Ellipses Issue [6] Unlearning Intelligence

Issue Editorial

Unlearning Intelligence: AI, geology, and shadow worlds

Beneath every ‘intelligence’, lie seams of matter, labour and agency. This issue of [...] ellipses takes as a prompt our evolving context, to ask how we might engage with a world where climate change, AI, territorial mapping and extractivist processes are entangled in our screens and smartphones - simultaneously distant and proximate. The device in the hand holds the mine, the cable and the data centre, folding the planetary into the intimate. At this shifting scale, the measures by which we come to know the world begin to slip. Taking this slippage as its prompt, Unlearning Intelligence sets out to question, probe and unlearn, in some way, what we know, or think we know, about ‘intelligence’: how it is measured, quantified, framed and understood. The call invited responses on how we might understand, speak to and engage with these ongoing and entangled relationships, asking what happens where the cloud meets the land; what is hidden, and what is revealed, in these encounters.

In ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Dipesh Chakrabarty points to the urgency of engaging with climate scientists, drawing the debate into proximity with postcolonial critiques of global history and the political economy of capitalism. For Chakrabarty, climate science asks us to consider the limits of history, where humans are geological and biological, as much as they are historical subjects. As he writes, “The discussion about the crisis of climate change can thus produce affect and knowledge about collective human pasts and futures that work at the limits of historical understanding. We experience specific effects of the crisis but not the whole phenomenon (Chakrabarty 2009, p. 221). At the same time, as Kathryn Yusoff reminds us, we cannot disavow the history of racial categories of difference, violence and dispossession enabled through geological categorisation (Yusoff 2018). The geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history (Chakrabarty 2009, p. 212).

The articles in this issue take on these entanglements, through creative practice as ways of knowing. Jewellery making, exhibition installations, sound, mapping, walking and dream interpretation become methods for working with knowledge. They set the vast beside the unseen: the planetary reach of data infrastructure beside the sediment of a cave floor, the hum of a cooling system beside a dream. In each case, AI takes place: its infrastructures occupy land, draw water, reroute labour and redraw territory, and this spatiality brings it within reach of creative practice, where it intersects with ground, matter and visual frame. They move from questions of the geological underpinnings and shadow worlds of AI–the data centre, the mine, the content moderation warehouse, discretionary policy loopholes–to the production of images, mapping, and countermapping that shape how we see and therefore understand the world; to responses that think with the limits of the technological world, inviting a return to intelligence as embodied, sensory, and ancestral. Together they ask for a relational engagement with intelligence and knowledge production.

The call to understand media as geological is asking for an attendance to the materiality of technology, alongside an attention to constant play between visibility and invisibility. In this issue, Angela Ka Ki Lee and Chris Tegho, in their article ‘Thinking with the Ground’, turn to the counterinfrastructure of Lebanon and the DRC, asking us to look at the shadow worlds of digital infrastructures as material sites of improvisation, adaptation and negotiation; while Claudio Astudillo Barra, in the article ‘Visuality, Indigenous Communities, and Lithium Extraction in Northern Chile’, draws our attention to lithium mines of Chile, where the infrastructural landscape might appear to be stable and aestheticised yet remains highly contested and political. In ‘Hydrological Data Flows: Imagining Large Language Models (LLMs) via Hydrocolonial Damming in South Africa’, Nina Barnett turns to the Vaal Dam (South Africa) as a means to make LLM systems tangible.

These geological sites are also sites of image-making, where their mapping, representation and countermapping are a means to engage with the limits and possibility of visibility. Surveys benefit from satellite-enabled remote sensing, linked not just to space, but mapping corporate and national interests, operating as mass surveillance (Parikka 2015, p.11). The ‘cloud’ is a building, a mine, a factory and a dump site. It runs on cooling systems, high amounts of energy, and alongside the ‘high-technical and low-paid culture of digitality’. There are deep times and deep places that support the social and material worlds that enable our screens and devices. Hyeongji Yang’s writing in ‘DAEMON: Detuning the Pitch of Spectral Temporalities’ takes on the invisible infrastructure of neocolonialism with a focus on Vietnam’s REDD+ carbon offset project, drawing attention to and mapping pitch as a means to ‘listening in’ rather than ‘listening to’, in order to ask whose voices are heard, and whose are omitted in image-based forms of representation. In ‘Groundsound’, Florian Scheucher similarly turns to the invisible reverberations transmitted through the solid matter of the earth’s crust, to speak to the violence of sonic mapping, and think with the possibilities of sound as an alternative way of sensing, perceiving and producing relations. Salome Kipiani’s work in ‘Tracing the Cloud: Feminist Counter-Cartographies of AI between Nairobi and the Salar de Atacama’ thinks across the shadow labour worlds of Kenyan content moderators to the indigenous contestation over the Salar de Atacama by the Lickanantay, opening up the possibility of visibility for territorial legibility and therefore accountability both adopting and complicating the idea of a countermap. In ‘The Exosomatic Image After AI: Visual Plasticity and Borderland Identity’, George Themistokleous’s ‘Operating Table’ in Cyprus asks us if it is possible to think of the image without a subject, provoking the possibility of a new kind of collective subjectivity which exceeds the nation-state where the new algorithmic image is not only a site of militarisation, but an opening to another form of relation.

