Looking forward to holding one of the keynote presentations at the 6th Media Materiality Forum: Digital Intelligence, Cosmotechnics, and Planetary Future at Tsinghua University, Beijing on March 30!
Big thanks to Prof. Jingwei Wu for inviting me to speak about my MCF research project on thought exhibitions and critical zones!
This paper discusses “Critical Zones – Observatories for Earthly Politics” (2020–22), the last of four “thought exhibitions” developed by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, in collaboration with various co-curators, for the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. The exhibition offered its visitors an aesthetic investigation into the scientific measurement methodologies and scholarly protocols that underpin the research practices of Earth System Science. It focussed on the critical zone, which is the “thin biofilm” (B. Latour) covering Earth’s surface: a few meters down until the bedrock and a few meters up into the lower atmosphere – where biogeochemical reactions are created by the processes of life and which provide, sui generis, the conditions for life to exist. Research on and within the critical zone relies on a variety of scientific instruments and media which include measurement devices and data processing capabilities, but also “sensitive infrastructures” (A. Arènes) made up of trees, microorganisms, and more-than-human cooperation. Here, as in the entanglements of lifeforms within the critical zone, the distinction between human and non-human agency becomes blurred and the idealized distanced gaze of an objective scientist treating Nature from a somewhat separated sphere of Culture is challenged.
