Pluralising the Planetary: The Radical Incompleteness of Machinic Envisioning

Abstract

Automated techniques have driven new approaches to visualising and acting upon planetary crises, such as Microsoft’s Planetary Computer and Amazon’s partnership with the start-up Overstory (formerly 20tree.ai). However, “planetary” machine envisioning, together with its critical theorisation, tends toward scalar equivalence and the assumption of interoperability across media, infrastructure, and optics. The “planetary” becomes a mode for and platform of seeing Earth and beyond in which AI vision systems conjoin seamlessly with a predictive imaging of the planet and have the effect of becoming mutually dependent and self-reinforcing. In this article, we argue for a more pluralistic and nonhuman set of Earth images and imaginings. We argue that such modes of imaging are multiscalar and are indebted to what Paul Edwards calls “data friction.” Here materialities of both media and Earth impede the seamless movement and exchange of data involved in machine vision; and disjunctive syntheses are instead constantly being generated. We examine eccentric modes of configuring the planetary via the artwork of Tega Brain, who deploys disjunctive and nonscalable relations of climate and environment in her use of data and AI imaging techniques. In spite of considerable financial, cognitive, and affective investment to entangle Earth with machine vision, we propose instead that imaging and imagining the planetary is a radically incomplete project. Drawing on Indigenous approaches to AI development via Country Centered Design and the process philosophy of William James and others, we propose that planetary “vision” operates within a pluralistic universe of seeing, in which ongoing and radical incompleteness is core to its imaging.