Geologic Media: Signs, Sediments, and the Imagination of a Volatile Planet by
Laura Sterre Pannekoek
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
in Comparative Literature
Graduate School of Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam
Smile from ear to ear when everything seems wrong
Act like you understand when you don't know what's going on Think about all the bad shit that you've done
Remember you're still breathing and you probably won't die for a while. Skegss. "You Probably Won't Die for a While." Holiday Food.
Ashes are falling like blankets of snow Eating your tail wherever you go
Don’t hold so tightly to your dowsing rod The water you thirst for will never be gone.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Geologic Media and Environmental Imagination Chapter 1: The Nuclear Mundane: Geology and the Unthinkable
Chapter 2: Sonic Geologies: A Geoliteracy Between Noise and Narrative in Wolf Lake on the Mountains
Chapter 3: The Stakes of Geological Survey Conclusion
Acknowledgements
If there’s something exciting or important in this, it’s because of Jeff Diamanti. I haven’t ruled out the possibility that I did some things right, but I know for sure that it's his magic that made possible not only this thesis, but everything yet to come. Thanks Jeff, for taking me seriously as a researcher when I was having a bit of trouble doing so myself.
I learned a tremendous amount from Niall Martin throughout both degrees which set me up for this project really well. Into Eternity, Wolf Lake on the Mountains, and much of the noise theory in here is his doing, as we all know.
Special thanks to Jorn Beuzekom for years and years of friendship and inspiration and for being so goddamn smart; to Mick Vierbergen and Pip Weytingh for the comradery and the post-writing pizza and beer sessions; to Lena Reitschuster for the brilliant late night
conversations at East 16th Street that inspired much of this thesis; to the Sofa Room Crew (particularly Zoë for the encouraging feedback and Noura for the equally important chocolate supply); and to the editorial team at Soapbox from whom I have learned so much over the past 18 months. It’s been wild figuring this thing out with such clever humans.
Finally, to my friends outside the university who were there from the start and always will be: thanks for calling me out on my bullshit, for the rock n roll, to some for being my family, and to all for reminding me every day that community lives in each individual as much as it lives as a whole between them. And makes you stronger for it. (Even thesis writing strong!).
Introduction: Geologic Media and Environmental Imagination
When the director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Jim Reilly announced that the USGS would present climate models only up to the year 2040 instead of the end of this century it was a moment of deliberate exclusion of facts. Runaway climate change, the consensus is, will be felt hardest after 2050, any modeling up until that time will give a misleading picture of the long term effects of a present increase or decrease in carbon emissions. It is easy to follow the money in this situation. Jim Reilly, a former petroleum industry geologist was appointed as director of USGS by Donald Trump in January 2018. He is part of what The New York Times calls the US President's "assault on climate science" to destabilise it as a base for policy making. It is no news politics has stakes in natural science and vice versa. The institutional geology of the USGS is more a prime example than exception to the ways the domains of science and
technology are politicised. For climate modeling the misconception persists that the deferral of human agency to computational modeling is an eradication of human bias, even though, it seems more and more likely that it is, rather, bias hardcoded. But Reilly's intervention is not only the next example of the techno-scientific hardcoding of climate change denial in environmental politics, his appointment shows that institutional geology continues to bear the mark of a techno-historical situation of industrialisation and resource imperialism, that somehow still produces an environmental imagination for the public and policy. Right at a time when global climate change compels us to imagine an otherwise to the modern, post-industrial world.
Reilly's appointment and his models are an instance of geology's surprisingly unstable politics. Yet, as I will show in this thesis, geology, both in its form as institutionalised science
and as material category, is conceived as the bedrock for the imagination of planetary futures. Environmental imagination is the way we think collectively about our position in relation to the objects, processes, and events around us, and is as much about the words we use as the
technologies we imagine them with. This tightly interwoven relationship between the material and the symbolic, and what an attention to this relationship might mean for environmental thinking, is a central concern of this thesis. Yet, this relationship between the material and the symbolic is not seen as synonymous with stable technology and unstable discourse. Rather, what is at stake in this project is the ways in which the materiality of geology gets positioned as a solid measure against which unknown futures can be thought, measured, or predicted for continuing a political rhetoric of progress on the one hand and how it can be used to imagine an alternative relationship between the human and the inorganic: a cultural politics of the geophysical.
This means that, in this era of heightened geological awareness, geology must be involved in a reorientation of our human lifeworlds as integrated with geophysical objects and processes. Not only as an anti-anthropocentric reckoning with the non-human but rather in the sense that geology works as media in several ways. The institutional geology of the USGS, and its new climate models, remind us that geology currently sits between climate change and our conception of climate change, in the same way it has sat between the world and our geographical imagination of it since its 19th century vocation with mapmaking. All this is important to
consider because climate change ups the stakes in the age-old dispute on the nature of the dichotomy between the imagined and the real.
For Jussi Parikka, a geology of media means "a different sort of temporal and spatial materialism of media culture than the one that focuses solely on machines or even networks of technologies as nonhuman agencies" (3). Although Parikka's idea of geology of media is rooted in a variety of intellectual traditions it is not surprising that he begins his A Geology of Media with Friedrich Kittler's media materialism. This originated as a provocation to Foucault in saying that discourse is less about the archives that make possible certain statements than about the technological devices, networks, and institutions that make possible what gets included in the archives in the first place. This, by consequence, makes humanities studies less about
hermeneutics than about, quite literally, unearthing media operations of inclusion and exclusion. For Parikka, this provocation, combined with the 'abstract geology' drawn from Gilles Deleuze and Robert Smithson where sedimentation happens in the mind as much as in the ground, makes possible an analytic of geologic media that ranges from the tiniest mineral parts in our media devices and the labour used to extract them to the communication of material environment through media technology.
This connection between media materiality and environmental imagination is the central concern of this thesis. I argue that in this idea of geology of media that Parikka proposes it is crucial to consider geology in its institutionalised form, its materials and technologies as a relay between the geophysical and the cultural, and the ways these functions are used to produce an environmental imagination. The way I use the term geologic media then refers to the set of both political-economic and techno-scientific mediations that connect the physical world and the human imagination. It describes the geoscientific apparatuses and infrastructures used to map oceans floors, locate subsurface resources, such as seismic technology, sonar and bathymetry.
The technologies that are discussed in this thesis are seismic technology, geologic study of natural analogues, and the survey stake as turn-of-the-century observation infrastructure and are considered in the way that both their limitations and affordances are addressed through artistic and aesthetic mediations.
