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Peer-reviewed article forthcoming in Cultural Politics journal issue 19:3 (2023). The article stems from the project Operational Images and Visual Culture (funded by the Czech Science Foundation grant 19-26865X). Abstract: This article addresses the question of the planetary through three practices that relate to design and architectural pedagogy and research as well as the broader context of Anthropocene discussions. From Strelka Institute’s Terraforming program to the Terra Forma book by Aït-Touati, Arènes, and Grégoire and a discussion of Royal College of Art’s Architecture program’s studio “Something in the Air: Politics of the Atmosphere” the article focuses on framing of “problem spaces” (Celia Lury’s term) through studio briefs as well as experimental visualization and mapping. While discussing some methodological underpinnings of planetarity as such a problem space, the article mobilizes the neologism a natural history of logistics to analyse practices of scale in the critical design studio briefs and discourses at the centre of the article. The term is pitched as one temporary conceptual anchor for a specific relation to technological framing of a polyscalar Earth as it emerges in design discourses and practice-based approaches.

This article analyzes the visual operations of contagions and their material aftereffects. Data visualizations and diagrams have played a key role in the visual culture of the contagion, and this article explores especially two recurring themes: curves and simulations. The article addresses the data diagrams that describe and predict, advise and control actions during the pandemic. The authors argue that these curves and simulations are also crucial epistemic and aesthetic occurrences that produce the long tale of the epidemic as it pertains to a variety of actions from policy making to affective responses. Furthermore, the text investigates the theme of the operational loop to help us grasp statistical curves and simulations as part of a multiscalar logic of the epidemic image and to discuss the temporal modalities of these various images and diagrams. The article also includes David Benqué’s speculative diagrams of contagion loops that present an artistic response to the theoretical theme.

This article functions as the introduction to the Themed Issue on Archaeologies of Fashion Film. The text introduces fashion film as a genre and as an historically dynamic form of audiovisual expression that we approach through fashion history, media archaeology and new film history. While introducing key concepts and approaches, the authors propose a form of ‘parallax historiography’, a term emerging from Thomas Elsaesser’s work, that links different time periods from early cinema to recent digital platforms, even ‘post-cinema’. The introduction makes references to the contributions in this issue that address historical conditions of emergence, marginal voices in the historical record and unexcavated archival materials; and the issue shows how they all contain feedback loops or recursive traits that resonate in contemporary practice where infrastructures of platforms and data frame the moving image.

This article investigates the concept of the ground truth as both an epistemic and technical figure of knowledge that is central to discussions of machine vision and media techniques of visuality. While ground truth refers to a set of remote sensing practices, it has a longer history in operational photography, such as aerial reconnaissance. Building on a discussion of this history, this article argues that ground truth has shifted from a reference to the physical, geographical ground to the surface of the images echoing earlier points raised by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy that there is a ground of the image that is central to the task of analysis beyond representational practices. Furthermore, building on the practices of pattern recognition, composite imaging, and different interpretational techniques, we discuss contemporary practices of machine learning that mobilizes geographical earth observation datasets for experimental purposes, including tests such as “fake geography” as well as artistic practices, to show how ground truth is operationalized in such contexts of AI and visual arts.

This article addresses contemporary artist-architect Tomás Saraceno and his studio team’s work in the context of art and science collaborations. The text pays special attention to how their artistic practice deals with questions of environmental formations and agency. Besides a context in speculative architecture, this article approaches Saraceno’s material engagement as working objects, borrowing the term from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s work. The studio’s engagement with images, sculptures, and other material objects is relevant to a broader set of discussions about materiality and the modelization of and through living beings. The article argues how spatial (spider) web constructions and sculptures work as diffractive yet productive models, concluding with how these models engage with larger questions of environmental humanities and practice-based art methods.

The introduction chapter summarises the current state of research, introduces the contents of the book and its aims and scope. The introduction links the books’ chapters with existing photographic and media studies research and provides the core synthetisising approach for the texts. Here the key focus is in outlining how to theorize questions of quantity, scale, and measure in ways that acknowledges earlier theoretical body of work in photographic and visual theory but also demonstrates how these terms are key to understanding the so-called mass image.

In the original publication of the article, the following paragraphs have been indented wrongly in the published article.

The article outlines the concept of medianatures. The term is a neologism and in debt to Donna Haraway’s rather eloquent and important coinage naturecultures that already functioned to mark the constant co-becomings of supposedly separated spheres of nature and culture. Medianatures is a further elaboration that elaborates the tie between the earth materialities that are mobilized for technological infrastructures, visual technologies, applications and devices, and the onto- epistemological stance that then feeds back into understanding those planetary scale earth materialities in the first place: the techniques of vision, observation, calculation, and circulation that are part of the governance of the earth and its various localities.

This article focuses on recent contemporary art of Gulf Futurism and Arab Futurism with a specific geographical focus on the Near and Middle East. Still only occasionally addressed and analysed in contemporary academic discussions, these art discourses and practices can be understood as particular forms of counterfuturisms and cultural politics of imaginary times; they continue the earlier work of Afrofuturism in using an aesthetic repertoire to complicate normalised notions of time and technology but in an alternative geopolitical context. Some of the analysed works such as Larissa Sansour’s films outline political questions about territories and architectures of control but these are also other contexts that address how experience of time is being infrastructured in material media culture. The article analyses these post-colonial artistic practices in dialogue with contemporary theoretical debate about cultural politics of time including the discourses about cancellation of future (Berardi) as well as the idea of counterfuturisms as a form of audiovisual practice.

