Twisting Metal with Earth

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.202020 | Issue 5 | October 2020

Harry Meadows

Arts University Bournemouth

Abstract

The video Twisting Metal with Earth was produced to explore how weather stations can be useful beyond their function as mechanical sensors. It was suggested that they also act as an aesthetic interface with the hyperobjects of big data and global climate. The video’s animated characters were voiced by interview recordings from couples discussing their experience of weather. One interviewee collected and shared data from his own weather station, others gave more experiential accounts. From the characters’, a conversation emerged that blurred the boundaries between global systems and local experience. Mechanical climate sensors and plants were discussed by the characters as useful objects to think through large and complex topics.

Research Statement

Twisting Metal with Earth presents three couples’ experiences of weather. The recordings of each participant are spoken by animated characters modelled on mechanical climate sensors. In a blending of computer generated and live motion video, the characters are introduced as weather stations placed in a garden, near a roundabout and a hilltop viewpoint. The dialogue is a result of interview questions that prompt the subjects to consider how climate data is generated, the benefits of climate prediction and their personal experience of weather.

In creating these characters, I aim to open up a concept of climate sensors beyond their use as accurate measuring devices offering useful data, but as visible material interfaces that offer an aesthetic experience of the massive but often invisible forces of climate change and big data. The aesthetic design of the machines, the data they record and the predictions made from their massive network make the climate sensor a potent extension of human senses. By giving the mechanical climate sensors a voice, I explore the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines in understanding and creating their environment. What are the surprising textures and registers of this cyborg voice and what does it reveal about my position as editor and animator?

The way the animation anthropomorphises the machines speculates on the sensors having agency, a perception that frames them as imbued with humanlike bias and emotion. Sensors as actants straying from the hard facts humans want from automated systems. Jennifer Gabrys (2016) states that climate sensors are not simply benign entities but transform the environment that they are designed to objectively monitor. ‘Sensor networks perform— and so transform— environmental systems.’ (p.38).

Now the machines are actants, animated with life and become more-than-human and more-than-technological, what social or emotional concerns might they reveal? Bruno Latour (1979) highlights how scientific process can be influenced by sociological factors. He observes the complexity in generating ‘hard facts’ and the machines and people that create them, in this provocation: ‘the logic of deduction cannot be isolated from its sociological grounds’ (p.136).

Using recorded interview voice-overs to give a sense of candid authenticity to an animated non-human character is a widely used method. Here, the originality comes from the combination of perspectives and experiences of the interviewees. These centre around Roger Dobbs, founder of newforestweather.co.uk, a website that broadcasts data from the weather station set up in his garden. He also shares his data through social media and UK Weather Network. His is a life-long interest. He showed me daily handwritten records he made as a teenager in the 1960s. His dedicated endeavour allows him to get a handle on the hyperobjects of big data and climate. His technically informed account gives a counterpoint to the visceral but anecdotal descriptions from the other interviewees: from the predictions of the Hadley Centre to an helado brain-freeze.

Conducting interviews as research requires rigorous consideration of the subject. However, my motivation as interviewer is not purely to accurately record verbal accounts but also to give a voice to an animated character. My questioning of the interviewees is influenced by how the voices chime with each other in the edit. As editor, my consideration for academic rigor shifts to a responsibility towards the nuances of the characters and the conversation I create. Each recorded dialogue is combined with a body, face and stage set to create a fiction that opens up the potential for the instrument to function not just with the rationality attributed to scientific instruments, but operate on a spectrum of emotionally driven complexity, functioning not as a siloed individual but in relation to other characters.

The word animate is derived from the latin animat, meaning, instilled with life. The method of animation becomes an incantation resulting in images of sensors showing facial expressions that give nuance to their words. Importantly, they also react to their partner sensor through looking surprised, frustrated or supportive. This relationship between each couple mirrors the combinations of sensors bound together in a weather station. Gabrys (2016) describes observation data machines, when combined, create a new environment.

