Media Geology: Logistics, International Strategies and Remote Sensing | Winter Season online panel Issue7

地质媒介：

物流、国际战略与远地遥感

Media Geology:

Logistics, International Strategies and Remote Sensing

✦对话嘉宾 尤西·帕里卡

Guest Speaker: Jussi Parikka

✦对话主持: 曹雪菲   蔡艺璇

Panel Host: XueFei Cao, Yixuan Cai

✦对话直播时间

2020年11月21日（周六）

纽约时间 8:30--10:30

伦敦时间 13:30--15:30

北京时间 21:30-23:30

Online Panel Time

November 21rst (Saturday)

New York Time 8:30--10:30

London Time 13:30--15:30

Beijing Time 21:30--23:30

✦参与地点

Voov Meeting 腾讯会议;

Youtube直播

BiliBili直播

✦对话概述

本次对谈活动“地质媒介：物流、国际战略与远地遥感”邀请了来自莫斯科Strelka学院的学者尤西·帕里卡（Jussi Parikka），其研究兴趣与“堆栈理论-实践”项目理念不谋而合。活动将首先回顾在本次OCAT研究中心举办的“2020研究型展览：策展方案入围展”中展出的“齐物生息：堆栈地貌中的自然系统变动”方案展，从媒介地质学的角度介绍帕里卡的经典研究，再由帕里卡介绍他近年来推进的相关研究项目。围绕这些项目开展一系列对话后，将会放映帕里卡的论文录像《种子、图像、地表》（Seed, Image and Ground, 2020），并一同探讨他全新的研究项目“操作图像”（Operational Images）。最后，活动邀请观众进行提问互动，进一步参与此次线上对话。

This panel invites scholar Jussi Parikka, whose theories and research are very related to Stack theory used in the exhibition “QiWu: Natural Footprints in Technological Vicissitude.” The panel will first review our recent exhibition ”QiWu” in Beijing OCAT. Then Pro.Parikka will introduce the theory A Geology of Media, and followed with a recent report on A Natural History of Logistics. We will screen the video essay Seed, Image and Ground(2020) and introduce his new project “Operational Images”. The talk also invites the audience to ask questions and participate in the conversation.

✦嘉宾介绍

尤西·帕里卡（Jussi Parikka），现任南安普顿大学温彻斯特艺术学院技术文化与美学教授，同时于布拉格艺术学院任客座教授。帕里卡的主要研究方向为数字文化和媒体理论，撰有《媒体生态学三部曲:数字蔓延》（2007/2016）、《昆虫媒体》（2010）、《媒体考古学是什么？》（2012）、《媒体地质学》（2015）等著作。同时，他还曾担任多部论著的编辑，其中包括2019年编译成中文的《媒体考古学:方法、应用和含义》；与托马斯·德沃拉克（Tomáš Dvořák）合编的《尺度之外的摄影：大众图像技术与理论》（Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image）将于2021年1月出版。目前，帕里卡正在撰写一本关于“操控图像”的新书。

Jussi Parikka is Professor of Technological Culture & Aesthetics at University of Southampton (Winchester School of Art) and a Visiting Professor at the Academy of Art, Prague. He writes on digital culture and media theory, and is the author of several books including the media ecology trilogy: Digital Contagions (2007, 2nd edition 2016), Insect Media (2010), and A Geology of Media (2015). He is also the author of What is Media Archaeology? (2012) and editor of several books. These also include Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications that has been translated into Chinese in 2019. The forthcoming co-edited volume Photography Off the Scale is out in January 2021. Currently he is working on a new book on Operational Images.

Jussi Parikka Project Introduction

媒介自诞生至今，已度过数百万甚至数十亿年的漫长岁月。尤西·帕里卡在过去的研究中曾指出：如果我们希望充分理解当代媒体文化，就必须从媒体诞生之前的物质现实——地球的历史、地质构造、矿物和能源——出发展开探究。同时，帕里卡还提出，为了实现这一点，我们就必须直面无处不在且绝非转瞬即逝的现代生活对环境与社会带来的深刻影响。帕里卡以西格弗里德·齐林斯基（Siegfried Zielinski）的“深度时间”（Deep Time）概念为基础，展开一系列的分析讨论，探索人类在进行网络生活中所进行的资源消耗、及其物质资源获取过程中所使用的设备，但这些现象的历史沿革实际上可以追溯至几千年前。他观察到，数字媒体机器的正常运作需要稀土矿物和许多其他原始材料的支持，而那些废弃的媒体技术裹挟着数字文化的残留物漂浮于太空，最终返回地球之时，致使有毒废物不断叠加，这一过程将激发未来的考古学家以媒介与物质性为中心进行思考。帕里卡还指出，我们必须将这些媒材与危险的劳动剥削过程放在一起思考，将它们看作是虚拟或非物质实践背后的设备。

媒体地质学表明：环境不只是围绕着我们的媒体文化世界，它贯穿其中，存在于一个前所未有的气候骤变的时代之中。在回顾地球遥远的过去时，处于环境空间中的媒体文化世界也期待着一个更广阔的媒体理论——含蓄地说，即为“媒体行动主义”（media activism）的到来。