The article analyses the idea of the media city both from the perspective of sensors and monitoring of air pollution and as a more conceptual thread that relates to air pollution itself. Smart cities are layered urban arrangements that have carried forward their earlier technological legacy in terms of infrastructure and often also in terms of the residual air pollution, like photochemical smog. This sort of an understanding feeds an alternative way of understanding technological cities. The issue of the sensorial becomes a central focus of the article ranging from the experienced air pollution to its tracking and monitoring in remote sensing solutions. These two threads, sensors and the sensed city, lead to a conceptual argument that suggests to look at the technologies of smart city as an entanglement of the materiality of the pollution as the data that keeps also the media ecologies of big data circulating. Besides issues of political economy and governance, it also points to questions where is political citizenship located.

This introduction to the special section on mediated geologies contextualizes the articles that follow within recent discussions concerning cultural politics of the environment, ecological contexts of contemporary media, and debates concerning the Anthropocene. The special section approaches the topics from the angle of media studies and argues for new ways to understand media culture as read through a materials focus: from waste to building materials and from temperature control to more conceptual developments concerning new materialism. The introduction discusses these ideas as extensions of material media theory and addresses how they can complement already existing ideas in the field.

Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and e-readers all at one time held the promise of a more environmentally healthy world not dependent on paper and deforestation. The result of our ubiquitous digital lives is, as we see in The Anthrobscene, actually quite the opposite: not ecological health but an environmental wasteland, where media never die. Jussi Parikka critiques corporate and human desires as a geophysical force, analyzing the material side of the earth as essential for the existence of media and introducing the notion of an alternative deep time in which media live on in the layer of toxic waste we will leave behind as our geological legacy. The published (.epub) version of the Anthrobscene (published by University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and available as CC Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike 4.0 International license

This chapter aims to put imaginary media research and speculative design in conversation; what does it mean to think of media archaeological and imaginary media projects in the context of speculative design? This earlier missing discussing of the two parallel fields sets out to investigate critical methods in speculative practices across media and design with a special angle to imaginary pasts. Both speculative design and imaginary media research are interested in how alternative worlds might be created and how both temporal, social, and technological tabulations situate coordinates of past-future in alternative ways. The chapter addresses different art and design projects, cross-fertilising the two traditions of media and design theory and practice, and aims to elaborate ways how media archaeology could contribute to speculative design and hence contemporary issues in critical design.

This collection of essays highlights innovative work in the developing field of media archaeology. It explores the relationship between theory and practice and the relationship between media archaeology and other disciplines. There are three sections to the collection proposing new possible fields of research for media studies: Media Archaeological Theory; Experimental Media Archaeology; Media Archaeology at the Interface. The book includes essays from acknowledged experts in this expanding field, such as Thomas Elsaesser, Wanda Strauven and Jussi Parikka.

In this chapter Jussi Parikka discusses air pollution and waste as media, data and environmental art created in the contemporary smart city. The way these, otherwise unwanted, elements are sensed and perceived unveil the political subjectivity in an urban context and as data feedback from various readings, understandings and governance of the city. This sort of a materiality is one that is about folds between architectures, data and the chemistry of the air -a sort of a media ecology of multiple materialities. The creative power of smog that intertwines old computational infrastructures of urban pollution and new infrastructures such as monitors, programming and data storage is explained. The chapter focuses on urban environments as defined by the emergence of new forms of measurement of the city -and its airborne pollution - through smog sensors. The smart, modern city as defined through its unwanted elements, in this case, pollution and waste, are further discussed.

In recent methodological scholarship on digital games, a strong connection is noted between “platform studies” and media archaeology. While platform studies has its critics, who primarily lament the limitations of the project, a recent spate of publications in the field suggests considerable dynamism in platform studies as the concept is further developed. This article argues that by examining platform studies from the perspective of media archaeology, it becomes apparent that platform studies establishes an “epistemic threshold”. Additionally, platform studies is a historical method which both establish continuities and mark breaks with previous platforms and technologies. From the perspective of this threshold, this article explores epistemic questions that arise from how platform studies forms an archive, and how media archaeology can enrich the method’s explicit concerns and engagements with technology and culture.

Przekład artykułu Deep Times of Planetary Trouble, który ukazał się pierwotnie w piśmie „Cultural Politics” 2016, nr 3. Artykuł podejmuje refleksję na temat geologii mediów. Zwraca uwagę na głębokie związki między obszarem wymiany kulturowej i medialnej a ukrytymi procesami geopolitycznymi oraz klimatycznymi.

This short text addresses media archaeology as a material methodology of investigation of the cultural layers of technology. This materiality of course relates it to the older discipline of archaeology, even if in many cases the archaeology in media archaeology is more conceptual. Having said that, the article proceeds to briefly introduce the emerging practices of media archaeology labs through two examples in Germany and the US as ways to offer institutional spaces for a hands-on extension of the theoretical, historical and conceptual methodologies. It is possible that through such spaces as well as other sorts of disciplinary bordercrossings the multiple archaeologies find joint projects.

This chapter draws on Wolfgang Ernst’s media theory and argues for a way to look at digital memory through microtemporal operations of the network. This leads into an analysis of some technical components of Internet infrastructure and how such components and ideas were also producing an alternative sense of how the “public” was to emerge in infrastructures of data networks. The text deals with issues of network politics and time in ways that contribute to the discussion of digital memory in the context of media archaeology too.