This thesis then proposes this modified concept of geological media in light of recent geologic turn following Anthropocene discourse in the arts and humanities. Much of the aesthetics of which has to do with scaling. Contemporary environmental thinkers such as Rob Nixon and Timothy Morton consider the specific vocation of environmental art as translating the scales and scopes of environmental crisis, the slow violence of environmental injustice or climate change as infinitely regressive hyperobject, to something that can inspire 'regular people' to take action or demand it of others. Rob Nixon writes
To confront slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time. The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To intervene representationally entails devising iconic symbols that embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse those symbols with dramatic urgency. (10)
What he understands as slow violence are processes too slow and dispersed for us to grasp and as such should be infused with drama. To bring home the message of slow catastrophe we need to be faced with sudden, straightforward spectacle. This imagined indexing of the environmental as
intangible and the symbolic as tangible is a persistent dichotomy that will always mean that things get lost in translation.
Thomas F. Homer-Dixon already wrote in 1999 that environmental criticism strives to "move the notion of environment from abstraction to a tangible concern" (qtd in Buell 29). That tangible concern for Buell meant an interest in the set of specific textual motifs that could facilitate this move towards tangibility. But to say that today the notion of environmental catastrophe remains intangible, would be insufficient. It is everywhere, in the forms of extreme weather, increasingly corporeal forms of protest, sudden bursts of media attention to failing climate agreements and so on. Perhaps that means the projects of environmental criticism and environmental imagination as envisioned by Homer-Dixon and Buell at the turn of the
millennium have been successful to some degree, if it were not for the fact that broad-scale climate catastrophe continues to loom – and it does not seem to get any better (if anything it is getting worse.) To hear again this focus on the symbolic from a contemporary environmentalist like Rob Nixon is disheartening. Perhaps it is precisely the tangibility of the material closeness of these phenomena that are irreconcilable with the broad-scale temporal and spatial dimensions of climate catastrophe. An ongoing polarisation of discursive motifs or narratives and material entities, events, and processes – one that can of course no longer be reduced to the former being a description of the latter – only continues a society-wide environmental illiteracy towards the fundamentally entangled dimension of nature and the human, the organic and inorganic, the active and inert.
Just like any other technical media, geologic media can only last as long as the political-economic regime that birthed them. As I will show in the chapters, seismic sensing technology bears the stamps of both military and economic situations, the institutions and its technological materialisations of geologic surveying bears the weight of its resource imperialistic history, and the geological index of long term nuclear waste storage: the study of natural
analogues, waste neutralisation techniques such as 'GeoMelting' cannot erase the traces of what its political modulations aim to include and exclude. If such expressive forms based on these media prefer certain perceptual and cognitive directions over others, the idea repurposing technical media for radical means comes down to a rearticulation of the tension between technodeterminism and social constructivism.
Still, an attention to geologic media for the production of imagination is not the same as saying that the mechanisms of selection are determined to reproduce certain worldviews. It is not a rejection of the discursive that I am after. Rather, as Bernhard Siegert explains, German media theory was “an attempt to overcome French theory’s fixation on discourse from its philosophical or archaeological head onto its historical and technological feet.” (3) In particular, grounding discourse techno-historically – that is, technology as occupying space tied to history and
economy of technology– not only with regards to the rise of mass social media and explosion of connectivity but also to the less conspicuous ways in which we come to know the world and communicate with each other. Siegert calls these cultural techniques: index cards, stamps,
blackboards or the disciplinary techniques of alphabetisation (2). In this, German media theory is part of a much broader movement in criticism – together with various forms of materialisms – that attempts to come to terms with the devastating effect of the ubiquity and force with which
20th century post-structuralist thought obliterated any anchorage discourse had to objective grounds. The backlash this caused (particularly through STS) moved science and technology in defense mode – and as Bruno Latour has noted in his now seminal article, right at a time where an increased intensive collaboration between the disciplines is more important, and more inescapable, than ever.
Yet as geology begins to enter our cultural domains as a stable category in a volatile world it becomes more and more pressing to realise the ways in which geoscientific technology and its cultural techniques that emerge from it can and have a way of stabilizing the dichotomies it founds: nature/culture, organic/inorganic, but also stasis/mobility, presence/absence. It is because of this mistrust for geology as stabilizing ground for unknown futures that I open this thesis with the question of the deep future risk management discourse around nuclear waste storage, and nuclear energy policies that depend on it. This chapter opens with two very similar artworks both made from radioactive materials that were stabilised through a process of
vitrification. These two radioactive cubes open up a space for critically considering the role geology plays in waste management discourse and attempt to work through the figure of the unthinkable that persists in nuclear aesthetics. Against this nuclear sublime the chapter identifies a newly emerging analytic: the nuclear mundane, which describes contemporary techno-political mechanisms through which the unthinkable timescales of nuclear energy get banalised and figured as regular industrial risk.
Chapter two considers the 2016 Dark Ecology sound art project Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains for the ways it uses seismic technology as geologic media and the
highlights the practice of listening across modes of being that emerges from it. This chapter asks how Wolf Lake imagines through which mechanisms geology is inclined to silence or amplify certain voices over others. I argue that there exists a tension between the inhuman histories and the specific historicity of geological matter and that the ambitions of large scale philosophically informed art projects like the Dark Ecology project jump too quickly to an ontological
consideration of the agency of the rock instead of the sedimentation of colonial and capitalist violence that are built into the geological.
Chapter three opens up a discussion of institutional geology through the figure of the survey stake presented by Harvard architect Pierre Bélanger at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016. Through a historical overview of the survey stake as a geologic media technology the chapter addresses the bias towards the simultaneous accumulation of data, territories and its resources through a mode of modern visuality: a scopic regime that hardcodes Western ideas about truth and visibility into the institutional survey as knowledge infrastructure. These
infrastructures, I suggest in this chapter, need to be pulled apart and considered for the ways the technological materialisation of this historical moment is negotiated with the changing stakes of geologic survey.
The chapters, though topically widespread, all ask the same basic question: how is environmental discourse (in nuclear energy politics, philosophy, and data accumulation) dependent on geologic media? And why and how does geology both as material category and modern science get positioned as a stable ground for policy making and how are these issues opened up, contested and experimented with through artistic mediations? It is in the elusive that
we find most planetary trouble. And it is no surprise that it is in the recalcitrant that we find the most interesting and transformative artistic responses to it. If anything, that means that an effective response to the elusive is not one that steadies, but one that remains divergent, unmanageable, disobedient to the human, just as geology itself.
Chapter 1: The Nuclear Mundane: Geology and the Unthinkable.
