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To complexify the notion of scale and to expand it, both historically and beyond human perception, allows us to think about scale within different academic, design and artistic vocabularies. Writer and professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, as well as visiting professor at FAMU (Prague) and Winchester School of Art (UK) Jussi Parikka has extensively researched the cultural histories and archaeologies of media and has, over the past years, focused even more on environmental media. In a recent text for Aksioma, he has addressed scale as the middle of a meddling bundle of forces, showing that the concrete techniques in which scale comes to existence and functions are ontogenetic, i.e. they bring worlds into existence. That’s why scale is inherently entwined with power and politics in very detailed ways, which is something he addresses in his recently published book Operational Images as well as in the slightly earlier co-edited volume in Photography Off the Scale. This fifth episode marks the culmination of the series: it is an intriguing dialogue aimed at reframing the concept of scale and at connecting all the insights and perspectives discussed in the previous episodes., https://www.librarystack.org/scale-reality-as-a-scalar-effect/?ref=unknown

Can We Repair the Climate? Holly Jean Buck works at the interface of environmental sociology, international development, and science and technology studies. In her book After Geoengineering, she takes a deep dive into the envisioning, development and deployment of tactics and schemes for deliberately intervening in the environment, including Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). What we have to do to restore the planet is clearer than ever, we have the technologies and the money to do it. The obstacle, then, is social and political. We should acknowledge that what we are facing is not a climate crisis but an ecological crisis, one where people need to have a say in the plan and where specific exit strategies for every country and reality must emerge through building a consensus in communities., https://www.librarystack.org/reprogramming-energy/?ref=unknown

Since the escalation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Asia Bazdyrieva, who has settled in Germany, where the sociopolitical reality seems more and more volatile, has crossed the border between her home country and peaceful Western countries several times. She has experienced first-hand that this border produces two realms: the realm of being in pain and the realm of trying to prevent it at all costs. Ukraine’s resistance has put the country on the map: prior to the invasion, its territories were imaged and imagined as a site of inexhaustible resources that can feed the entire world; however, after the invasion, the fear of disruption has produced an emotional state that is identical to the one produced by climate change – the fear that the usual lifestyle will soon be over. The problematic yet convenient separation of climate and war discourses and narratives in the Western world has proven to be no longer sustainable., https://www.librarystack.org/micro-meso-macro/?ref=unknown

In the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) threatened to inflict significant casualties on the ground troops of the United States and Allied Forces. This led to unprecedented levels of investment in unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and the ensuing ascendancy of wide-area persistent surveillance systems (WAPSS) across the region. These prototypes of hyper-surveillance and targeting were inevitably supported and powered by developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Combining the predictive logic of AI and the martial rationalization of the pre-emptive strike, these technological and logistic alliances sought to not only calculate risk and threat but to eliminate it before it materializes. They seek, in short, to occupy the future in the name of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial dominance. Throughout the following essay, Anthony Downey (Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa at Birmingham City University) examines the historical contexts and current deployments of such systems, enquiring into how neocolonial projections of power are implicated in the martial and political will to occupy the future. What happens, he asks, when we defer life-and-death decisions to a mechanical calculus of probability that is beholden to martial devices of pre-emption, political expediencies and the neocolonial logic of expendability., https://www.librarystack.org/neocolonial-visions-algorithmic-violence-and-unmanned-aerial-systems/?ref=unknown

What Does it Take to Change the Future? Kim Stanley Robinson stands as one of today’s most beloved science fiction writers and is a prominent exponent of climate fiction. In his novel The Ministry for the Future (2020), he envisions a scenario where India is struck by a devastating heatwave, resulting in the loss of millions of lives within days: soon after this tremendous tragedy, a climate response begins to take shape. Do we need such a shock for governments, or maybe some billionaire, to take radical actions against the climate crisis? Solutions to buy time before we reach the point of no return are already known and available, maybe a utopian horizon painted by literature can help us implement them. In his most bleak yet hopeful work to date, Robinson delves into the limits and possibilities of human cooperation under extreme circumstances., https://www.librarystack.org/reprogramming-trigger/?ref=unknown