‘Sense data are not simply items to be read and gathered as machinic

observations of environments that scientists process. Instead, sense data are indications of a process of becoming sensible, where environments, humans, and

more-than-humans are individuated as perceiving and perceivable entities.’ (p.50).

The anemometers and weather vanes I reference, are modelled on specific designs aimed largely at a consumer market. They are often purchased by climate enthusiasts. Weather stations used by organisations such as Highways England do not generally have so many whirligig moving parts, preferring more static, less flashy ultrasonic technology. The consumer models are certainly a million miles from the other end of the spectrum: gothic weathervanes featuring mythical beasts, scythe-wielding old men or cockerels. The consumer sensors have their own aesthetic. Coloured in a spectrum of grey reminiscent of an office desktop computer, entangled in wires and cable-ties but with an occasional flourish of chrome, these machines align with twentieth-century ideals of rational technology producing hard facts. The aesthetic of this design aligns to the ideals of a demographic for whom the home weather station is the perfect sculptural interface to begin to engage with the idea of climate.

The enthusiast’s weather station gathers data that is then stored on a separate unit. Plug the unit into your PC and records are available to be uploaded to a variety of online platforms such as UK Weather Network or Weather Underground. These are networks of weather stations that provide real-time local readings for most major cities in the world. It is independent of the main agencies used by the broadcasters such as the BBC and uses contributions from non-professional weather stations. This underground organisation features web forum discussion and allows for individuals to have their own page that may feature photographs and webcams. Aside from a civic act of contributing to the service, this is a poetic act of trying to get a handle on the overwhelming subject of climate. James Bridle (2018) expands on the motivating sense of alienation created by huge datasets:

‘The structures we have built to extend our own life systems, our cognitive and haptic interfaces with the world, are the only tools we have for sensing a world dominated by the emergence of hyperobjects. Just as we are beginning to perceive them our ability to do so is slipping away.’ (p.75)

Here Bridle frames the networked data systems as a hyperobject machine that is too massive a data set to make sense to a human and can only be understood by other machines. Indeed, the climate is one of the largest data sets in existence. But there is also the other great anxiety which is accessed through the weather station: climate change. This, Timothy Morton (2013) writes, is a hyperobject of its own:

‘The threat of global warming is not only political, but also ontological. The threat of unreality is the very sign of reality itself. Like a nightmare that brings news of some real psychic intensity, the shadow of the hyperobject announces the existence of the hyperobject.’ (p.32)

I see the act of assembling, installing and tending to a weather station as a process of cathartic contemplation. They are installed locally and act as a visible interface for the shrouded forces of big data that exist in the cloud or the disastrous climate change effects that may seem distant from local weather. Weather station design is often anthropomorphic or zoomorphic: an upright central frame from which tentacular arms and legs extend their mechanical feelers into the world. They act as conduits to a new conception of the world that is not looking down through a Google Earth satellite but from the perspective of life on the ground. This visible positioning in our zone of experience is significant, as Latour (2018) writes:

‘The Terrestrial, is in fact limited in a surprising way to a minuscule zone a few kilometers thick between the atmosphere and bedrock. A biofilm, a varnish, a skin, a few infinitely folded layers.’ (p.78).

Latour’s Terrestrial or Critical Zone, as he also calls the space between the tops of the trees and the bottom of the groundwater, is a perspective on the world that requires a conceptual framework situated within the Critical Zone. Rather than the removed objective perspective of satellite data, instead an image emerging from an assemblage of human and machine sensors, or what Gabrys (2016) refers to as ‘more-than-human’.

‘sense data are not simply items to be read and gathered as machinic observations of environments that scientists process. Instead, sense data are indications of a process of becoming sensible, where environments, humans, and more-than-humans are individuated as perceiving and perceivable entities.’ (p.50).

Considering Gabrys’ assertion that humans and non-humans create the environments they perceive, Latour’s call for a new perspective based at ground level and Bridle’s (2018) demand for “not new technology, but new metaphors” (p.5), I have reflected on the perspectives created in pursuing my own line of enquiry. In the video, the aesthetic qualities of weather stations are transformed by giving them a face and expressive spinning actions. I have observed that the texture and register of the cyborg voices load the aesthetic possibilities of doubt, drama, frustration and fun onto the grey and chrome rationalism of scientific instruments. They become charged with the ability to act as objects for thinking about massive issues by opening up conversation from a variety of terrestrial viewpoints.

