Spectral Elemental
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
nimrod.art
nimrod@astarhan.com
digital media energy electromagnetism physics quantum
As a foundation, the relationship between resource mining, energy consumption in the form of electricity, and digital media technologies is introduced. However, the relationships digital media technologies have with energy continue beyond consumption. Considering the electromagnetic spectrum as a whole, digital media devices emanate this type of energy almost as often as it powers them. Media technology devices disperse light, radio frequencies and telecommunication signals to become parts of networks. These information exchange and communication networks are also networks of energy exchange, thermodynamic relationships, and quantum field interactions between living organisms, earth energies, and media technology devices.
The full ontological implications of post-classical physics are still being negotiated. Still, some of its principles are mandatory to understand the operation of digital media. At the same time, it can be harnessed to establish digital media technologies as entangled with earthly energies in an indeterminate interaction of flows that does not necessarily lead to entropy, providing another perspective on how digital media operates and interacts with life on Earth.
Earth energies power digital media devices. It is easy to agree that “Digital media are unthinkable without the energy needed to produce and run them;” (Cubitt 16). No commonplace electric circuits can operate without an energy source: a battery or a connection to the electric grid. Nevertheless, further elaboration on the more intricate ways digital media relates to resource extraction and earth energies is required.
Changes in energetic conditions are considered linked to cultural changes. See Parikka (137): “The explosive event of industrialization was dependent on new forms of energy; coal, oil, and gas became main drives replacing the reliance on wind, water, plants, trees, and animals as energy sources.”. These new forms of energy are related to furthering the reach underneath the earth's surface. Inseparable from other efforts to increase material wealth through resource extraction and mining practices, humans have reached inside the planet to find more energy.
In other instances, digging into the earth is associated with excavating tools, remnants, and structures of past cultures. Studying these findings allows us to fill gaps in historical texts, contributing to knowledge production. A similar practice of digging is related to resource extraction for the industrial manufacturing of media technologies. As Parikka puts it: “The archives of geology give, not a model, but the material for what would later be media and technology.” (138). This means that media technologies, as bearers of inscribed messages, are not only a metaphor for how geological layers are embedded with past material occurrences, continental shifts, and volcanic eruptions on Earth but are also made of one and the same material.
If we think similarly about the excavated energy sources enumerated by Parikka (coal, oil, gas), they are made of an earthly source of materials as well. All these energy forms are transformed hydro-carbon compositions, all formerly living masses, ossified, condensed, and buried under the earth for millennia. “Living organisms are only relatively stable pools or folds in a continuous flow and transformation of energy moving from the sun, conjoined by the organism, reproduced in its offspring, and disjoined in death.” (Nail 77) Life is not only conditioned by energy but also, in some cases, its source.
Closely examining the circuition of the earth and media devices, we can analyze the functioning of media on earth as a part of an energy exchange process unconditioned by human intervention or technological advancement. This is done by examining the various ways the types of media we consider the result of technological inventions, such as radio, are naturally occurring phenomena on Earth. Thus, the operation of media technologies through various energetic domains is not the creation of energy exchange circuits as a byproduct of communication networks but instead tapping into a primordial, billions-year-old energy field of elemental media.
Elementary, my dear Watson. Radio was heard before it was invented, and before it was invented, it was. “The first person to listen to radio was Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant. He tuned in during the early hours of the night on a long metal line serving as an antenna before antennas were invented.” (Kahn 2). Thomas Watson helps us see beyond the energy of our devices and into the preexisting, eternally occurring, performative, active nature of electromagnetic energy on Earth.
Following this line and building upon previously mentioned relationships between media technologies and the environment, we see how energy exchange is complexified through the example of radio: “Radio is not always a technological control device supplied with energy from a battery or a plug in the wall; sometimes it is the energy” (Kahn 3). Using the example of radio we can look into the non-technological, emerging aesthetics of energy and its manifestations: “The telephone listening sessions of Thomas Watson were a conjunction of wireless reception prior to wirelessness, engagements with an electromagnetic cosmos prior to scientific investigation, a noisy aesthetics of sound before the avant-garde, and electrical sound before electronic music.” (Kahn 4)
Natural radio as a phenomenon marks the precedence of radio and electromagnetism in nature and earth, unrelated to technological advancement, inventiveness, or aesthetic consideration. It is just another instance of a practice of interacting with the electromagnetic spectrum, like many other technological, biological, and cosmological ones: “Lived electromagnetism has its historical basis in such things as rainbows, electric motors, and telecommunications, from which are derived the spectrum, the correlation of electricity and magnetism, and the speed of light and its global and cosmological manifestations.” (Kahn 10)
In the early 21st century, it appears as if concepts of electromagnetism and its waves are tucked away neatly underneath glass and aluminum surfaces. Media is folded and transcoded into the binary realm of the digital, with its vocabulary of bits and pixels, data and resolution, HD, and LED. The faint light of a fiber optic cable shines visibly for the last time when tested on the floor of a distant factory before being wrapped in layers of steel wires and plastic and buried underground or underneath the ocean—a subtle, fleeting flicker of the electromagnetism powering digital technology.
