The Problem of Nonhuman Phenomenology or, What is it Like to Be a Kinect?

A description of the epistemological problems opened by new materialist ontologies, explored through a phenomenological discussion of the Microsoft Kinect and Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, and Adrian Freed's performance piece, X (2013)

Building Nature in Detroit: Ruin Aesthetics, Historical Gaps, and the Urban Agricultural Imagination

Urban Agriculture is increasingly forwarded as a tool for social and ecological renewal in the post-industrial city. However, much of the enthusiasm (and increasingly, scholarly analysis) of this phenomena focuses on its civic role rather than its tangible impacts on urban food systems. This suggests that there is a great deal of ideological investment not just in the practice of urban agriculture, but in its visual culture and broader social imagination. This paper makes these connections explicit by attending to the representations of farming in Detroit through two case studies: the 2014 television show Cosmos and a 2015 art installation Flower House. It finds that, while these visions of urban agriculture can productively trouble categories between the cultural and the natural in a way that is constructive towards meeting the challenges of a climate insecure future, these utopian imaginaries are often predicated upon a dystopian vision of the present. As a result, the temporal politics of green futurism can actually work against racial and classed struggles for the right to the city, creating a disconnect between ecological and social justice

Carbon Vitalism: Life and the Body in Climate Denial

This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and ecological standing. This philosophy contains a poetics of denial that is too often overlooked by studies of climate skepticism focusing narrowly on industry funding. Accordingly, this article develops a reparative theory of climate denial, asking what values and relations are gathered together within carbon vitalist speech and how speakers work to sustain these connections. Through close readings of carbon vitalist media and interviews with key figures in its network, the article demonstrates how the body is central to carbon vitalism’s rhetorical and emotional framing of ecological interdependence and epistemological populism. As such, carbon vitalism in effect reenacts long-established feminist appeals to the body (though to decidedly different political purposes). The article concludes by evaluating how the climate movement could both challenge and remobilize these logics, exploring what this corporeal turn in climate denial means for feminist and antiracist theories of environmental justice and the body

Disorientations: John Singer Sargent and Queer Phenomenology

Art history has long struggled to find a method to account for the diverse expressions of queer desire across the heterogeneous landscape of history. While there has been a surge of research on the lives, artworks, and audiences of artists that trouble the heterosexual norm, the wider impact of this scholarship is often limited to singular biographies. Following the call for greater self-reflexivity and acknowledgement of difference in queer theory and phenomenological approaches to art history, the additive goals of gay and lesbian scholarship with its political investment in strategies of representation can be brought into scrutiny. To this end, a critical historiographical review of gay and lesbian art history is undertaken and a queer phenomenological method is presented as a new means forward. Applied to the work of John Singer Sargent, it is argued that a focus on the spatial orientation of bodies in his album of male nudes provides a more nuanced and ethical account of the queer than a focus on identity and identifications

Managing Carbon and Data Flows: Fungible Forms of Mediation in the Cloud

Microsoft’s transition to being both a cloud company and a carbon neutral company occurred at the same time and with common structuring logics. Cloud computing, carbon offsetting, and renewable energy provisioning share place-agnostic structures and practices. This article examines these trends together, analyzing how global forms of mediation and management mutually reinforce one another across the cloud’s carbon and data flows. This analytic affords more than just a tale of a commodity and its (mis)managed environmental externalities, but rather an analysis of the structures of fungible mediation common to both alike. Understanding this concept and its resistance to place-based accountability not only better captures the empirical and aspirational actions of cloud computing, it also allows for more efficacious forms of green media critique