Two radioactive cubes, recent artworks by two separate US artists: Taryn Simon's Black Square XVII (2016) and Trevor Paglen's Trinity Cube (2016) are currently suspended from public exhibition. One is placed in the Fukushima Nuclear Exclusion Zone, in the so-called Difficult-to-Return Zone to which entry, lodging, and commerce are prohibited indefinitely; the other is contained in the Radon Nuclear Waste Disposal Plant, 90 km from Moscow. Common to both is that they will only be available for public viewing when either the site's or the object's radiation levels have diminished to a level safe enough for humans. Their radioactivity puts pressure on what it is we might imagine an art work to license, to invite, and to promise. On the one hand this presses against an imaginary that presents radiation as a threat consistently out of reach. Depending on which side you're on, radiation is either a threat that can only be managed by forever postponing it, and as such can be shelved when faced with more pressing matters such as decarbonisation; or it is a threat that will always resist concretisation whether we want it or not, one that is by its very essence regressive and as such, directly invalidates any concrete nuclear risk management discourse.
Yet, on the other hand, where both these positions otherwise so familiar in nuclear energy debates attempt to bypass the aesthetic problem of radiation, Simon and Paglen's cubes
materialise the temporal and spatial pressures that align with some of the oppositions that have long defined nuclearity as an aesthetic economy: presence and absence, site and non-site, exclusion and inclusion, and visibility and invisibility. That said, the cubes do inherit the ongoing project of 'making tangible' the threat of radiation, which often turns out to be,
paradoxically, not that different from the project of reasserting its intangibility. Simon's Square will inhabit its intended site (Void for Artwork) in the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow in the year 3015. Here, the cube is present through its absence. Its extreme displacement through time invades the viewer's personal temporal framework and stupefies their actual and imagined relation to time. Paglen's Cube, similarly entertains the notion of spatial and temporal deferral but also attempts to congeal the ahistorical and the historical: the deep times of
radioactive threat and the anachronistic granularity of crystallisation of Trinitite and Fukushima glass. It is because of these temporal and spatial tensions that the cubes present the categories above in light of 'unthinkable timescales' of radioactivity and reflect what Frances Ferguson identified in 1984 as the most recent iteration of the sublime as aesthetic category, namely: the nuclear sublime. As the ultimate totality of destruction, the nuclear sublime is primarily is the invocation of the unthinkable. Yet, there is also something else going on in Simon and Paglen's cubes. The unthinkable is presented materially even if it remains absent, it is congealed and melted together. In this chapter I argue that thinking the unthinkable in nuclearity gets amplified and modulated through a new imagination of a nuclear energy future in the Anthropocene. Geology gets positioned as a stable discursive and material grounds to support what gets called by the international nuclear industry 'a nuclear renaissance' in the face of decarbonisation models – and works to diminish the radical uniqueness of nuclear materials and the nuclear sublime as the dominant form of nuclear aesthetics by countering with what I call the nuclear mundane.
The nuclear sublime persists even now as the dominant response to the nuclear as the ultimate threat. Perhaps this response is now less to the moment of explosion than to the perpetual management of excluded materials and sites. A major aesthetic weight of both cubes
hinges on the awe one feels faced with the thousand-year suspension of the artwork. For
Ferguson, thinking the unthinkable – while provoking "considerable difficulties" – nevertheless, like other forms of the sublime, "imagines freedom to be threatened by a power that is
consistently mislocated" (9). It is mislocated not only because of the spaces, bodies, and materials that the threat inhabits that are not our own – but hopefully always contained and excluded – it is also mistimed. At least in so far as the threat these cubes offer operates on a timescale at variance with human rationalisation of threat. If the nuclear sublime continues to figure radiation as a threat that is consistently mislocated, both spatially and temporally, then sure enough, thinking the unthinkable becomes a cognitive loop that maintains distance from the 'concept' of radioactivity so we will be perpetually unable to pinpoint the times and places of nuclearity. Still, mislocated the cubes will be, for a thousand years, if they are left to remain as intended. In a nuclear fueled culture, art must now also take a long time.
Paglen and Simon's cubes are both made out of what would be considered by most international regulations as radioactive materials. 'Making tangible' in these cubes is thought more materially than the abstractions the nuclear sublime seems to provide, and it marks a distinct shift in thinking nuclear aesthetics in the 21st century. Simon's Square is made of medium-level radioactive waste from Russia's State Atomic Energy Corporation's (ROSATOM) Kursk nuclear power plant and vitrified in a solid cube through an industry technique called GeoMelting, where nuclear waste is mixed with glass-forming elements to immobilise
radionuclides and prepare them for long-term storage. She says about her project in an interview with Aperture: "I wanted to make a work not for my generation, nor my children’s generation, but for a distant future to which I have no tangible relationship. The process of vitrification
converts radioactive waste from a volatile liquid to a stable solid mass, which resembles polished black glass." The process of vitrification is introduced as a stabiliser for the spatiotemporal ambiguity of radioactivity. Making tangible here is thought less as an imagined emancipation from the abstract realms of the unthinkable, then as through the concrete technique of
GeoMelting. Which is at once a process of materialisation, in the sense of converting the material from a "volatile liquid to a stable solid mass", and one of rationalisation, in the conversion of the idea of radioactive waste qua hyperobject to a single geometric shape.
Similarly, Trevor Paglen's project is also a vitrified cube, made from irradiated glass from Fukushima on the outside, and Trinitite on the inside, the material formed at the moment of the explosion of the Trinity nuclear test on 16 July 1945 in New Mexico. He says about his project: "For me it is a gesture that's thinking about geology, thinking about man-made minerals, and thinking about that history of nuclear power slash nuclear weapons that begun in New Mexico and continues to places like Fukushima." Paglen, like Simon, puts forward geology both as an epistemic mode and material measure to think through this mislocation and mistiming of the threat in the nuclear sublime. The mistimed is an ahistorical threat – just like geology was considered to be an event unfolding on ahistorical scales – that Paglen wants to concretise, make historical, by putting the geologic on the same plane as materials produced by human events. By melting together the Trinitite mineral with the irradiated glass from the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, Paglen's Cube, congeals history with what is the ahistorical quality of the perpetual mislocation and mistiming of nuclear threat. The process of vitrification is a mechanism to convert dangerous material output of a specific energy regime into an ahistorical materiality, dislodged from systems of extraction and consumption, and political mediations that sanction
them. In other words, what Paglen calls man-made mineral, is put forward as the figure by which the tension between the intangibility of radiation and the actuality of nuclear materials is
resolved through a turn to geology as a relay between history and ahistory.