When one of the anemometer (wind speed sensor) characters talks about the fruit she grows, she highlights the significance of an object acting as her preferred interface to the climate hyperobject. “I have a quince. I haven’t had a quince for five years.” This example reveals a fragrant, sweet, juicy aesthetic alternative to the grey injection moulded plastic of the climate sensor. It also reveals that her existence as an anemometer does not satisfy her need to construct an understanding of the climate. There are exciting possibilities for weather station design in combining machines and organic objects into the assemblage.

As hyperobject interfaces, the quince has a different aesthetic to the weather station. What influences a person to select either one is an important question and it highlights the social and cultural conditions that influence a spectrum of climate understanding. This opens up Gabrys’ phrase ‘more-than-human’, and asks to which humans we refer. Here the responsibility for selecting interviewees and their representation is with the editor as story teller. The representation of voices and design of characters blur the boundaries between the global (networked mechanical data) and the local (immediate experiences). What emerges from the video is an attempt to imagine the texture and register of conversation from our situated perspective in the terrestrial, the critical zone.

Footnotes

[1] Bruno Latour (1979) uses the term ‘actant’ to describe an object that has agency. He defines an actant as ‘something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general.’ (p373).

[2] Bruno Latour (1996) uses the term ‘hard facts’ in reference to how scientists distinguish between scientific findings and ‘beliefs, a culture, or a mythology’. (p76).

[3] Jennifer Gabrys (2016) uses the terms ‘more-than-human’ and ‘more-than-technological’ to describe sensing systems that are function between species or object categories. They might include humans, plants and machines. (p45).

[4] Timothy Morton (2013) uses the term ‘hyperobjects’ to describe pervasive entities that are massive in dimension of time or space. (p.10).

[5] Donna Haraway (2016) uses the term ‘tentacular’ to describe both a way of sensing the world through multi-species networks but also as a way of thinking. (p.31)

References

• Bridle, J. (2018) New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London: Verso

• Gabrys, Jennifer. (2016) Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• Latour, B. (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press

• Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills, Sage Publications.

• Latour, B. (1996) On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications. Soziale Welt. 47 (3), 373.

• Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

• Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hacking the NAP: Spectography as Counter-fiction Machine

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.202021 | Issue 5 |October 2020

Jeffrey Kruth. Assistant Professor of Architecture, Miami University

Dr. Allison Schifani. Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Miami

ABSTRACT

Downtown Miami is home to the Network Access Point (NAP) of the Americas. Operated by the multinational Equinix, informational traffic and computational power hums away through fiber optic cables and within server cages, linking the city to the rest of the world from this windowless facility. The NAP is highly secured with X-ray machines, intrusion detectors, and digital firewalls. Satellites on the roof are obscured by domes to prevent those outside the facility from gauging their directionality. We argue that the NAP facility is, both in its architecture as well as the discourse Equinix produces about it, a fiction machine. It performs a narrative of security, of placelessness, and of isolation. In order to work against neoliberal logics of disavowal and displacement embodied by the NAP, we propose a design methodology we call spectography. Spectography is affirmative speculation on the informational and material environment, and counter to the paranoid aesthetics exemplified by the NAP. Operating with similar logics (speculation, digitality, network technology), spectography does so against the grain of securitization. Working spectographically means employing design methods that reach toward the city as informational space and ongoing material project, speculating not on potential threat, but on situatedness and latent connection.