Beyond a critique of technological worlds, several texts move us to reconsider embodied, sensory and ancestral forms of intelligence that go beyond, challenge, and redefine the technological. They respond to the violence of late capitalism, through opening up questions of narrative, process, dream worlds and multi-sensory engagements. Wider forms of knowing here, ask us to take somatic knowledge seriously, as cultural and biological, recentering the collective subject through generational knowledge and sensory forms of knowing. Patricía Domingues’s work of splitting, fracturing, cutting and opening in jewellery making engages with geological and industrial histories; Hiba Ali’s ‘ecosomatics’ argues for a grounded sensory experience of the present environment and the possibility of dream worlds. Charmaine Bee centres dreams and ancestral knowledge in the afterlives of trauma, exploring dream interpretation as a form of technology that precedes and goes deeper than any chatbot interpretation might offer; while Aaniyah Martin, Amy Rusch, Sarah Wurz, and Meghan Judge look to Klasies River Cave and one of the earliest sites of Homo sapiens, asking how embodied, relational and more-than-human ways of knowing might unsettle dominant readings of intelligence and archaeology grounded in extraction.

Across these contributions that move from ground, to image and body, we are invited, often through resistant creative practice, to attend to what is obscured and unresolved in the context of intelligence and data. As Glissant writes, despite the violence of history, “The abyss is also a projection of and a perspective into the unknown” (Glissant 1990, p.8). It is an element of exchange, and the opening for new forms of relation. The articles in this special issue invite a situated engagement with intelligence and associated violent histories; they question visualities of data and prompt embodied responses, material engagements with communities, land, and water; and they collectively reposition digital infrastructure within a space of encounter and always in relation.

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Chakrabarty, D. (2009). “The Climate of History: Four Theses” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, no.2 (Winter 2009), p. 221.

Yusoff, K. (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chakrabarty, D. (2009). “The Climate of History: Four Theses” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, no.2 (Winter 2009), p. 212.

Parikka, J. (2015). Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p.30.

Ibid Parikka, p.11.

Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation (translated by Betsy Wing), Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, p.8.

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Issue Editorial

Unlearning Intelligence: AI, geology, and shadow worlds

‍

Chakrabarty, D. (2009). “The Climate of History: Four Theses” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, no.2 (Winter 2009), p. 221.

Yusoff, K. (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chakrabarty, D. (2009). “The Climate of History: Four Theses” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, no.2 (Winter 2009), p. 212.

Parikka, J. (2015). Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p.30.

Ibid Parikka, p.11.

Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation (translated by Betsy Wing), Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, p.8.

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Countermaps of digital somatics and ocean-sensing

Hiba Ali

DAEMON: Detuning the Pitch of Spectral Temporalities

It was set before you arrived. It will run after you leave. No one is watching. No one is listening.

Hyeongji Yang

Fractured Metabolic Systems of AI

Care, Extraction and Material Thinking through Jewellery Practice

Patrícia Domingues

groundsound

sonic sensing and the necropolitics of seismology

Florian Scheucher

Hydrological Data Flows: Imagining Large Language Models (LLMs) via Hydrocolonial Damming in South Africa

Reading LLMs in relation to the Vaal Dam and the Integrated Vaal River System through the porosity of creative practice.

Nina Barnett

Klasies River Cave in Tidal Dialogue

Where intelligence lingers in sediment, sound and stillness

Aaniyah Martin

Amy Rusch

Sarah Wurz

Meghan Judge

The Exosomatic Image After AI: Visual Plasticity and Borderland Identity

George Themistokleous

Thinking with the Ground

Situated Intelligence as Counter-Infrastructure

Angela Ka Ki Lee (HAAU architecture studio)

Chris Tegho

Tracing the Cloud: Feminist Counter-Cartographies of AI between Nairobi and the Salar de Atacama

Digital systems are never immaterial: they are built within the world, through it, and often against it.

Salome Kipiani

Visuality, Indigenous Communities, and Lithium Extraction in Northern Chile

The cloud was never immaterial

Claudio Astudillo Barra

Huda Tayob

Naadira Patel

Sarah de Villiers

Tamara Tesoriero

Naadira Patel

Surveillance

Machinic Perception

Affect

Plasticity

Visibility

Extraction

Invisibility

Homogenisation

Accumulation

Hydrocolonialism

Ghost Labour

Nairobi

Feminist Counter-Cartography

AI Infrastructure

Informality

Planetary Transitions

Situated Knowledge

Counter-Infrastructure

Computational Governance

Listening

Mutuality

More-than-human subjectivity

Ecology

Technology

Necropolitics

Hydro-Rugging

Stitching

Strandlooping

Sediment

Relational

Sonic Absence

Latency

Daemon

Climate Finance

Carbon Governance

REDD+

Intelligence

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Sarah de Villiers

Huda Tayob

Naadira Patel

Tamara Tesoriero

Naadira Patel

Countermaps of digital somatics and ocean-sensing

DAEMON: Detuning the Pitch of Spectral Temporalities

Fractured Metabolic Systems of AI

groundsound

Hydrological Data Flows: Imagining Large Language Models (LLMs) via Hydrocolonial Damming in South Africa

Klasies River Cave in Tidal Dialogue

The Exosomatic Image After AI: Visual Plasticity and Borderland Identity

Thinking with the Ground

Tracing the Cloud: Feminist Counter-Cartographies of AI between Nairobi and the Salar de Atacama

Visuality, Indigenous Communities, and Lithium Extraction in Northern Chile