The mislocation and mistiming of nuclear threat that these cubes both address and
attempt to condense through this transmutation from nowhere to somewhere is a mechanism that is part of the political project of making nuclearity tangible.Geology as a scientific mode and material category, emerges as a stabiliser for radiation that is always already mislocated and mistimed. It is a response to the volatile category of nuclear sublime that consistently pulls away from if not an essence or truth then a stable measure for decision making. It comes perhaps at no surprise then that Simon worked in collaboration with the Russia's State Atomic Energy
Corporation (ROSATOM) for Black Square XVII, while Trevor Paglen's Trinity Cube is part of the Don't Follow the Wind project that explicitly aims to provide a counter narrative to the pro-nuclear agenda from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Japanese
government. When the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, which exhibits the space Simon's Square will take 1000 years from now, frames Simon's cube as the evidence of the process of stabilisation of volatile material, Simon's cube effectively becomes a poster child for GeoMelting and waste "neutralisation." Simon also included a personal letter to the distant future in the vitrified cube, as if radioactive waste somehow is supposed to safeguard our connection to the future, giving it positive value, associating nuclear timescale with permanence and stability in a volatile world. Andrew Moisey has suggested that permanent nuclear commemoration, such as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant's marking designs from 1989, intended to cover the entire surface of the plant with awe-inspiring spikes, spirals, basalt, were not meant to be a hiding place
or warning a thousand future generations of nuclear danger but instead were intended as a celebration of the moment in history when man reinvented fire, the ultimate achievement of modernity (892). While celebrating nuclear waste as our ultimate permanent mark on the world seems too abstract for a direct motive, ROSATOM's interest in emphasising GeoMelting as a waste neutralisation process is not abstract at all in how it helps to demystify what continues to be perceived as an invisible and ingraspable threat. As I will argue later, banalisation of nuclear materials, both on the front-end and the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle and both in the public imagination and in international safety regulations is a core mechanism by which the nuclear industry hedges against public criticism and keeps policy restrictions at bay.
The attention of both cubes to the man-made geology – their attempt to think about the future from a non-human perspective through the epistemic mode of geology – signals a recontextualisation of nuclearity from the cold-war atomic sublime to Anthropocene-inflected arts and humanities discourses. This shift is important to note more generally because it is the discursive and ecological envelope through which the aesthetics of nuclear energy gets
materialised in more recent artworks that turn radioactive materials into an artistic medium. Very different is this aesthetic gesture than the conceptual matrix through which nuclear criticism in the 1980s oscillated between the unthinkable and unrepresentable ultimate destruction of nuclear war on the one hand and the very specific image of explosion on the other. Thus what is made available by attending to the presentation of geology in Paglan and Simon’s artworks are, among other things, the modes by which geologic index of the human becomes both a problem to climate change and a solution.
The shift is just as visible in the industry’s discourse about itself. Although the nuclear industry witnessed a plunge in the reactor capacity since the early 2000s through the
decommissioning of old reactors built in nuclear's 'golden age', some are speaking of a second coming of the nuclear industry, or as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it in 2015, "a nuclear renaissance." The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) is calling for new policy frameworks that would allow for a growing share of nuclear in decarbonisation plans. That means easing restrictions on trade, processing, and disposal of nuclear materials that currently obstruct movement of nuclear materials out of safety considerations and subject them to market forces instead. Elsewhere, ecomodernists, in a truly Promethean manifesto argue that a 'good' (or even great) Anthropocene is possible, if only humans would be willing to use their economic and technological powers to stabilise the climate. Nuclear power is one of their proposed solutions in further "liberating humanity from the constraints of nature". Human civilisation will be able to flourish for millenia on unlimited power generated by a closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle, they argue in their manifesto. Indeed, new grade 4 reactors are being built, twelve underground disposal sites are currently in the early stages of construction, and the current US administration adds large funds to private-public partnerships in advanced reactor developments to revitalise its domestic nuclear industry. It seems that the nuclear industry is making its way back into
imaginations of energy futures. And the cubes each in their own way signal that parallel to this,
nuclearity is returning as an aesthetic problem, one that attempts to grasp the times and spaces of a nuclear energy future. This time around not as the instigator of the end of the world but the solution to the end of the world.
This new nuclearity is then less about controversy over reactor safety but rather focuses on a strugglebetween energy future and the apparent geological capacity of the human that the Anthropocene has revealed. The Anthropocene signals new ways of thinking about time and matter because it imagines the temporal and material capabilities of the human to have stretched massively. While for many this triggers an uncomfortable image of humanity exceeding its boundaries, for nuclearity, this geological index of the human is figured as stable ground to base a new nuclear literacy on, an epistemic framework that thinks possible the stretching of risk management to geologic timescales. A major case in which this development becomes clear is in deep geologic disposal for spent nuclear material. Storing radioactive waste deep within geologic formations relies on a 'safety analysis' of the area, that means to evaluate the geological and hydrological structure and its evolution. In these disposal projects, much like both Simon and Paglen's cubes, geology, as a modern science concerned with deep time, is put forward as the measure against which the temporalities of radioactive waste can be thought, managed, or contained. This constitutes a form of geologic mediation that modulates the bureaucratic and conceptual stakes of the Anthropocene.
In these deep geologic waste storage projects, geology becomes the discursive and materials grounds for a contemporary iteration of the process of nuclear banalisation that, in different ways, has characterised the nuclear economy since the 1960s. Where bureaucratic reforms, rephrasing, and recharacterisations of 'the nuclear' have been aimed at reinventing nuclear risk on an international policy level from a specifically nuclear risk to regular industrial risk. This started with the denuclearisation of uranium at the beginning of the 1960s, meant to strip the mineral from its nuclearity – that is the particular conditions that make nuclear material
subject to international regulations. The set of bureaucratic reforms, mainly in defining separate stages of uranium exploitation constitute what Gabrielle Hecht calls ‘mechanisms of
banalisation’. These interventions were employed by the IAEA since the mid 1960s, in response to an international (but then mainly Western European and North American) desire for a uranium market and consist of the definition of 'source materials' in order to transform nuclear things into ordinary commodities (Hecht 55). This created the technopolitical conditions of possibility through which the distinctiveness of the state of being nuclear could be diminished.
For deep geologic disposal these terms of banalisation are set by the IAEA's GEOSAF project and are based on geologic research. GEOSAF's, or International Project on
Demonstrating the Safety of Geologic Disposal, pursues the IAEA's general statutory objective: to "seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and
prosperity throughout the world." by making a safety case that "draw[s] together all of the safety arguments and demonstrate and communicate why the operator of the facility has confidence that safety in the long term will be ensured" (0). In other words, this 5 year project that published its final report in 2017 defines terms and guidelines for what they call 'post-closure safety', the assessment of risk of leakage after final disposal of waste as opposed to leakage during operation. If the operator of the facility remains within the procedural guidelines set out by GEOSAF, post-closure safety is deemed assured. These guidelines prescribe a series of safety functions consisting of 'natural barriers', the 'host rock' – that is, the rock directly surrounding the waste containers and the geologic formations overlying the underground facility; and
'engineered barriers', the waste packaging, buffer, and sealing materials . It is important to make 1 1 Although clay (bentonite) is used as a buffer material.
a distinction here between ensuring the safety of geologic repositories and GEOSAF's aims to provide the terms and parameters, the technopolitical framework with which the safety of geologic disposal can be argued for. The terms GEOSAF's provides, like post-closure safety, safety functions, and safety envelope (the set of boundary levels that must be maintained throughout the disposal facility's life cycle), to use geology to provide a way to talk about risk management on a 100.000 year scale, are mechanisms of banalisation that necessitate an analytics that is, in fact, the opposite of the nuclear sublime, a nuclear mundane.