帕里卡今年的项目报告《物流学的自然史》出自Strelka学院的“地球化”（Terraforming）研究计划，从世界分工、生产链条、科学与学科的角度，探究半导体部件与数码物，化学实验，以及自然元素等课题，质疑了由学科实验与科学认知构成的传统知识结构。同时，报告强调了经验知识的跨学科重构与技术实践。它质疑了因殖民历史等原因建立的博物馆所应用的传统自然史的划分标准。这些标准建立在不同的民族国家、组织机构、私人资本流的摩擦与调和之中，而在当代语境下，物质、传输、信息已然与卫星航海运输、谷歌街景等众多现代宇宙技术紧密相连。

与此同时，帕里卡也正在推进新研究项目“Operational Images”的相关工作。“操作图像”（operational Image)，或“应用图像”（operative Image）一词是在2000年左右由捷克斯洛伐克出生的电影制作人哈伦·法罗基（Harun Farocki）提出。在他的实验纪录片、视频装置和理论著作中，法罗基专注于图像的政治，特别是在军工背景下。“操作图像”不是指描绘性或代表娱乐及信息的图像，而是指跟踪、导航、激活、监督、控制、可视化、检测和识别过程中的图像。此类图像来源于各式执行任务和发挥功能的仪器。操作图像系列包括各种成像技术和过程，通常将相机或传感器与某种类型的图像处理软件相结合：无人机、自动汽车、工业和家庭机器人，医学成像（MRI、CT或扫描仪)，工业扫描仪和闭路电视，地理信息系统（数字地图和导航）。帕里卡将这一概念引入他的项目，并同时发展新的方法论及课题。该项目是一次跨学科尝试，结合人文学科研究（摄影、图像、移动媒体理论）、社会科学（人类学、社会学），以及科学（军事和环境科学领域中新兴形式的可视化应用程序，以及人工智能系统和机器学习）等众多领域。

A Geology of Media

Media history is millions, even billions, of years old. That is the premise of this pioneering and provocative book, which argues that to adequately understand contemporary media culture we must set out from material realities that precede media themselves—Earth’s history, geological formations, minerals, and energy. And to do so, writes Jussi Parikka, is to confront the profound environmental and social implications of this ubiquitous, but hardly ephemeral, realm of modern-day life.

Exploring the resource depletion and material resourcing required for us to use our devices to live networked lives, Parikka grounds his analysis in Siegfried Zielinski’s widely discussed notion of deep time—but takes it back millennia. Not only are rare earth minerals and many other materials needed to make our digital media machines work, he observes, but used and obsolete media technologies return to the earth as residue of digital culture, contributing to growing layers of toxic waste for future archaeologists to ponder. He shows that these materials must be considered alongside the often dangerous and exploitative labor processes that refine them into the devices underlying our seemingly virtual or immaterial practices.

A Geology of Media demonstrates that the environment does not just surround our media cultural world—it runs through it, enables it, and hosts it in an era of unprecedented climate change. While looking backward to Earth’s distant past, it also looks forward to a more expansive media theory—and, implicitly, media activism—to come.

Seed, Image and Ground

Seed bombing is a technique used in forestry, agriculture, and environmental restoration where biodegradable containers filled with seeds and soil nutrients are dropped from flying aircrafts to the ground. Conceived after WW2 by an RAF pilot, its use has been fostered during the last decade, linked to the increased deployment of robotic aerial vehicles in environmental monitoring.

Seed, Image, Ground works with selected promotional images and videos related to seed bombing. It combines them with footage showing the movements of seeds and leaves, and the growth of plants. The video essay concerns the link between images, seeds, aerial operations, and transformation of earth surfaces into data. It acknowledges how the history of botanic knowledge and visual surveys of green surfaces is a history of images, and how the latter is also a history of circulation, speed, and motorised aircraft. Such images operate much beyond visuality.

Seed, Image, Ground offers an alternative way of understanding “the strike.” From metaphors of war to guerrilla farming, from agricultural techniques and reforesting to the automation of airspace and environmental management, the observation of growth of vegetal surfaces unveils connections to parallel histories of the logistics of military perception.

Sound design by María Andueza Olmedo. Research for the video essay was supported by the project Operational Images and Visual Culture, situated at the department of Photography at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague. The project is funded by Czech Science Foundation project 19-26865X.

Operational Image

The term “operational image”, or “operative image” was coined by the Czechoslovakian-born filmmaker Harun Farocki around 2000. In his experimental documentaries, video installations, and theoretical writings Farocki focused on the politics of imagery, especially in the military-industrial context. Operational images are images that do not depict or represent, entertain or inform but rather track, navigate, activate, oversee, control, visualise, detect and identify. Operational images are instruments that perform tasks and carry out functions as part of an operation. The family of operational images includes various imaging technologies and processes that typically couple cameras or sensors with some type of image processing software: unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous cars, industrial and home robots, medical imaging (MRI, CT or CAT scanners), industrial scanners and CCTVs, geographic information systems (digital maps and navigations), and many other examples of primarily automated visual systems that open up questions of images to encompass non-entertainment contexts of visual technologies.

This projects uses the term to systematically address contemporary forms of photography and visual culture, while developing new methodological insights and thematic openings. The project is It is also tightly linked to an interdisciplinary agenda that combines research from humanities (photography, moving images, media theory), social sciences (anthropology, sociology), and the sciences (new and emerging forms of visualisation in military and environmental applications as well as artificial intelligence systems and machine learning.)