Concerning Circulations: Cybernetic Stewardship & Planetary Engineering

Abstract

"Our age of climate crisis brings with it intimate, acute relations between informational environments and real ecologies. Technoscience has understood ecological change, environmental crisis, and human and non-human climate migrations through imagery — circulated through scientific publication, popular media, our devices, networks and imaginations as photographs of fieldwork, and an iconography of starving polar bears. Applied scientific powers attempt to regulate real, situated natures through inversions of this imagery as visual rubrics and illustrations. Pixels and CO2 molecules, data streams and jetstreams, abstract diagrams and engineering practices amalgamate. What results is a vision of elemental automation, planetary machinic worlding and technological care that authorises real conservation and geoengineering practices, growing green in Silicon Valley and explicitly trying to bring about »Gaia 2.0.«. »Concerning Circulations« is articulated through two media streams, one ongoing and the other summative, culminating at the end of the web residency. Collaborative, online-research recovers the image-ecosystem of new regimes of planetary scale management of nature, such as carbon markets. The project reposts, contextualises and critiques the circulation of images and diagrams of control, creating a visual archive of contemporary cybernetic attentions. This archive, continuously updated in instagram-like fashion, in turn creates materials for three, narrated short essay-films, confidentials of the stories that new ecological engineering and climate innovation propaganda propagates."