Depths and Densities: A bugged report

Depths and Densities: A Bugged Report

Jara Rocha

Under the guise of a one-afternoon workshop at transmediale 2019, Possible Bodies proposed to collectively study open-source tools for geo-modelling while attending to the different regimes – of truth, of representation, of language or of political ideology – they operate within. It attempted to read those tools and a selection of texts in relation, with the plan of injecting some resistant vocabularies, misuses and/or f(r)ictions that could affect the extractivist bias embedded in the computation of earth’s depths and densities.

The workshop Depths and Densities was populated by a mix of known companions and just-met participants (in total, a convergence of circa 30 voices), each bringing her own particular intensities regarding the tools, the theories, the vocabularies, and the urgencies placed upon the table. The discussions were recorded on the spot and transcribed later. This report cuts through a thick mass of written notes, transcriptions, and excerpted theoretical texts, sedimented along five vectorial provocations: on the standardisation of time, on software vocabularies, on the activation of geontologies, on the computation of velocities, and on the techniques of 3D visualizations. Each vectorial provocation was taken up by a sub-group of participants, who assumed the task of opening up a piece of Gplates, a free software tool and web portal for tectonic plate modeling. By holding close a technical feature, a forum, a tutorial, an interface etc.for a few hours, and tensioning these with some text matter from a reader pre-cooked by Helen V. Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and myself, Gplates worked as a catalyst for our conversations. Its community of developers would eventually become the deferred interlocutors of a report.

The following cut was made to share a sample of that afternoon’s eclectic dialogues in what could be transferred as a polyphonic bugged report. All text injections (in italics, on the right side) are quotes taken from the workshop’s reader. All pieces following one already quoted belong to the same author, until next quote in italics appears. All voices on the left emerged along the workshop’s discussion, which was transcribed by Fanny Wendt Höjer.

First vectorial provocation, on standardized time

if multiple timescales are sedimented in contemporary software environments used by geophysics, can fossil fuel extractivist practices be understood as time-travelling practices?

in these troubling times, there is an urgency to trouble time, to shake it to its core, and to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality.

this urgency is both new and not new

how is the end of time imagined, in a modelling sense?

we see discretely plotted colors

time isn’t what it used to be

does the body of earth exist in the same timescale as you do?

or try and witness the whens otherwise

time tends to be limited to (and influenced by) the observer’s perception but what are the material and semiotic conditions for another kind of time perception?

sedimented time and coexistence at ecologies of nothingness (aka voids)

voids are features that occur commonly in near-surface geophysical imaging. (…) However, voids are often misidentified. Some voids are missed, and other anomalous features are misinterpreted as voids, when in fact they are not. Compare them with real voids, and we determinate the differences based on incomplete data

Second vectorial provocation, on software vocabularies

forging a differently fueled language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to attend the geotraumas

the endurance of a stony patience that doesn’t forget love

user engagement with the earth through a 3D visualization software is based on metaphors like handling or grabbing

in the lexicon of geology that takes possession of people and places, delimiting the organization of existence, the refusal of such captivity makes a commons in the measure and pitch of the world, not the exclusive universality of the humanist subject

you can still grab the earth: at Gplates a stable static earth is available for grabbing

a refusal to be delimited is found in the matter of the world and a home in its maroonage; “they wander as if they have no century, as if they can bound time… compasses whose directions tilt, skid off known maps”

also, the use of the verb “to grab” brings with it the history and practice of “land grabbing”, land abuse and arbitrary actions of ownership and appropriation with correlated both dispossession by the taking of land, and environmental damage

but what if the earth grabs back?

there is a kind of reason that we will no longer accept tilting the axis of engagement within a geological optic and intimacy, the inhuman can be claimed as a different kind of resource than in its propertied colonial form—a gravitational form so extravagant, it defies gravity

if all the semantic network of Gplates is based on handling and grabbing as a key gestures in relation to the body of earth, a loss of agency and extractivist assumption slip in too smoothly, and too fast

forging a new language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to take apart the Anthropocene, a poetry to refashion a new epoch, a new geology that attends the the racialization of matter

most software platforms allow for no resistance, for no possible unavailability

the praxis of that aesthetic locates an insurgent geology

middle click and drag ¡la tierra para quien la trabaja!

reconstituted in terms of agency for the present, for the end of this world and the possibility of others, because the world is already turning

and what if the earth grabs back

the ghosts of geology rise

Third vectorial provocation, on the activation of geontologies

we are all talking over each other like tectonic plates and strata

a time of the geos, of soullessness

looking at what geology is implies a reconsideration of assumptions of what life is

the anthropos as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife

minerals rocks plates

the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren

cannot be separated from time

it is also clear that late liberal strategies for governing difference and markets also only work insofar as these distinctions are maintained

but where is the legend we could not read it

Life (Life{birth, growth, reproduction}v. Death) v. Nonlife

why this suspension subversion of the living

why this suspension subversion of the living

it is hardly an uncontroversial concept

otherwise the future will keep being missing but wait, the past is also missing the line goes back to 172 million years but earth is 4,5 billion years

the way data gets laid over particular shapes, how that comes to kind of operationalize particular makings and matterings of the world,

a color-coded chronology is that tone the year of emergence or is it duration of collapse of merging

so kind of thinking through the technical and political questions of what is depth and what is density, how they shift depending on the situation they’re operationalized within

a gradient of abstraction is being dangerously portrayed

the differences perhaps of the densities in geophysics to the densities in something like biomedical scanning, even though both might have tomographic processes

what is the skin of a body its density how is it colored?

