process space, memory space, instruction space

While the most of the Nazca geo- glyphs have been long visible from surrounding mountains, or thanks to aerial flights, the case of the recent additions to the corpus of these monumental drawings embodies not just an augmentation, but an automation of vision – the labour of identifying the pattern is delegated to a machine.nn

Contrary to the preced- ing example, these accidental geoglyphs are not revealed by AI, but by another more-than-human agency – an overheating planetary ecosystem responding to an increase in CO2 emissions with the rise of temperatures and previously unseen weather patterns. It is the medium of the changing climate itself that suddenly makes these archaeological traces visible.

A diagram might be a systematic visualisation of some process, such as thinking, digestion, atmospheric phenomenon or geological change. However, as Ryan Bishop reminded me recently, the diagram might also be a plan, a sort of normative gesture – it can format, prescribe, direct attention or produce a habit.

MEMORY SPACE – The dyschronia of human history and geological time is irreversibly erased, privileging the exterior temporal scales of the geological over the interior temporalities of the cultural.

PROCESS SPACE – have a position within some process rather than simply representing it. For this reason, we might say they function as process-spaces. Every geoglyph on Nazca plane is an imprint of cultural activity of a past human community, and its purpose is not to depict something, but to do something. We can interpret them as sites of religious rituals or of astronomic observation, or we can leave the interpretation of their cultural purpose open, but in any case, they are primarily tools used to mediate some relation to spiritual entities or to enable a knowledge of celestial bodies (to give a few examples).

The cropmarks are also imprints of an activity, in this case, the one of changing climate; human architectural traces are mobilised as a diagram of climate emergency.

The planet narrates the climate change as it is unfolding, leaving traces around us and in us – a cropmark on a field, a swarm of medusas in an ocean, a bleached coral reef, an agricultural land turning to desert: each of them being an index of global heating. Even our lungs become – metaphorically speaking – photographic imprints of the polluted cities in which we live.

INSTRUCTION SPACE – ‘In other words, these visual traits of climate emergency might be capable of inducing or of instituting a cultural habit.’

Crucially, identifying instructions that these geoglyphs yield is condi- tioned by our ability to read them not as simple representations of climate emergency, i.e. as some surrogates or proxies of the process, but as spaces where this process itself unfolds. The message is very banal: Climate change is never out there; it is always right before our eyes. The cloud of smoke over the Australian bush is not a representation of the catastrophe – it is the catastrophe.

Following the Peircean
triad of icon-index-symbol, these are indices produced by the planet itself. Some pictures are disastrous; some pictures are disasters.

Thus, it seems that climate emergency is putting a pressure on our current understand- ing of visual cultures as the realm of indirect representations. When it comes to visible traces of ecological disasters, these traces are their direct imprints, and they are encodings of the process into the medium of planet Earth. They announce an aesthetic regime of the surface, claiming an immediate authority to inform our ways of plotting the escape from the Anthropocene.

Here comes also an urgency to reassess the role of humans as privileged observers, when the traces of the ecological emergency remain hidden: there might be artificial, technical agencies better suited to detect traces of the distributed climate disaster, as well as to translate these traces into an adequate prescription, thus somehow extend- ing the scope of machine-readable geoglyphs outside of the Nazca Plate.

• example of phantom images?

Understanding the geoglyphic nature of climate emergency’s visual regime might finally help us to understand how the planet invites us to reconsider our relation to the assumed duality between the global and the local. So far, we have mainly treated the local as an opposite to the global, resulting in a (geo)political impasse when these scales are treated as hardly translatable (in the better case) or mutually exclusive (in the worst case). However, in the coming framework of the Planetary – as elaborated by scholars such as Jennifer Gabrys, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, William Connolly or Benjamin Bratton – the hope is that the local becomes just a clumsy term to express how our immediate surround- ings can be treated as an index of the Planetary. No place on Earth has a privileged position here. As a fractal image, every place hides the micro- cosm of the planetary relations; each locality is a garden within a garden, indexing the violence done to the planet.

• really good end bit on how to see all traces through OOO, the local being the same as the global!!!!