa's video on Anthropocene includes maps
and graphs depicting climate change that triggers modes of perception, causing an emotional
reaction comparable to shock images (Barthes and Howard, 2013). Therefore, the video
invites the viewer to reflect on environmental change with the weight of responsibility that
recognises humans' role in that change.

Internet and communication systems in this age are essential, yet their processes are invisible.
With data and image visualisation, we attempt to break the media versus nature barrier by
exposing humans' accelerating impact on the Earth. However, like satellite imagery maps, the
purely technical representation of the planet presents the world as intangible and disconnected
from the humane. Anthropologist Tim Ingold similarly writes, "The significance of the image
of the globe in the language of contemporary debate about the environment is problematic
precisely because it renders the world as an object of contemplation detached from the
domain of lived experience." (Demos, 2018).

With that in mind, the lived experience is the truth of critical aspects the Anthropocene
acknowledges. Media has rendered the world as a ''hyperobject'', no longer a lived experience,
but a complex, out of touch one. A term coined by Timothy Morton, ''hyperobject'' describes
entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about
what a thing is in the first place (Morton, 2013).

Byproducts of hyperobjects, such as mining, manufacturing and urban development have

altered geologic, geomorphic, hydrologic and atmospheric systems and processes in
significant ways, unsettling our relationships with natural systems (Mould, 2018). For
example, mining has left huge voids in Earth's crust that are seen from space

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(refer to figure 3). Simultaneously, it has contributed to water pollution either through
discharged mine effluent and seepage from tailings and waste rock impoundments (Hancock
and Hancock, n.d.) or potential transportation spillages such as oil in the ocean (refer to figure
4).

Figure 3, Bingham mine in Utah as seen from space

Figure 4, oil spill

Data is another ''hyperobject'' collided with natural systems. Physical information is

dependant on the climate, the ground, and the energies circulating in the
environment (Parikka, 2015). For instance, permafrost is the natural cooling system perfect
for the servers and data storage that release heat. However, permafrost is melting as a result of
climate change. To paraphrase James Bridle, the melting of the permafrost is both a danger
sign and a metaphor: an accelerating collapse of both our environment and our cognitive
infrastructure (Bridle, 2018). At the same time, the amount of energy used by data centres has
doubled every four years, contributing to 2% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions
(Bawden, 2016).

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The production and upkeep of our technological infrastructures are dependent on vast
amounts of water, besides other resources. ''The earth is a machine of variation, and media can
live off variation-but both are machines that need energy and are tied together in their
dynamic feedback loop,'' as explained by Jussi Parikka in A Geology of Media.

Whether we describe it as Anthropocene or something else, the human age is the age of
mineral extraction driven by the need for a material world. It can be characterised as a
personal or global scale demand, but nevertheless, it has brought with it unprecedented
outcomes. We now use data visualisations to illustrate environmental issues using technology
that is the very source of such matters. Being an artist working with media, the indicated
difficulties are daunting subjects to create work about, and for them, I don't have a fitting
conclusion. Therefore I will quote James Bridle who does so ideally: ''Technology, while it
often appears as opaque complexity, is in fact attempting to communicate the state of reality.''

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