Research Statement

Downtown Miami is home to the Network Access Point (NAP) of the Americas, operated by the multinational Equinix. In a windowless facility in the heart of the city, informational traffic and computational power hums away through fiber optic cables and within server cages, literally linking the city to the rest of the hemisphere, and the world. The facility is highly secured with X-ray machines, intrusion detectors, sniffer dogs, as well as internet firewalls. Access to its third floor is restricted to US citizens with government clearance. Even the satellites on the roof are obscured by large domes to prevent those outside the facility from gauging their directionality. The NAP facility is, both in its architecture and design as well as the discourse Equinix produces about it, a fiction machine. It performs a narrative of security, of placelessness, and of isolation. We propose the construction of another fiction machine to work against Equinix’s neoliberal logics of disavowal and displacement, its smooth aesthetics.

Fig. 1 The existing NAP facility north of downtown Miami

Architect Keller Easterling’s work is useful here because the NAP is at once infrastructure space and non-place. Easterling writes of the so-called “3DPD–meaning ‘three-dimensional pig disgusting’ [...] used to indicate that the 2D world is superior to the 3D world.” Digital space is said to be smooth, opposed to the ‘lumpy’ and messy material world. The NAP embodies the logic of smoothness that Easterling articulates. And too, provides a material example of her discussion of infrastructure space as urban software: repeatable and informational.

The NAP, according to Equinix, can “accelerate and amplify internal value creation for your business.” It offers “dynamic connections to 6,775+ companies and 1,420+ networks on site.” But of course when someone wants to ‘view’ a center on their promotional site, they are only offered a link to a Google map, never to an image of the structure itself. That the architecture of the site so visibly refuses its surrounding is only a redoubling of the logic of smoothless articulated in promotional materials: it is turned away from the 3DPD, very messy city. It is architecture meant to erase its situatedness. Its performance of security is also a performance of a kind of spatial disgust for the world that surrounds it.

The network technologies and infrastructures that the NAP both sells and employs bolster its refusals of the lumpy, embodied city. Its work, both in discourse and design, also erases the material histories of its own urban context. Alan Liu has also observed:

Basically, a network is something that subtracts the need to be conscious of the geography, physicality, temporality, and underlying history of the links between nodes. After all, that’s why we have packet switching, statelessness, TTL (time-to-live on packets), domain-name servers, and, in fact, the Internet in toto: so that we are route-independent. Increasingly, the world appears to us to be adequately represented in a social network graph in which nothing meaningful–not distance, direction, or impedance (and certainly not how many historical dead bodies lie alongside a cable) – can be read in the thin lines between nodes.

Tung Hui-Hu, who notes that all network infrastructure is necessarily speculative in that it is built to forestall all future failure, to reroute around disaster, would certainly classify the NAP as among those manifestations of the “paranoid’s architecture of internal security and external threat.”

Part of the performance of the NAP’s turn against the city is, too, the abstraction of human context. Its generic facade with rhythmic spacing of alternating ventilation ports and false windows suggests that the human-scale, and thus the social-scale, can be reduced to a gestural aesthetics. In the age of informational capital, the NAP is a materialization of exactly such an abstraction.

There is, however, an opportunity, unwillingly offered by Equnix’s NAP. It is that its position as both router for international informational traffic and secure computational powerhouse is entirely dependent upon material linkages to the very city that surrounds it, the same city against which it turns its back. Its direct attachment to the undersea fiber optic cables (which Nicole Starowsielski notes are very much “territorially entrenched”) and other informational infrastructure are what make it so valuable an access point to begin with.

In response to the fiction machine of the NAP we propose another fiction machine. Our fiction machine, in the form of a speculative redesign of the structure, reimagines the site as vulnerable, transparent, and as reaching toward rather than away from the city. In the series of speculative drawings presented here, the site and its context between local geography and global network overlap, connect, and disconnect. The goal is to leverage our common risks for the construction of an urban informational commons, one in which we might both claim and exercise our right to the city.

Fig. 2 The design process for a reimagined NAP facility.

In order to counter the fiction machine produced by the NAP’s paranoid aesthetics, our project instead offers an alternative method for creating and re-mixing the building’s image. Eschewing orthographic projection in favor of a thickened context, we propose a speculation not on perpetual deferral of a breach, but on the possibilities afforded by breach, by openness to the surrounding urban context. The much more common measured drawings typical of architectural specs, and the descriptive geometry they deploy, have a predictive quality which imbues them with an authority about the real. Our intent is here to slough off that authority, remaking the NAP as an invitation to its surroundings, and highlighting its mutability in the city.

