Three Geomedia
Sean Cubitt
ABSTRACT
Working on the same principles as the phonograph, but reading tremblings of the ground rather than of the air, scratching out in real time invisible actions in visible form, the seismograph betrays its origins in the mechanical era. Today a second, more arithmetic form of data visualisation diagrams a numerical data set such as the one derived from instrument systems in place to monitor the health of the Animas River. A third form, financial visualisation software in commodity markets, not only gives direct accounts of geology (reserves), human interventions in them (extraction) and simulations of their likely use (futures) but actively produce those futures by fixing future trading prices. These three geomedia - vectoral analogues, numerical translations, and direct data – have significantly different means for handling time, with implications for the increasingly punctual subjects they presume, to the extent that it is not at all clear that the subjectivities they address, enable or create are human.
KEYWORDS: workplace media, geology, scientific instruments, data visualisation, sesimography, river monitoring, finance software.
BIO: Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect, The Practice of Light and Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology. Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, his current research is on political aesthetics, media technologies, media art history and ecocriticism.
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE
Sean Cubitt
Department of Media andCommunications
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW
Three Geomedia
I
Given his literary background, McLuhan can be forgiven for obsessing about the printed word; and art historians, trained to attend to painting, sculpture and architecture, can hardly be blamed for overlooking other arts. But the general failure of the humanities, for much of the last 150 years, to notice the immense visual revolution brought about by intaglio printmaking is less condonable. Directly relevant to our discussions is the importance of printmaking to cartography and to the kind of conceptual mapping that characterised the Renaissance from Paracelsus to Ramon Llull. Equally so, in their fascination with the post-retinal arts perhaps, the humanities have turned a blind eye to a technical revolution that began in the late 18th century. For the first time since Alberti and Mercator, a visual language worthy of Cassirer's (1953-7) term symbolic form has not only appeared but spread almost universally through scientific and popular media, a visual grammar capable of making as many and as varied a set of statements as perspective or mapping, and which I will gather under the collective description data visualisation.
This is not to deny the great scholars of artistic and popular prints (among them Griffiths 1996, Ivins 1953 and Mukherji 1983), or the work of those researchers who have tried to gather attention around data visualisation as a professional and popular medium (in the first instance Halpern 2014 and Drucker 2014). In my own field of media and communications, we have been equally slow in bending our attention to workplace media, despite their growing influence on the aesthetic and perceptual underpinnings of contemporary life. The growing body of work on scientific instruments (notably Galison 1997 and 2003 and Daston and Galison 2010) is further testament to increasing interest in the mediation of knowledge, and the consequent question whether mediation forms knowledge at least as much as knowledge frames instruments and ways of visualising its objects.
This paper is less concerned with the integrated networks of instruments gathering geological data, and more with the consolidation of mediated earth-observation into visual communications. My concern is not so much with the question of truth to reality as of truth to data. In another paper I hope to address how far the expression of the world as data is a world-forming as much as a world-picturing activity. Here however the interest lies not in the nature or accuracy of the readings instruments give of phenomena, but rather in the modes of mediation bringing the resulting data to human users, modes which include digitisation, translation, transcription, encoding, transmission, decoding, processing and especially expression. Similarly this paper does not deal with the framing of data visualisations in their onward transmission through news, current affairs and entertainment media, workplace and policy discourses, or their eventual efficacy in supporting or altering prevailing beliefs and actions. It is however written in the belief that the principles of mediation underpin the design of instruments and their articulation, for example in the management design of international meteorological networks and the operations of press officers and media professionals in conveying data to public networks. The ultimate credibility of geological data rests not on the accuracy of instruments, nor on the agenda-setting and framing activities of media outlets, but on the techniques of expression and delivery that are the key concern of this paper.
A particular challenge for data visualisation media is the handling of time. Joseph Priestley's A New Chart of History (1769) and William Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas of 1786 established the horizontal time axis as a standard that, even in their static diagrams, implies animation. The animation is not limited just by the technology of printing but because these diagrams relate time to only one other variable (or an algebraically composite variable); and rather more significantly for the present enquiry because they spatialise time. Prints have several technical drawbacks too, most of all that they take considerable labour to convert information into drawings, and drawings into engravings. This means that in general they can show us, in geological terms, where a mine is, how many mines there are at a given date, or what a mine looks like in section at a specific moment in its history, but not the changing relations between these displays. The Frontispiece to Lyell's Elements of Geology of 1838, [IMAGE: Lyell_Principles_frontispiece.jpg; SOURCE: CAPTION: Frontispiece to Charles Lyell, Elelemnts of Geology. London: John Murray. 1838] carrying the intellectual freight of his 1830 Principles, witnesses the cracking open of a new conception of time, but does so without moving.