In the essay The Art of Encoding, Slovenian media theorist and philosopher Maks Valenčič proposes to call on media theory for a more refined understanding of some branches of contemporary art, like object-oriented art. Media theory offers a more refined starting point, as it is concerned with the very way in which patterns are encoded. Here, art is modelled as a specific register or, more precisely, a mode of encoding that differs from alternative approaches, e.g. in science. In other words: while science encodes, art recodes, since it deals with all possible ways of encoding patterns, including those that do not strive for optimality or the possibility of optimization. It softens patterns or encodes the same pattern in different ways, thereby establishing alternative functions (or models) for such approximation of input data. Artistic encoding is therefore by definition concerned with another, alternative world or mode of encoding, which is most clearly highlighted by contemporary world-building narratives and various theory-fiction attempts at understanding one’s own practice., https://www.librarystack.org/art-of-encoding-the/?ref=unknown

Talk to Your Neighbour Astra Taylor is an international filmmaker, writer and political organiser. She was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and has been one of its best narrators and critics. Since then, in a series of legendary attempts to improve protest movements, she has become one of the essential chroniclers of contemporary acts of collective resistance. She is the co-founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union organising to renegotiate and resist debts, that succeeded in changing first the narrative around student debt loans and then eventually the politics. In a media landscape dominated by social media, we want everything to go viral, but small groups of well-organised people can have a larger impact than millions protesting in the streets or online. Mass is not engaging, and the individual is not the scale for politics and change: the level for democracy is the collective. Talking to neighbours and breaking conversational taboos are the first steps for real change., https://www.librarystack.org/reprogramming-community/?ref=unknown

How to Tell Eyal Weizman is a Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures. He founded Forensic Architecture, where he helped develop a methodology – counter forensics – for analysing cases of human rights violations around the world to provide new evidence against official narratives in international human rights courts. Counter forensics is a response to structural limitations – such as not having access to the crime scene – and makes openly available what is concealed from the public eye. Counter forensics takes all the time needed to scan and interpret enormous amounts of data and images, trying to find clues that are already in the public domain, but which we don’t know how to look at and interconnect. Secrets can be deconstructed by following the traces they leave in the visible world, harvesting what is out there, but nobody is looking at., https://www.librarystack.org/reprogramming-accountability/?ref=unknown

Everything is Not Connected Joana Moll is a Barcelona/Berlin-based artist and researcher. Her work moves towards a crossover between art and investigative journalism with the aim to make public the hidden costs of techno-capitalism. Back in 2013, her research began with an epiphany: services like Google do not come for free, without environmental costs. As her research has proven since then, not only does the internet have a huge impact on ecosystems, but e-commerce services, browsers, dating apps and surveillance systems extract data and energy from unwitting users. What happens when we purchase an item on Amazon? Who owns the profile images posted on dating apps? How many trees are needed to absorb the amount of CO2 generated by the global visits to google.com every second? Through the artistic outputs of her findings, Joana Moll transforms these revelations into tangible concepts fostering awareness in the collective consciousness of the footprint caused by our use of the Cloud., https://www.librarystack.org/reprogramming-the-cloud/?ref=unknown

Writer and independent researcher Laura Tripaldi shows how politics can play out in the nanoscale dimension, by focusing on the role of colloids in defining what “matter” and “bodies” are. When, in 1856, Michael Faraday experimented on gold colloids and investigated their behaviour, the reality of what was known as “matter” and was usually perceived as a collection of intrinsic properties became much more elusive and complex. Even our entire biological bodies could be understood as remarkably intricate colloidal systems consisting of trillions of tiny biochemical particles dispersed in water. One hundred years after Faraday’s experiments, gold colloids were first used in modern pregnancy tests. This revolutionary invention gave women the possibility to make autonomous choices about their bodies, and serves as an example of how non-human nano-actants participate in our politics and ontologies., https://www.librarystack.org/colloidal-ontologies-the-gendered-body-at-the-interface-of-matter/?ref=unknown