Master planning of cities primarily takes place through a top-down approach, amplified today through various data-driven processes and orthographic mapping techniques. Henri Lefebvre argues that such representations of urban space abstract the human body and everyday life to actualize that space for exchange or consumption. At the same time, the representation of the city is often abstracted through marketing brochures (such as those presented by Equinix of the NAP facility), Google Streetview and various social media. The city today is less experienced than it is collected, sorted, and re-configured through a massive media apparatus. NAP is a primary agent of that urban transformation and a producer of the city-as-image. The gap between the representation of the city and the technical interventions that have made it is effectively veiled. Typical counter-mapping strategies such as cognitive mapping, as popularized by Kevin Lynch, or psychogeography, as advocated by the Situationists, rely primarily on first-hand experience of the city to foster a new legibility. The hidden technical logics and overlapping jurisdictional boundaries of the processes of urbanization remain hidden and are under-explored as a terrain of intervention.

The goal of our counter-fiction is to foster both legibility of abstract forces, but also offer the city’s image as a pluralism. Marshall McLuhan refers to this as low definition media, where action on the part of the receiver is needed to give meaning to the content. The production of our images include first an abstraction of the site context produced as an image using creative coding and 3D modeling software. The boundaries and pixels of the site are made lumpy and low resolution, suggesting an inbetween-ness, rather than a remoteness or securitized capsularity. The works that are produced are intended to highlight, rather than hide lumpyness, fragmentation, and porosity. We ultimately ask, how can local culture exist within the context of a globally imaged city?

The images show the constituent parts of the city and NAP facility, recontextualizing the building’s inherent otherness. The fragmented pieces of the city are not broken, however, but instead suggest rearrangement and occupation. The media itself consists of traffic cones, domestic security fences, submarine cables, pediments from local churches, murals from community gardens and a local jazz club. They all intermix and adapt based on changing local conditions. Other elements appear transparent and ghostly, in the act of disappearance. Other parts are intentionally pixelated—stories and context impacted by digital loss.

Fig. 3 Spectograph 1. Layers.

The re-imaged NAP Facility is viewed from multiple perspectives at multiple scales. Remixed components of the interior merge and distort with images of the existing local context.

Fig. 4 Spectograph 2. Open Work.

Infrastructural and architectural components of the NAP facility and surrounding community are coded using Grasshopper software to randomly intersect and intermix. The spectrograph attempts to contrast the narrative of black box infrastructure and the smooth flow of data production, suggesting the city as an open work of digital and material elements.

The design process we employ, which we preliminarily call spectography, is a kind of mapping, but unlike the speculative nature of infrastructure as Liu describes it, our speculation is plural, rooted not in enclosure and protection, but in openness: 3D Pig Desirable, perhaps. In this we follow the work of the anonymous collective, an uncertain commons, who have described capitalist speculation as “firmative,” a speculation which “renders latent possibilities as calculable outcomes,” as opposed to alternative “affirmative” forms of speculation, which, instead, aim “to produce futures while refusing the foreclosure of potentialities, to hold on to the spectrum of possibilities while remaining open to multiple futures whose context of actualization can never be fully anticipated.” The spectographs themselves are moments in time, rearrangeable, and open to interpretation. They willfully play with scale, layering, and hybridization of media. As encounter and process, spectography is intended for manipulation and re-mapping by local communities whose own expertise and daily experiences adds to the pluralistic intentions of the project. Information scientists, hobbyist coders, designers, and the everyday residents may all contribute to the remapping of the NAP image. This suggests the process of spectography as a digitally native platform that allows reimagination informed by local conditions.