density is not a fixed thing

but why?

we’re interested in exploring these open questions; how these matter, and how they matter in relation to things like surfaces and their topologies, where there might be densities of power

a chroma chart would be appreciated

there’s a kind of thickness in imaginaries of depth: the kind of unknown or unreachable, the removed or the unremovable. But also the kind of dark and morally crooked in bodies, in earth and in desires

like absolute dating of rocks you’re alive, I’m alive/let’s go

but other imaginations of depths in relation to both the earth or the so-called body, or the body of the earth. In particular, the thinking with the kind of writing from geo-philosophy and feminist technoscience, which might suggest that we might tilt the axis of engagement

peel earth’s skin the mantle

i think that’s at heart of the Possible Bodies project as well, this tilting of access to a different kind of optic

and peel it back where 4D is time and meets 5D uncertainty

to a different kind of intimacy

it does not peel back enough

think about the inhuman of earth surfaces, of tectonic plates, of geological strata; they might have another possibility than the proprietary colonial form, which often is the way it gets rendered within things like the modelling tools for say the extraction of fossil fuels or natural gas

Geontologies: the need of all bug reports

Fourth vectorial provocation, on computing velocities

that is too linear this is too straight

data has different densities and intensities and the effects and affects of the single timeline make themselves visible

when specific intra-active technologies violently rendered real bodies, they wondered about the see-through space-times that were left in the dark

leaving grey areas that show no data coverage

the crisis of presence that emerged with the computational turn was shaped by the technocolonialism of turbocapitalism!

where is that information what is this superfiction

convoked from the dark inner space-times of the earth, the flesh and the cosmos, particular [amodern] renderings evidence that real bodies do not exist before being separated, cut and isolated.

whole parts of grey earth like you are making a cake you can put toppings on

grey means there is nothing such as a body of earth it is almost a void

they read, listened and gossiped with awkwardness, intensity and urgency

earth used as a template for almost always fractured data

listen: there is a shaking surface, a cosmological inventory, hot breath in the ear

zoom in this shaking surface and always find some cracks

the tool keeps wanting it to be presented as a whole the oneness of earthness as in the oneness of humanness

there is a persistently imposing paradigm of wholeness and a pretension of full resolution but a body becomes any body only if the whole thing collapses

but when

[the soil] is no longer (or never was) the exclusive realm of technocrats or geophysics experts

swipe it fast so much time in one swipe

it is almost rude

these are your new devices, dim and glossy

take your time scroll scroll scroll deeper

where poetic renderings start to (re)generate (just) social imaginations

theres thens truths

let’s collectively resonate against technologies

counting backwards and year zero does not stay

grab that time and

perhaps if you upgrade the software you can get extra time

that bring in trans*feminist queer futures

Fifth vectorial provocation, on the techniques of 3D volume visualization

who is behind the proposers of the Mercator projection

postcolonial or hegemonic structures of development

who is behind one more eurocentric view of it

“the centrality of mathematical and technological science… structured by masculinist ideologies of domination and mastery”

from 2D to 3D

such institutional, cultural, and scientific practices also affect glaciological knowledge

you are the camera!

Questions of who produces glaciological knowledge, and how such knowledge is used or shared, take on real implications when considered through feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology lenses

At Gplates you can replace the pole location grab the pole and drag it

indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive, to be measured and mastered

while time happens along a linear highlight of cascading data

folk glaciologies diversify the field of glaciology and subvert the hegemony of natural sciences

Gplates applies deep familiar metaphors like child plates

Of the Earth, the present subject of our scenarios, we can presuppose a single thing: it doesn’t care about the questions we ask about it

slide the zoom in and out of a data set of magnetic information

to speak of a world which is “prior” and “independent” without implying that it is “single” and “determinate”: it encounters an earth which is very much “already composed” without it thereby being “already totalized”

now

relocate

the pole

having “a stable identity” in relation to scientific study does not imply stasis or stability per se

slide

deeper down

smoothly

but how when where

but who what why

Software Resources

• Gplates Download
• Gplates Webportal
• Magnesium Picks
• Geology
• EMAG2 Magnetic Anomaly Grid
• GPlates Markup Language (GPML)
• Gplates Tutorial 7.1: 3D Volume Visualisation Importing and Visualising 3D Scalar Fields
• EarthByte Gplates Portal Geology
• G.plates on fictional planet
• GPlates Tutorial 1.1: Loading and Saving Data
• Enhanced Shuttle Land Elevation Data

Notes

Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Nigel Clark, “Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet,” Theory, Culture & Society (2011): 38-39.

This text constitutes the report of a workshop of the same name that Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha conducted during transmediale 2019 and was published on the issue #3 of the festival's journal: https://transmediale.de/content/depths-and-densities-a-bugged-report