Orit Halpern @ Bauhaus Universität Weimar on March 27 "The Planetary Experiment"

Reckoning With Everything – Mit Allem Rechnen

March 26—28, 2024

Festsaal, Goethe Nationalmuseum
Frauenplan 1, 99423 Weimar

The fact that computing is becoming ubiquitous does not necessarily mean that it is migrating to devices that are increasingly mobile, but that it is becoming an infrastructure that is merging more and more with the background of our living environment. We no longer live only with and through cultural techniques, but increasingly in cultural techniques. 

But the cultural technique of calculation has not only become "environmental" since the ubiquity of computation turned cultural techniques into environing techniques. Cultural techniques like Calendars, clocks, constellations, addresses, maps, registers, but also aqueducts, ships, routes and routines have always been infrastructural media. Computation must and has always had to "reckon with everything", with the materialities of the media that define the environmental conditions of computability, as well as with practices of extracting, storing and transferring data.

This conference invites to describe the environmentality of computation as comprehensively as possible on the basis of selected settings.

Orit Halpern: The Planetary Experiment. On March 27th 2024; 15:30 - 16:00

We live in the age of the planetary experiment. As sociologist of science Bruno Latour noted in the wake of recent crises in ecology and biomedicine, such as oil spills, pandemics, and climate change, the “distinction between the inside and the outside of the laboratory has disappeared,” and the “laboratory has extended its walls to the whole planet” (Latour 2004). The transformation of the entire planet into an experimental space is underscored by recent natural scientific projects such as the Event Horizon Telescope, which employs the earth as a whole as a sensor for observing celestial phenomena, and by projects such as the European Commission’s Destination Earth (DestinE) project, which aims to create a digital “twin” of the earth. The vital importance of planetary experimentation in the present is highlighted by the recent decision to accept formally the term “Anthropocene” as designation of our current geological era. The Anthropocene is inextricably connected to the concept of planetary experimentation both because human-caused global warming has been described by natural scientists as the result of “unintended” global experiments (Revelle & Suess 1957; Steffen, Crutzen & McNeill 2007), and because solutions to problems such as global warming seem necessarily to depend on new modes of intentional planetary experiments.
These forms of planetary experiment are currently grounded on infrastructures of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This talk will examine planetary experimentation as a mode of governance in relationship to generative artificial intelligence and concepts of “synthetic” in both data and biology.  For example, AI is central to climate and planetary digital twining, large language and other models demand planetary scale data sets for training (comprising a new form of experiment at scale), and new forms of manipulating life in synthetic biology are co-produced with new forms of generative machine learning and artificial intelligence.  Synthetic data and generative learning models also play roles in geo-engineering, agricultural bioengineering, and many other fields.  This assemblage between machines, data, and life constitutes a new episteme linking knowledge, technology, and power that this paper hopes to preliminarily diagram through historical and ethnographic research.

Bibliography:
 
Latour, Bruno. “Von ‘Tatsachen’ zu ‘Sachverhalten’: Wie sollen die neuen kollektiven Experimente protokolliert werden?” Trans. Gustav Rossler. In Kultur im Experiment, ed. Henning Schmidgen, Peter Geimer, and Sven Dierig. Berlin: Kadmos Verlag, 2004, pp.17- 36. English translation available at www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-95-METHODS-EXPERIMENTS.pdf
Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill. “The Anthropocene. Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio. Vol. 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–621.
Revelle, Roger, and Hans E. Suess. “Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades.” Tellus Vol. 9, no. 1 (1957): 18–27.

To the Programme