Spectography as we preliminarily propose it here, is affirmative speculation. It is an essential counter to the fiction machines of securitized informational architecture in part because it operates using similar logics: that is, we employ speculation, digitality, and network technology. But we do so against the grain of paranoid aesthetics. In working with but counter to so-called ‘smooth’ digital worlds, we highlight the false narrative of security and enclosure. To work spectographically is, we propose, to employ design methods and digitality against paranoia and securitization, to employ affirmative speculation against firmative foreclosures of the future.

Footnotes

[1] Thomas Sparrow, “Behind the Scenes of Latin America’s Internet ‘Brain,’” BBC News, January 31, 2013, sec. Technology, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21178983.

[2] Keller Easterling, “IIRS,” E-Flux, no. 64 (April 2016), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60837/iirs/.

[3] “The Amoderns: Reengaging the Humanities,” Amodern (blog), October 2013, https://amodern.net/article/the-amoderns-reengaging-the-humanities/.

[4] Tung Hui-Hu, “Black Boxes and Green Lights: Media, Infrastructure, and the Future at Any Cost,” English Language Notes 55, no. 1–2 (Fall 2016): 81–88. 85.

[5] Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) 10.

[6] Henri Lefebvre, “Space and the State,” in State/Space: A Reader, ed. Neil Brenner et al. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003) 84-88.

[7] Marshall McCluhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) 22.

[8] an uncertain commons, Speculate This! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). e-book.

After Humanity: technology, ecology and a blueprint for speculative media

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.202022 | Issue 5 | October 2020

Dr. Garfield Benjamin

Solent University

Abstract

'After Humanity' approaches issues of technological futures, environmental collapse and human agency. The eponymous future after the fall of humanity imagines a world built through relations between machines and ecology, in order to critique human priorities and the impact of constant expansion on the environment. This is situated in the context of developing a combined speculative media method, fusing design, fiction and ethics. The work is offered as a proof of concept for the method in developing a specific context using machine learning and human creative practices.

Link to work

https://digitalcultu.re/media/afterhumanity/

after humanity, the world is scarred and ruined : what remains in its wake?

...

land and sea are reclaimed as human excess rots and fades : what else will evolve?

...

from machines and nature, new ecosystems are born : a posthuman world?

This speculative design project combines machine learning and organic structures to imagine a posthuman world, anticipating new forms of civilisation that may emerge after humanity ends. In doing so, we can spark discussions around technoethics and ecology, and inform hybrid design in the present. We ask, how can we use concepts from humans, animals and machines to generate more sustainable futures for all species?

We imagine a fusion of machine and ecology to wonder what technology and earth would look like after humanity. By posthuman, we take three separate meanings:

- a technological singularity created by humanity that fundamentally changes the species and its relation to the world. This acknowledges the persistent role of the utopian dreams of science fiction and the tech industry, while critiquing the power such perspectives hold over the future of society and the planet;

- the development of the world after human extinction, a future defined by animals and/or machines. Here we build on Haraway’s (2016) conception of the anthropocene as a framework of economics and power structures, contrasted with the chthuluscene in which the earth reigns and humans are reduced to compost;

- a critical posthumanism, following Rosi Braidotti (2013), which deconstructs the frameworks, assumptions and priorities of humanism, technology and posthuman desire. The driving force of this strand is to introduce opportunities to consider human and non-human perspectives of Otherness.

This posthumanism therefore emphasises human responsibility while rejecting human privilege, a fusion of art, philosophy and technology, a call to action for (re)designing the future.

In order to inspire posthuman debates and critically assess the role of humanity in ecology, the designs in this speculative work are co-created between human, machine and the environment. The work starts as a visualisation of the collapse of human society, resulting in a new, scarred landscape in which new societies emerge. To imagine what this new world might look like, we take an oil rig - a human structure signifying the negative ecological impact of an exploitative relationship with the planet. The oil rig is generated using Google DeepMind’s bigGAN, a generative adversarial network built from a massive dataset of one thousand categories of objects, and specifically the image generation templates developed by Gene Kogan (2018). This is further manipulated by the machinic creativity by metamorphosing the human artefact of the network’s latent space with the potential for environmental creativity - the oil rig is combined with bigGAN images of (non-mammalian) animals, plants, fungi and landscape features in order to generate the seeds of new architectural structures that might coexist more productively with the ecological system. By removing the human from this process, we begin to see what creations might emerge in our wake once our tools are left to the own devices and co-opted by other species. In order to frame the work as a critical posthuman piece, the human artist re-enters to convert the bigGAN image into a 3d blueprint, alongside an emerging fictional thread describing the creative potential of the planet ‘after humanity’.