Renaissance Robotics: Leonardo da Vinci's Lost Knight and Enlivened Materiality

René Descartes posits a curious anxiety his Second Meditation that an otherwise convincing form might conceal a post-human robotic entity. Machinic and animalian bodies, in his dualistic perspective, were seen to exist on a lesser order than the soul of man. Yet, as Descartes himself seems to wonder, the maintenance of this divide is a fraught endeavor when automata can mimic human shape and movement. The question of animate materiality is curiously echoed in the earlier writings of Leonardo da Vinci. These fellow thinkers and tinkerers agreed on the analogous principles between bodies and machines, yet they are at odds as to the implications of these beliefs. What da Vinci's anatomical studies, robotic prototypes and treatises on art suggest is the far more radical possibility of material bodies and souls, conjoined in sensation and movement. In this flat ecology of bodies, machines and spirit, Leonardo's robots suggest a radical alternative to our Cartesian inheritance

Mediating Climate, Mediating Scale

Climate communication is seemingly stuck in a double bind. The problem of global warming requires inherently trans-scalar modes of engagement, encompassing times and spaces that exceed local frames of experience and meaning. Climate media must therefore negotiate representational extremes that risk overwhelming their audience with the immensity of the problem or rendering it falsely manageable at a local scale. The task of visualizing climate is thus often torn between scales germane to the problem and scales germane to individuals. In this paper I examine how this scalar divide has been negotiated visually, focusing in particular on Ed Hawkins’ 2016 viral climate spiral. To many, the graphic represents a promising union of political and scientific communication in the public sphere. However, formal analysis of the gif’s reception suggest that the spiral was also a site of anxiety and negative emotion for many viewers. I take these conflicting interpretations as cause to rethink current assumptions about best practices and desirable outcomes for scalar mediations of climate and their capacities to mobilize a wide range of reactions and interpretations—some more legibly political and some more complicatedly affective, yet all nevertheless integral to the work of building a holistic response to the climate crisis

Low-Carbon Research: Building a Greener and More Inclusive Academy

This essay examines how the fossil fuel energy regimes that support contemporary academic norms in turn shape and constrain knowledge production. High-carbon research methods and exchanges, particularly those that depend on aviation, produce distinct exclusions and incentives that could be reformed in the transition to a low-carbon academy. Drawing on feminist STS, alternative modes of collective research creation and collaboration are outlined, along with an assessment of their potential challenges and gains. This commentary concludes with several recommendations for incremental and institutional changes, along with a call for scholars of social and technical systems to uniquely contribute to this transition

Digital Energetics

Media and energy require joint theorization as they are bound together across contemporary informational and fossil regimes. Digital Energetics traces the contours of a media analytic of energy and an energy analytic of media across the cultural, environmental, and labor relations they subtend. Focusing specifically on digital operations, its authors analyze how data and energy have jointly modulated the character of data work and politics in a warming world

The world wide web of carbon: Toward a relational footprinting of information and communications technology's climate impacts

The climate impacts of the information and communications technology sector—and Big Data especially—is a topic of growing public and industry concern, though attempts to quantify its carbon footprint have produced contradictory results. Some studies argue that information and communications technology's global carbon footprint is set to rise dramatically in the coming years, requiring urgent regulation and sectoral degrowth. Others argue that information and communications technology's growth is largely decoupled from its carbon emissions, and so provides valuable climate solutions and a model for other industries. This article assesses these debates, arguing that, due to data frictions and incommensurate study designs, the question is likely to remain irresolvable at the global scale. We present six methodological factors that drive this impasse: fraught access to industry data, bottom-up vs. top-down assessments, system boundaries, geographic averaging, functional units, and energy efficiencies. In response, we propose an alternative approach that reframes the question in spatial and situated terms: A relational footprinting that demarcates particular relationships between elements—geographic, technical, and social—within broader information and communications technology infrastructures. Illustrating this model with one of the global Internet's most overlooked components—subsea telecommunication cables—we propose that information and communications technology futures would be best charted not only in terms of quantified total energy use, but in specifying the geographical and technical parts of the network that are the least carbon-intensive, and which can therefore provide opportunities for both carbon reductions and a renewed infrastructural politics. In parallel to the politics of (de)growth, we must also consider different network forms