The mundane is different from the sublime in that it gives a shape to the nuclear in order to stabilise a nuclear energy future, instead of foreground its unpredictability. What the mundane works on conceptually is the figure – ground relationship, where the environment as ground is turned into a passive stabiliser for the harmful actions of the human as figure. Rather than vice versa, where climate change becomes something that happens to the human this nuclear mundane therefore works conceptually and aesthetically to distribute nuclearity as a distinctly human product back into the earth through geology. On the one hand this is a facet of the Anthropocene that positions the human possessing the ultimate and final agency, on the other it allows the aesthetic of nuclearity to become banalised, unimportant or insignificant. The nuclear mundane, needless to say, not only falls back into the idea of energy as fuel and its regimes as supportive, rather than constitutive of social and cultural worlds. It also obscures and diminishes the threats and violences specific to it. The nuclear mundane and the nuclear sublime are
opposing analytics for nuclearity, yet as I will argue in the next section, both economies bypass nuclearity as a unique energy regime.
Nuclearity manifests discursively, aesthetically and ideologically either as the sublime or the mundane. This polarisation of the nuclear index, already signaled in Paglen and SimonS cubes, returns more explicitly in 2011 film Into Eternity. It chronicles the early stages of the construction of Onkalo, Finland’s deep geological repository for nuclear waste generated by the nearby Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant. This facility will be filled with spent nuclear fuel
currently in interim storage, and will continue to accept new waste before it is backfilled and sealed around the year 2120. It is meant to stay sealed for as long as the waste remains
radioactive, up to 100.000 years in the future. We see the representatives of Onkalo arguing for its safety. By storing the waste deep within the Finnish bedrock, which is, they state, "the most stable environment we know of,” and where “time moves slower than on the surface.” Making this safety case relies on certain assumptions about the host rock, resonating with a view on geology going back to the so-called English Gentleman tradition of James Hutton and Charles Lyell. Where gradual, uniform processes of change replaced previous ideas of the earth being changed only by spectacular sudden catastrophes. Lyell's most important work Principle of Geology from 1830-33, was a polemic against the so-called catastrophists of his time and argued for a uniformitarianism: the idea that physical laws, and thus geologic processes are stable and uniform and thus the past can be studied through the present. James Hutton wrote in 1788 "In examining things present, we have data from which to reason with regard to what has been; and from what has actually been, we have to conclude with regard to that which is to happen
thereafter." In these terms, a nuclear safety future can be constructed from the study of natural analogues – present day geologic formations as stand-ins for the distant future, and
computational modelling based on these studies. It is no surprise then that the Onkalo representatives choose to adopt this language.
But this study of natural analogues does not align with the safety parameters common to industrial risk, meant to guarantee safety by verification of future stability. For the IAEA, since post-closure safety cannot be "verified by direct methods" (Report Task Group 7) which means that because no IAEA member will be able to witness a successful radioactive containment for a hundred thousand years, post-closure safety can be guaranteed by 'indirect methods' of natural analogues instead. This tactical split in defining 'guaranteed safety', between indirect and direct verification, makes it possible to argue for the complete safety of an open nuclear fuel cycle. These indirect methods of verification move alongside the mechanisms of mistiming that gets associated with nuclear materials, because the Scottish uniformitarianist principle 'the present is key to the past is key to future' thinks all three on the same plane. Yet, this time GEOSAF's safety framework doubles down on the ahistoricality that gets associated with nuclear materials. This again is a mechanism of banalisation that attempts to diminish the ‘radical uniqueness’ (Hecht) of radioactive waste by creating a bureaucratically constituted, atemporal form of nuclear materiality that allows a nuclear risk to disengage from its time and place. Without this form of banalisation through the function of the ahistorical, nuclear energy and its 100.000 year legacy would become again about the current historical moment and would endure a literally unthinkable and as such, undefendable pressure on nuclearity. In other words, there is nothing mundane about the nuclear mundane.
To return some of this pressure suspended by banalisation to present day energy policy, some forms of nuclear aesthetics, like Into Eternity, demand an intervention in the ways in which these mechanisms represent the stages of the nuclear fuel cycle. The critical weight of Into Eternity then lies in the doubt it presses against these terms of banalisation. In these interviews filmmaker Michael Madsen asks repeatedly, how can we guarantee that no future civilisation or life form will enter the repository? When asked about human intrusion by Madsen, Peter
Wikberg, credited as Onkalo’s research director responds:
If someone in the future is able to dig down to the repository – it will probably be a civilisation of the same kind as we have presently. In such a case they would also be knowledgeable – to know that this is radioactive material.
The woman sitting next to him, Berit Lundqvist for a short moment smiles and after an awkward pause and a short intake of breath phrases carefully:
I think that is the most... probable scenario, but I’m not so sure. It could be – another situation. They might interpret it as something religious, a burial ground, a treasure.
This conspicuous doubt is the jarring move of this film. Perhaps because Lundqvist recognises the disastrous consequences of being wrong. Not only for the humans of the future, but of the Onkalo project here and the international nuclear safety agreements more broadly. In this
destabilise the carefully constructed bureaucratic grid through which the doubts, dangers, uncertainties of long term nuclear risk get banalised.
By pushing the limits of this fear management discourse and leading the engineers to dead ends in their arguments, Into Eternity returns some of the panic of the nuclear sublime to us. Aside from the interviews with the representatives, the film employs a series of aesthetic and narrative strategies that caused film scholar Andrew Moisey to call the film dismissively a “middle-brow spook fest” ("Concerning" 103). This is not surprising as Madsen’s match-lit monologues, the stylised shots of waste containers on songs off Kraftwerk’s album
Radio-Aktivität ; the footage of poorly-lit underground tunnels; the markings for the blasters that look like pre-historical cave drawings; and extensive embellished footage of construction machinery are all tactically presented stand-ins for the 'unrepresentable future' of the nuclear waste. In Into Eternity, Onkalo becomes a mythical place, far removed from the mechanisms of banalisation. The waste is not presented as ahistorical materiality but in a fictional sphere that is forever occupied with thinking the unthinkable: an aesthetic that imagines what cannot be represented.