After Humanity is a new work, available online, that forms the blueprint and initial proof of concept for ongoing research into developing a speculative media method combining fiction, design and ethics. From speculative design, we take the production of concrete objects and technologies as a provocation of possible futures. We focus on design as a process of asking questions rather than providing answers (Dunne and Raby 2013). But we also move from design strictly conceived into a more explicit relation with art practice, in order to approach further “speculative dimensions, which are not content to modify but more radically dismantle technology” (Parikka 2015). In After Humanity, this leads to the machine-ecology blueprints for alternative structures. From speculative fiction, we take the world building process of social thought experiments (Le Guin 2018), estranging our perspective historically and cognitively in order to critique the present (Suvin 1979; Jameson 2005). But we also consider individual perspectives of what it is like to live in alternative contexts, revealing inequalities and priorities in how the future might unfold. In After Humanity, we invert the ‘outside context problem’ (Banks 2008) offered by speculative scenarios through an act of speculative removal. Instead of imagining what it would be like for humans to live in alternative societies or futures, we imagine an alternative future without humanity, in which machines and ecology realign their priorities and prejudices to reconstruct the world anew. The fictional snippets attached to each design provide a more explicit world-building approach, along with a consideration of how and why these structures have developed as well as how they fit into broader phylogenetic orders and the relations between different ‘species’. Here we move into speculative ethics. Bogost (2012) places a limit on speculative ethics - when considering the ethics of relations between non-human things - as always being the relation of humans to that non-human relation. In After Humanity we embrace and push against that limit, precisely to explore the relation of humanity to its own absence, and thereby reinsert the responsibility of ecological damage even as we consider the relations between machines and ecology. We invoke concrete ethical consideration of relations and futures in order to ‘think otherwise’ (Gunkel 2007) - to challenge the ethics of exclusion as boundaries of ethics. This is furthered (Gunkel 2018) by inverting the dominant ethical narratives of taking what technologies are emerging or possible. Instead, we place what ‘ought’ to be before what ‘is’ (or what might be), applied here within the speculative model to consider the ethics of competing priorities in determining the societal and design choices that underpin new political and ecological structures.

By constructing the method and the work in this way, we are attempting to stretch our “temporal imagination over primordial and post-extinction realities” (Kara 2016, 758). And, even further we combine fiction, design and ethics so that “the notion of speculation becomes tied to a specific non-human temporality as well” (Parikka 2015). We develop the context After Humanity in order to speculate on the implications of relational ethics of technology and ecology in the present climate crisis. The work forms a preliminary test of this framework. This method is being further tested and developed in The Speculative City, a VR project that reimagines Southampton, UK, in speculative contexts building on the setting and techniques of After Humanity.

References

• Banks, Iain M. 2008 [1996]. Excession. London: Hachette.

• Bogost, Ian (2012) Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

• Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.

• Dunne, Anthony & Raby, Fiona. 2013. Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.

• Gunkel, David (2007) Thinking otherwise: Ethics, technology and other subjects. Ethics and Information Technology 9(3),165-177.

• Gunkel, David (2018) The other question: can and should robots have rights?Ethics of Information Technology 20, 87–99.

• Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

• Kara, Selmin (2016) Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions. In Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Falmer: REFRAME. 750-784.

• Kogan, Gene. 2018. BigGAN Colaboratory. Tensorflow Hub. https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1rqDwIddy0eunhhV8yrznG4SNiB5XWFJJ

• Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fiction. London: Verso.

• Le Guin, Ursula. 2018 [1969]. The Left Hand of Darkness. London: Orion.

• Parikka, Jussi (2015) Mutating media ecologies. continent 4(2), 24-32.

• Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.