Twelve years later, in 1842, the seismometer was invented, ascribed to the devout Scottish glaciologist James David Forbes, though earlier pendulum based designs were in use in Japan, and are reported as early as the second century BCE in China. (Needham 1959: 625-35; as with other crucial visual technologies of the epoch like the magic lantern, there appears to be a direct connection with Japan in the development of the modern seismograph; see Reitherman 2012: 122-5). The seismometer, working on the same principles as the phonograph, but reading tremblings of the ground rather than of the air, scratching out in real time invisible actions in visible form, is the archetype of geomedia: an automaton that translates the inhuman into humanly-perceptible and legible form.
The seismograph still belongs materially in the mechanical era, when the vector was still in vogue. Today we are more arithmetic. A second form of data visualisation is more common, perhaps what we most expect: it diagrams a numerical data set which in turn derives from measurements of non-numerical phenomena. The 'vast machine' (Edwards 2010) of weather stations and instruments – converting temperature curves and wind into numbers that can then be converted to graphs, charts, diagrams and applied to maps – are in the large scale also geomedia. In this presentation I will concentrate on an earth-bound study of river monitoring, mirroring the complex of meteorological instruments and translations in the concatenation of observational devices used to track the consequences of an environmental crisis shifting minerals through watersheds towards the ocean.
Such phenomena-to-data translations no longer deal exclusively in real time or the accumulation of records: more typically, we use the accumulation of data to predict. Even in the case of atmospheric instruments systems not every place can be observed. Curiously then we find that simulations based on the dataset not only predict the future but also whatever is occurring now that is not being directly observed. The inevitable real-time delay of real-time media – the latency involved in digitisation and transmission – means that real-time decisions, such as what clothes to wear, are made on the hoof on the basis of the past rather than the present; while simulations extrapolate from the past the probable shapes of the future. Weather visualisations – like visualisations of social trends – project broadly normative accounts that allow readers to refer them to their experience of weather (or trends), all the while reducing experiences to epiphenomena of fundamentally predictable tendencies. Similarly, accounts of downstream flows of spilt hydrocarbons and tailings instruct us where to fish and drink, but leave our sensory encounters with sludge and smells on the riverbank, at the margin.
A third form of visualisation begins in data that are already numerical. Financial visualisation software is not obviously a geomedium, but the London Metals Exchange and other markets in commodity futures not only give direct accounts of geology (reserves), human interventions in them (extraction) and simulations of their likely use (futures) but actively produce those futures by fixing future trading prices.
These three geomedia - vectoral analogues, numerical translations, and direct data – have very different implications for the subjects they presume. What or where is the subject of geomedia? I am spurred to this question by an observation of Badiou's: "You must always have at your disposal a network of concepts, of which 'subject' always designates the articulation, without being able to situate within this network the point subsumed under this term" (Badiou 2009: 285). Following Badiou's ontology, individual instruments and measurements articulate one kind of subject; their articulation into systems of multiple types of instruments and measurements produces another kind of subject that, while it is articulated in and by the system, is not an integral part of it. We might hear under this statement of the problem Marx's methodological adage that "The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations" (Marx 1973: 101). Subjectivity, subjectivisation and subjection are both products and processes, articulations of multiple factors, among which present purposes charged us with naming those which are geo-factors. What is the subject of geo-? It is the subject that deals with gravity, that distinguishes up from down, that typically lives on or very near a surface, and that orients itself accordingly. But it is also for that reason a subject very likely to be ignorant of its own conditions of existence. For ecopolitics, every human is a concentration of interactions with its environment, which it in turn remakes by breathing, ingesting, excreting, moving, sheltering. We may become conscious of breathing in certain circumstances, or by an act of will, but rarely even then as an ecological entanglement. The seismograph operates in this plane: we can remain largely unconscious of the Earth's constant seismic motion; we only need become aware of it in moments of crisis.
I may not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but logistically our corporate and governmental planning processes do rely on geological and atmospheric media for strategic risk management. Numerical translation media, unlike seismography, foster prediction, and have a normative actuarial function - to produce assurances – the reason for popular and governmental interest in them, if not the whole scientific rationale. No one agency needsto know everything that is happening now. Empirical gaps are plugged by probabilistic knowledge whose concern is with trends rather than the totality of events; or rather, they are concerned with the totality at the expense of the events comprising it. The third case, financial software, does however address the totality of events in real time. Until recently, such software described human activities to human readers; but now the vast majority of news of computer trades is generated by computers tracking markets and 'read' by other trading computers, so that financial visualisation has become a window into an increasingly inhuman universe of purely numerical activity which, however, translates into more or less mining, transport, refining, energy use, and dispersal into infrastructure and consumer goods – the newly anthropogenic geology (Parikka 2015).
