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At a time of increasing challenges that concern our relationship to the environment, including looming and continuing environmental crises, sociopolitical designations of alterity, and the uncertainty of a planetary future outside of capital’s globalizing social forms, we address how new forms of vision and visuality brought forth through technologies envision planetarity and planetary relations. Imaging technologies are central to consider as sources of knowledge about the environment. Their image output has the power to reconfigure relations of the planetary and can and can act as a source of speculative reimagining. The development and dependence on machine vision technologies such as satellite imaging, wide-scale algorithmic platforms, statistical modeling programs, drones equipped with LiDAR, and other sensing networks with visual output bring about an expansion of the perceptual scope. Through inquiries into the themes of scale, alterity, nonhuman entanglements, and operational imaging, this issue asks how machinic ways of seeing generate a new aesthetics of planetarity.

"Digital and data technologies are actively transforming the archives of contemporary warfare. Bringing together a range of scholarly perspectives and artistic practices, (W)archives investigates digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes. Throughout the book, the (w)archive emerges as a term to grasp the extended materiality of war today, wherein digital archiving intersects with images, bodies, senses, infrastructures, environments, memories, and emotions. The essays explore how this new digital materiality of war reconfigures the archival impulses that have shaped artistic practices over the last decades, and how archives can be mobilized to articulate political demands, conjure new forms of evidence, and make palpable the experience of living with war." -- Publisher's website.

The Circle is a novel written by the American author Dave Eggers (2013), and it tells the story about a powerful Internet company that works with highly developed surveillance technologies to monitor workers as well as the local and global community. In discussions and research this novel often has been seen in the tradition of a dystopic and totalitarian view of society as we know from Orwell’s 1984 or Huxleys Brave New World. However, this article critically investigates a vision of democracy that is suggested in The Circle. Circlers call this political model “demoxie”, which embraces the idea that everybody who has a Circle account is also a registered voter. That means, the voter directly votes on issues via his or her Internet platform (such as decisions on healthcare, company policies, as well as international politics issues). Based on this work of fiction as well as recent discussions about cyber democracy, this article opens up a discussion about the benefits and risks of Internet technologies and democracy.