The film's two opposing narratives structures on nuclear waste: the IAEA reflected in the Onkalo representatives and Madsen's spook fest, reflect this ongoing polarisation of the sublime and the mundane in nuclear energy discourse: the movement towards banalisation, a radical mundane of nuclearity and its countermovement towards what Hecht calls, a "radical
uniqueness" of nuclearity. Both spheres construct opposite futures, one of absolute predictability and one of no predictability at all, but engage a similar process through which nuclear materiality
is disengaged from its discursive surroundings. The futures invoked, or rather not invoked, by Into Eternity's spookfest generates a fear of darkness, of nothingness, of the unknown, more than it generates fear of nuclear threat.
The IAEA's tactics of banalisation through misplacement and mistiming, creates matter disconnected from history. And it is this type of nuclearity that has less and less to do with radiation. Radiation only really manifests when it comes into contact with matter. Nuclearity here instead becomes an aesthetic economy that mistakes the discursive process of 'making tangible' for the material process of making tangible. It is here that the tensions at the heart of Paglen and Simon's cubes come together. The important point here is that both sides of this polarisation work to bypass the violence of nuclear energy regimes. Into Eternity, too inhabits that same polarisation of the mundane and the sublime that is so central to Paglen and Simon's cubes and that might be precisely what continues the illiteracy of representation of nuclear energy regimes. This is not to say that they defy representation it is to say that nuclear energy safety discourse is caught up in a web of competing temporalities that cannot be figured in existing conceptions of nuclear risk in the present, risk in the future and what we have come to know about risk in the past.
Chapter 2. Sonic Geologies: A Geoliteracy between Noise and Narrative in
Wolf Lake on the Mountains
The humans of the future will surely understand, knowing what they presumably will know about the history of their forebears on Earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids are inert. (Ghosh 3)
In chapter one of this thesis I demonstrated the use, for better or worse, of geology as a stable mediating ground for the imagination of a nuclear energy future. Important for the larger argument I am developing across this thesis is that geological media and environmental
imagination are co-constitutive and co-dependent. In this chapter I address seismic technology as geologic media and the practice of listening across modes of being that emerges from it and ask through which mechanisms geology is inclined to silence or amplify certain voices over others through a reading of the Dark Ecology's 2016 sound art project Vilgidkoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains. My contention is that there exists a tension between the inhuman histories and the specific historicity of geological matter. The ambitions of large scale philosophically informed art projects like the Dark Ecology project jump too quickly to an ontological consideration of the agency of the rock instead of the sedimentation of colonial and capitalist violence that are built into the geological.
In Wolf Lake on the Mountains, the secluded former Soviet geologist Viktor protests "because people are only interested in metals, oil, or gas – they forget how to listen to the rocks."
At first glance this sounds like a type of posthumanist fear: we have exchanged our primordial connection with nature for economic growth and the intimate sensibilities attuned to the
nonhuman that come with it have been replaced by the epistemic regimes of extractive capital – that which forms the root of our current mode of destruction. Viktor's anxiety about the cultural amnesia of the practice of rock listening is not only caused by a change in the cultural selection of the entities that deserve our attention, but also imagines itself speaking to the shifting stakes in the division between the human subject creating knowledge about its environment as ground in which the notion of 'being' as exclusively human, or even exclusively organic becomes
increasingly uncomfortable.
On the second instance it also echoes Ghosh's assertion above that the supposedly ahistorical inertia of planetary matter is an outcrop of a specific period in human history. Across what Christophe Bonneuil in a 2017 article called 'the geological turn' in social science and humanities research, which is attentive to the material histories expressed (and muted) by the nomenclature attached to climate change, such as the Anthropocene, the historicity of geology as a discipline gets foregrounded as a uniquely political discipline responsible for an epistemic framework paradoxically stalling rapid shifts in how we know and relate to the earth. For Kathryn Yusoff, a human geographer, "extractable matter must be both passive and able to be activated through the mastery of white men" (14). Yusoff, a critic of geology and its extractive grammars demonstrates that geology as a dominant though uncontested epistemic mode
continues to facilitate a division of material categories between inert and active, a separation that is upheld by geologic apparatuses. This matters for ongoing research on media and environment because, in Yusoff’s account, the geologic turn does not only mean that the temporal and
material imaginations of the human have been stretched, as discussed in the previous chapter, but she takes this a step further in that the mineralogical radically constitutes social life and that both the geophysical and social narratives should be considered as modes of subjectification in the Anthropocene ("Geologic Life" 780). Geologic media, as the technohistorical relays between the geophysical and the cultural, then are a central mechanisms for these modes of subjectification what Yusoff calls 'geologic life', that must exist in the knots between the discursive and material and the active and inert.
What is at stake in the sound art project I am discussing in this chapter,
Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, from which Viktor's lament above is taken, is a response to this division between active and inert matter through a subversive practice of listening. Subversive in the sense that this type of listening undermines the set positions of listener-subject, the heard object, and the medium that connects them. The aesthetic weight of Wolf Lake's project hinges on the twofold scheme that sound, and noise in particular, can create intimacies between many kinds of entities, materials, processes, and that it is geotechnology's vocation to mediate between the cultural and the physical, between human imagination and subsurface materials and processes.
Yusoff's provocation invokes Friedrich Kittler's assertion that philosophy has
systematically neglected the means used for its production. We can see in Yusoff a shift from the discourse of geology to the historical materiality of its apparatus – the means of its mediations. The return to the apparatus as a material assemblage that matters to the production of content coheres with the tradition underwriting Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media, which begins with
Kittler. Kittler’s work has been important for taking the materiality of media seriously because it marks a previous mode in which objects and events are registered before they arrive at the human mind. This matters for thinking about inhuman epistemology in environmental discourse and politics not only because it presents a non-anthropocentric level on which but also because it removes the persistent idea that technology is the mere neutral and transparent means for
knowledge production and expression. Wolf Lake, for one, highlights the fact that geological media technologies are rather historical-material hybrids because it foregrounds the fact that the nature of geologic research, from 'rock listening' to oil and gas exploration, changed with the political and social situation of the borehole site.
Following these lines of thought inspired by Kittler and Yusoff, if there is a previous way in which philosophy, or the determination of terms and oppositions that categorise beings, entities, and processes in the world, has been brought forth by technologies then bringing human thinking up to speed with nonhuman beings, events, and materials, cannot be sufficiently
addressed by progressing human thought from within human thinking alone. Yet, what would it mean, as Wolf Lake imagines itself doing, to grant serious attention to the inorganic, through a technoepistemological framework not meant to destabilise oppositions between nature/culture, life/non-life, active/inert matter but rather reinforce them?
