Geoengineering Experiments as Socio-technical Rehearsals

Abstract

This project demonstrates what we are calling a Socio-Technical Rehearsal – a method for examining how scientific experiments constitute mechanisms of ‘steering’ of emerging technologies, and how the organization of mediation can be operationalized towards certain futures. A three-act teleplay, depicting a story of an aborted 2012 geoengineering experiment, is written by an artist, and then continuously amended, annotated and split into new narratives by people portrayed in it, as well as people external to it. The original events are mediated and remediated through forms of re-search, re-narrativizing and re-representation. The multiplying narratives contradict, contaminate and react to each other. Each way of telling the story is anticipatory, predisposing one to particular projection of the future dependent on the model derived from the past. Each narrative presents one version of a fragmented and limited understanding of the situation. Through the iterations of scripting, rehearsing, performing and revising; assumptions about the technological management of the environment are probed and ruptured in new ways. The circuitous communication process is always anticipatory, steering the narrative turns toward utopian or dystopian futures as possible worlds proliferate. Our cybernetic and cyberneticizing method exposes the process of knowledge circulation and the ways that narratives are naturalized into a common understanding of “geoengineering.” We hope to expose the multiple narratives of geoengineering – what it is, what it is for and how it re-mediates and modulates existing material ensembles and epistemological frameworks. We ask – how is the process of mediation integral in the normalization of ‘fringe’ scientific ideas, such as geoengineering proposals, within mainstream science?