It remains to think – where did the energy go? Of course, electricity is inseparable from digital media and computation. We can easily recognize how electric power is necessary for our computer to turn on. But it is harder still to consider how the flow of electricity defines everything digital media does or doesn’t do. That is because the binarization and transcoding of electric flow through semiconducting materials is considered an event that folds the raw and untamable nature of the electromagnetic field into discrete, measured, controllable, and predictable means. The dialectics of enlightenment materially ossified. However, semiconductivity can only be understood in the framework of modern physics. As such, it frames digital media in quite different relations to the material-kinetic structure of the electromagnetic field that defines it.
At the subatomic level, the flow of particles through a digital switch is anything but discrete. “Semiconductivity is a quantum-mechanical phenomenon because in classical physics there is no way for an electron to move through “close-packed” atoms.” […] The transistor is therefore a binary quantum switch that can be opened or closed simply by modulating an electrical voltage.” (Nail 341). Understood through the interaction of electrons at the quantum level, the very same conditions that enable the operation of semiconducting transistors are those that question their existence in binary absolutes. Unlike electricity, the flow of the electron wave composing the electromagnetic field doesn’t stop when there is no current. All electrons are in constant pedetic motion. At a quantum level, the flow of the electron wave always leaks.
The re-introduction of waves of unconditioned and indiscriminate energy flow into thinking of digital media can be useful for challenging some of its perceived qualities. One way would be through renegotiating the dialectics of enlightment embedded within it. Considered through the pedetic nature of the electromagnetic field, digital media becomes much less stable, predictable and controllable: “When a digital command is issued in a digital binary system, there is only a probability that it will be executed, not a certainty. The dream of downloading human consciousness into machines or creating a perfectly controllable artificial superintelligence will inevitably run up against the pedetic nature of matter and the material agency of the digital image itself.” (Nail 344). A close examination of the underlying material conditions of computational abstraction and the perceived and theorized dematerialization of digital media reveals an earthly, messy, nuanced, and touchy image.
The introduction of energy into frameworks of understanding digital media, reuniting it with the rainbows from which it emanates, makes digital media not an artificial, detached, isolated realm of simulated logic but rather one that is always already earthly and energetic. Introducing an energy flow into how we understand digital media can shift perspectives and understandings. If that happens, it won’t be the first time: “The food chain model, and with it the idea of the organism itself, were substantially reworked only by the introduction of energy flow into the balance of ecosystems. As "energy" became a vital term, with it followed a transformative understanding of the ecosystem as an interconnected formation that moves through organisms instead of emanating from them.” (Nisbet 6). Moving through the digital media landscape with electromagnetism could yield similar changes in the conception of digital media systems.
The electromagnetic field is a precondition for any act of sensing. “All kinesthetic fields are defined not only by the circulation of matter and image but also by the recirculation of matter back into that same field. ” (Nail 344). Digital media does not create, harness, or utilize but instead fits itself into always already existing energy flows. Enabled by, operating with, and activating a pre-existing condition of perception rather than a novel invention, digital media is reunited with its electromagnetic origins through earth energies. Like radio, digital media technologies are not novel ways of interacting but rather eddies and flows on the stream of the electromagnetic field. Conceivably, their becoming is unconditioned by the appearance or disappearance of human, or other, intelligence.
Not unlike the hieroglyphs, which never stopped meaning even though we couldn’t read them for decades, the information of digital media exists on a material, sub-atomic level of energy fields before it is conjured into a sensible image or effect. Digital media technology was energy before it was invented, and before it was invented, it was.
References:
Nisbet, James. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s. The MIT Press, 2014.
Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Cubitt, Sean. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Duke University Press, 2017.
Kahn, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts. University of California Press, 2013.
Nail, Thomas . Theory of the Image. Oxford University Press, 2019.
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