Wolf Lake on the Mountains explores both the physical dimensions of listening to rocks through geologic media and the historical, cultural settings in which this practice of listening takes place. It is a soundwalk recorded by Dutch/British soundscape artist Justin Bennett that takes the listener through an auditory tour of the Kola Superdeep Borehole (KSD) site. It consists
of five audio tracks that are each between ten and fifteen minutes long, recorded at different locations within the site. In these tracks we hear Viktor telling his story, we hear him narrating the history, politics, and ideologies intertwined with geological research at the KSD near Murmansk, Russia. We learn that it was opened in 1970 by the Soviet Union, and at 12,262 meters, the borehole is still the deepest man-made hole in the world. The drilling was stopped in 1989, due to unpredictably high temperatures and a break in funding following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The site was officially closed in 2008, but Viktor, a geologist from St. Petersburg, still lives and works there most of the year. He uses the seismological instruments and what he calls his 'listening tubes' at the abandoned borehole site to listen for earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and disturbances in the deep rock due to oil and gas drilling in the Barents sea. Against Viktor's narration we hear environmental sounds: wind blowing through the trees, birds, a creek, we hear his voice echo in the 'Long Hall', in the 'Laboratory' track we encounter electromechanical crackling and radio noise. In track 5 'Borehole' Viktor introduces the listener to what he hears through his listening tubes. There is a slow, low-pitched rumbling noise set against higher-pitched faster moving sounds. It definitely sounds like something is moving. These noises are unsettling; matter that we have deemed to be inert now suddenly seems active.
The sonic layering of Viktor's narrative contextualisation and the noises from the borehole, which sometimes disrupt or complement his story, creates a tension between the inorganic, on both the level of the recording equipment and on the level of the rock itself, and human storytelling. This tension has emerged in light of discussion in the social sciences and humanities around nature/culture entanglements that recognise non-human or non-discursive literacies, but at the same time there is also the pressing need to communicate effectively both
the urgency and complexity of environmental crises to our contemporaries. I propose that the success of the latter hinges fundamentally on taking seriously the former, and that a geoliteracy can only be begin by exploring the circumstances under which they emerge. This means not so much a rethinking of the nature of our being and relations with the environment, but connecting the inhuman with the channels through which it is imagined.
In the first location of the sound-walk, Outside KSD, Viktor explains that the official reason for the drilling, given by the Soviet authorities, was 'geologic research', but in the back of the minds of the local authorities of the site's surrounding areas was the hope that they might find valuable resources: minerals or perhaps a hidden oil field. Viktor is quick to dismiss this – the geologists employed at the KSD already knew that could not be the case. They expected to find small amounts of valuable minerals but of course lacked the proper resources and infrastructure to extract them; it would not be worth the trouble. However when the moment came, the
discovery of a bit of gold did not fail to spark a voracious interest in the search for something 'practical', as opposed research-oriented drilling, that could be, in Viktor's words, "either burnt or sold or made into stuff that no one needs." A craze that in Viktor's mind drew attention away from the geological research and made people "forget how to listen to the rock." As soon as it became clear that extraction would remain unfeasible, the project ceased. When asked by the artist why he thinks the project was stopped Viktor answers:
Well what do you think? Capitalism happened – money happened. When the Soviet Union broke up, the funding for these research projects was cut drastically. There
was no vision anymore, the companies that we were sold to were not interested in research. Of course, when I think back, we were really part of the cold-war. For Viktor, the end of the cold-war meant that economic interests replaced an interest in research for research's sake, in his account, a capitalist system makes people forget how to listen.
At this level: geologic mediation means mediating between the environmental and the human mind through geoscientific technology. But then at the second location of the soundwalk, Long Hall, Viktor reveals that soon after their research began it became apparent that the "hidden purpose" for the site was geopolitical. The use of seismic technologies that could gather seismic and data from such a depth, Viktor explains that the geologists could sense disturbances on another continent. By comparing the measurements with pre-cold war data they could roughly localise explosions within United States borders, explosions that were often interpreted as nuclear tests. Here arises a second level of geomediation. The rock is now not so much an
interlocutor, it is no longer a question of whether it speaks, but instead it has become the medium through which this information is transmitted.
What it means to think of a rock as a medium of communication is to think of media in a different way. Such as John Durham Peters expanded concept of elemental media, which inverts the doxa of media as environment, to environments as media. In which air, water, and bedrock are just as much media as digital technology. Thereby drawing drawing a connection between thinking mediation as the primal relations between entities, materials, and processes in the world, through new media and old media alike. It is not just media theorists that think this way. Around the same time the KSD was using these geological media to listen to listen to the US. The US
Navy created the Sound Surveillance System, a system of hydrophones in the Atlantic Ocean designed to pick up signs of Soviet submarines making use of deep ocean channels that can carry low frequencies across long distances. These systems integrate elemental and technological media into expanded listening practices that scale up the frequency band of the human. Human sound perception is oriented towards objects and entities in our environment roughly comparable to our scale. To listen to earth systems and processes these expanded registers of perception can provide ways to investigate the ways in which humans and their environments, bodies and processes of all different kinds are responsive to one another on a sonic registry.
The KSD site then moved from a geologic research site to a geopolitical surveillance system, and then to a site of contemporary environmental aesthetics. While the local interest in oil and valuable minerals first, and later the disinterest of a capitalist system in non
profit-oriented research, muted the rock, militarisation of geotechnological development as well as the Dark Ecology project, required the earth to speak again. In other words, the history of competing cultural investments at the KSD show that whatever political, artistic, or research orientation determines whether we either take seriously or forget an epistemological or mediational agency of the inorganic.
If anything, Viktor's story is a reminder that there is no way to separate the geological from the technopolitical and the economic, yet that is not what Wolf Lake's commissioners, the Dark Ecology Project, seem to be after. The Dark Ecology project is a three year art and research effort by a cluster of artists from The Netherlands, Norway, and Russia that set out to explore the 'pristine nature' of the Barents region in the face of pollution caused by its industrial activity and
the landscapes shaped by open-pit mining. This project is informed by Timothy Morton's book and concept of the same name, where the human's ecological awareness in the Anthropocene is fundamentally based on a 'faulty' ontology. From this ontology he distinguishes several axioms of existing that need to be overcome in order to create a new 'logic for coexistence', a dynamic ecological awareness of the interrelatedness of human and its environment. Such a rethinking would be at the core of the struggle against Anthropogenic climate change. Correspondingly, The Dark Ecology project's aims, as stated on their website, is to open up lines of
communication with the earth in an attempt to, in their words "rethink the concepts of nature and ecology, and exactly how humans are connected to the world" (11). Yet, in Wolf Lake the
concepts of nature, ecology and human-environment entanglements remain relatively stable. What changes rather is the scales and materialities on which we think modes of communication. Given Viktor's focus on the history of geoscientific and geotechnical developments alongside geopolitical ones, combined with earth noise enables by these geoscientific technologies, what Wolf Lake highlights is less an ontology of entanglement and instead the technopolitical conditions for a sonic or infrasonic inquiry into the earth.