An instrument not only tells us about the phenomenon it is designed to measure, but about its designer. The same is true of the workflow from measurement to presentation. Subjectivation, the construction of subjection and subjectivity, derives not only from the instruments and measurements but from the formal attributes of these transmission and presentation media. The geo- prefix suggests that the predominant dimension of geomedia's subjectivity is space, a hypothesis supported by the triumph of spatial grids in both workplace software and the construction of contemporary screens that also implies a concomitant suppression of time. The fine gradations within and between precise modes of temporal suppression in the three modes of geo-media, however, suggest that while containment of its object divorces geo-phenomena from time, the most significant dimension of the subject of geomedia is temporal.
II
The fundamental design of seismometers involves a mass suspended from a frame by a spring. The frame and recording device move when the Earth moves, but the heavy mass tends to inertia. The recorder traces the difference between the moving and still parts, giving a record of vertical movements of the Earth. A plotter pen on a revolving drum was traditional, but the friction of pen on paper was enough to give false readings, leading to the use of beams of light reflected from the mass onto photographic or heat-sensitive paper. Contemporary seismographs suspend the mass in electromagnetic fields, allowing movement in two dimensions, recording the amount of electrical force needed to keep the mass inert. Like its mechanical and optical predecessors, electronic seismometers amplify the movement, typically converting voltage readings into either analog or digital form for display (Nebeker 1995). To keep the argument clear, I will concentrate on the analog read out, the plotter drawing near-symmetrical shakes on an unspooling drum of time-stamped paper. The paper itself is a major medium (Gitelman 2014), covered in lines parallel and at 90 degrees to the motion of the drum, graph paper to all intents, showing time on the parallel and scale on the vertical axis. To the unschooled observer, even without these measuring lines, the seismograph's output makes sense, as it does in so many movies: hectic motion "means" strong seismic activity directly, without need to understand the Richter (magnitude) and Mercalli (intensity) scales. In this restricted sense, seismometers are indexical media, making marks as a direct result of the movements they record; but also in a more particular sense of the index as a pointing finger: when we look at a working seismograph, we are looking at the finger as much as we are looking at what it's pointing at. As vectoral analogue media, seismometers mobilise this double function of the index. They are analogues in that the shapes they draw are analogous to, or isomorphic with, the movements of the ground. They are vectoral in the sense that they record gestures, albeit mechanical ones, which have both size and direction – they move in time as well as over distance. In fact, modern seismometers often have three masses lying at angles to one another to respond to different aspects of seismic motion, including depth and compass bearing. Technically the extra dimension makes them scalar media. 'Vector' however keeps the sense of the temporality intrinsic to seismometers, whose recording drums advance under the moving arm of the plotter in order precisely to keep its timely intelligence.
Seismography is animated in the moment of recording, though it produces a record that can be analysed after the event. Its most curious feature is that the whole device moves except the inert mass, so the apparent movement is in fact the record of inertia relative to the whole planet moving around it. To ensure that inertia, the device is kept inside a wind-proof chamber, and isolated from accidental rumblings (traffic, shifting furniture, crashing waves which produce a permanent micro-seismic background) and from changes in temperature and the Earth's magnetic field, using invar alloys that respond poorly to heat and magnetism. This isolation from the world makes visible the world's movements, as if to prove TS Eliot's lines about "the still point of the turning world": "Except for the point, the still point / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance" (Burnt Norton, Eliot 1963: 191). In Eliot's poem, the still point "where past and future are gathered" is an ideal extraction of the conscious moment from time that allows time to proceed. In the seismometer, however, the world's movement tracing itself against such stillness is the evidence of an utterly unhuman present that trembles constantly, and now and then erupts with sufficient violence that our human senses confirm what the instruments say. The motion of the frame, and therefore of the world attached to it, draws itself as a line of motion, rather than of stilled depiction, as in Fox Talbot's photographic 'pencil of nature' (1844-6). Though it can only draw one quality of all the qualities that make up the world, and though the condition of its doing so is that it be as isolated as possible from everything else in the world, especially its non-seismic movements, the seismometer reverberates directly in sympathy with the Earth, and at the same time.