On the nanoscale, materials can appear as vibrant, lively subjects that can even have political implications. Laura Tripaldi, author of Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), is an expert on nanotechnology who worked in industrial research before shifting her focus on philosophical and theoretical fields. She has been exploring our relationship to technology and materials we use everyday, and has proposed a different perspective on non-human and non-living entities, challenging us to consider them as active rather than passive matter., https://www.librarystack.org/scale-matter-as-a-subject/?ref=unknown

The concept of scale is related to mapping, which is intrinsically related to colonization and neocolonial military practices. Anthony Downey, Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University), draws a historical line from the development of cartographic devices and photogrammetry in the 18th and 19th centuries to the neocolonial extraction of data through AI-powered models of hyper-surveillance. Utilized for training neural networks and refining algorithms, these methods of data extraction effectively redefine the future of kinetic and non-kinetic warfare. Programmed within such systems, the operative and rationalizing logic of algorithms are, Downey proposes, complicit in increasingly reductive determinations of what constitutes life and death in conflict zones., https://www.librarystack.org/scale-neocolonial-extraction-and-surveillance/?ref=unknown

Alternative community-based data distribution networks on the local scale have emerged in Cuba as a consequence of the economic sanctions imposed on the country in recent decades. German anthropologist Steffen Köhn and Cuban media artist Nestor Siré shed light on the unique materiality and significance of these networks, built to overcome the limitations of internet access in Cuba. In the current capitalist, consumerist form of internet, characterised by closed platforms, we are fed content chosen for us by algorithms, whereas informal infrastructures allow their users, makers and content creators to be the protagonists of their own choices – and allow us to envision decentralised, non-commercial and collective interactions on the web., https://www.librarystack.org/scale-alternative-networks-in-cuba/?ref=unknown

Infrastructures of abnormous scale are the materialization of neocolonialism. Megabridges, power plants, military bases are means of dispossession, invasion, extraction perpetrated by bigger countries upon smaller sovereign states. Media artists and interdisciplinary researchers Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich have developed a method called “applied demonology,” which combines CGI, mediaeval demonology and satellite investigation to interrogate the specter of colonial violence. They have used this approach to shed light on the way Russia has possessed Ukraine, Belarus and Syria like a demon that parasites its host and always breaks its promises., https://www.librarystack.org/scale-russian-neocolonialism-as-demonic-possession/?ref=unknown

In this essay, Jussi Parikka, writer and professor in digital aesthetics and culture at Aarhus University, explores the concept of scale. He argues that nothing actually works on the 1:1 scale, so we needn’t be simplistic about scale. Nothing is really self-identical, because all is mediation. All is radically about scales, relations and friction. Across media and aesthetics, in every field which has had to negotiate how to inscribe abstraction in a communicable, tangible form, scale is mobilised inside and into the techniques of knowing. The simplicity of measurement is only apparent, it hides a series of scalar loops that reveal something essential: scale is the middle of an intertwining bundle of forces. Scale is a generative notion and it entails an ethic-aesthetic meaning: scales standardise and potentially destabilise, and creating methods for other scales can be seen as an ethical practice., https://www.librarystack.org/there-is-plenty-of-room-in-the-simulation/?ref=unknown

So far, many of the things we build on and with blockchains have presented themselves as new types of property enclosures. From cryptocurrencies to NFTs, decentralized ledger technology seems mostly dominated by the asset logic of financialization. But the landscape of blockchain-enabled digital culture is fantastically diverse and can encode much more than a desire for wealth and ownership. In this short essay, media theory and digital art researcher Martin Zeilinger explores what might become possible – for artists, activists or community organizers – when we reimagine blockchains not as property-oriented infrastructure, but as structures of belonging. Doing so may allow us to develop conceptual frameworks that better account for (dis)continuities between hyper-capitalist tech innovations and their radical alternatives. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) offer the perfect starting point for thinking about how to mix on- and off-chain technologies in structures of belonging that push beyond fintech legacies and emphasize collaboration, co-ownership and sharing., https://www.librarystack.org/structures-of-belonging/?ref=unknown