Sticking with this discrepancy between the artwork and its wider movement of ecologic awareness and environmental aesthetics, it seems Wolf Lake is then perhaps better considered not from the philosophical tradition from which Dark Ecology lends its terms than from a media materialist perspective on geology and geotechnology, and in so far as that refers to the mode of signal selection and relay of media technology that is constituted by traces of scientific, cultural, and historical specifications that contributed to their development. Such a space that takes seriously these material registries of sonic responsivity across human and non-human bodies,
objects and processes might look like what Jussi Parikka calls the sphere of medianatures, as a variation on Donna Haraway's concept of naturecultures. This reworking refers to a continuum between media and nature, in which the geopolitical context of the production and extraction of geophysical components of media technologies are in tension with the operations of framing that make the environment intelligible to us. It is a term that describes the entanglement of media and nature, as the geophysical conditions of mediation are caught up in the ways in which media are used to present the environment as an object for both understanding. At the same time,
medianatures also provides an angle for media analysis that is not limited to the moment of mediation, but ranges, from the geopolitical/economic context in which its tiniest parts are mined to their afterlife as 'zombie media' – dead media, as a consequence of planned obsolescence, in their afterlife as toxic waste at landfills.
Formulating these terms, Parikka takes a cue from Sean Cubitt’s assertion that mediation is the manner in which the human is connected to non-human events, and that "the flow of mediation precedes all separations, all distinctions, all thingliness, objects, and objectivity. It precedes the separation of the human and the environmental." (Parikka "New Materialism" 97, Cubitt 4) In formulating these terms Cubitt and Parikka both respond to (directly and indirectly) the struggle of representing and communicating and conceptualising the temporal and spatial dimensions of the environmental crises, which directly address mediation between populations and environments. If mediation names the process by which humans are connected with non-human events (Cubitt 4) to obtain the means for change that ecocrisis demands involves a change in political organisation that defines and births media and communication technologies (technologies in the broadest sense). Theoretical terms that conceptualise the struggle to come to
terms with these dimensions, like slow violence (Nixon) or hyperobjects (Morton) while they attest to a conceptual illiteracy towards non-human logics, forget the historical materiality of the media that produce these illiteracies.
Sonicity and (A)history
For much of Parikka's work he takes his cue from German media theorists such as Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst, who aim to formulate a technical, ahistorical facet to technical mediation. Conceptualising a non-human dimension to mediation has been central to both theorists work. In Wolfgang Ernst's recent book Sonic Time Machines the German media theorist builds on his idea of media as time-critical by introducing the notion of sonicity, because "Sonic terminology turns out to be most appropriate for describing such technical temporalities for which historical discourse is no longer sufficient" (7). Seen not in terms of a soundwalk, soundscape, or even music, but rather in terms of sonicity, Wolf Lake not only 'brings to life' the earth through the technical affordance of the recording equipment nor the conceptual or symbolic associations of speaking, but also involves a physical dimension in addition to the socio-cultural interpretive paradigm. Sonicity, as opposed to sound, does not refer to the auditory qualities of the sonic, but refers to a spatial, physical articulation of time that allows for a conceptualisation of 'sonic space' as an integration of a techno-material. In his own words:
Sonicity is where time and technology meet. Technosonic timemechanisms and their charming power to seduce the human sense of time deserve a study of their own. If time is neither reduced to an internal state of subjective consciousness nor to an external physical a
priori but conceived as a complex layering of the imminent, of presence and of past(s), rich forms of temporal articulation can be identified in a chrono-tonal sense. (21)
Such a time critical quality of technical media opens up the possibility for grasping slow and big processes that go beyond conceptual 'rethinking'. Because sonicity refers to the conflation of sound and time, sonic space becomes a realm in which "the beings of the world (human and non-human) dwell together in sound-as-time" (11). This means that to see the rock not as a static object but as a processual being happens through the temporal flux of sonicity. If, as Friedrich Kittler argued, the gramophone, playing back the voices of the deceased manipulated time, and cinematography manipulated images in time, Wolf Lake, in its walk through sonic spatiality, and its unique sonic layering of times and spaces makes rocks speak in a manner that would surely please Viktor. Ernst sees this acoustic space as an "integration of space, time, and matter." What is particularly important for Ernst is that "it matters that sonicity takes place as a physical vibrational event that is distinct from mere symbolisation" (24). For him it matters how air molecules adapt to a shift in pressure, how the periodical waves are mathematically counted because there is some physical level at which the information transmission takes place. An attention to sonicity is not the same as listening in a strictly hermeneutic sense but rather allows for a shared receptibility between humans and non-humans. A sonic relation between entities is more material, or at least more physically present in the inbetween space than an ocular one. For such a relation to exist source and receiver can be singular, dispersed or non existent as long as there is stuff to vibrate in between. Anything that can vibrate can also listen, speak, or mediate.
Human listening may be less important for Ernst but still, it matters that Wolf Lake lets us hear this noise. That makes the earth sound in a way that is receivable to humans. Because 1. chewing at the categories of sender, receiver, object and subject, this sonic temporality of the audio recording makes possible a relation to understanding that reconsiders the earth not as a static object but a processual body. And 2. Sonic space is different from visual space. In visual representation, signification relies on a tactics that separate figure from ground. Sound, as opposed to the visual, instead has the capacity to equally interlace distinct voices.
Soundwalking as epistemic genre facilitates this second mode of listening by which the noise of the borehole loses its function as noise. The noise we hear in Wolf Lake becomes difficult to keep on calling noise. The soundwalk as genre structures our attention towards the noise and it becomes the nucleus of Wolf Lake's imaginary, rather than an excluded third. As Cubitt argues, when we try to "grasp noise for itself, when we hear in the static the random burbling of the universe, we should recognise in it the basic flux of mediation, enthralling and distracting as the waves of the sea" (4). And enthralling the sounds certainly are. They remind us that something gets lost when communication means to "distinguish the message as figure from the noise as ground". That something may well be a connectivity between vibrating bodies, pushed aside by modern reason and the drive towards efficiency. If following Cubitt's assertion that communication constituted an "original sin" that separated humans from their environments, that categorised entities as sender, receiver, object and subject, (5) then this soundwalk may well be an exercise in reconnecting, or at least rejecting the separation.
