Journal of Environmental Media - Current Issue

Each time lightning bursts in the Earth’s atmosphere, it releases radio waves that ricochet between the planet’s surface and its ionosphere, a layer of charged air lying between 80 km and 1000 km above our heads. This article explores these radio atmospheric signals, or ‘sferics’, across a range of media and sound arts. It argues that even as artists idealize sferics as a direct path to a kind of planetary unconscious, there remain attempts to incorporate sferics within existing cultural models of both quantitative and qualitative data. These models insist that environmental phenomena, no matter how immaterial, serve some aspect of human productivity. In short: the pursuit of sferics in media arts is also the pursuit of their use-value. To make this argument, I explore a range of sonic, visual and radio artists who incorporate sferics into their work in a variety of ways, with an emphasis on the media techniques they use to listen to, record and transmute sferics. Through readings of works by artists and scientists such as Mads Haahr, Matt DesLauriers and Alvin Lucier, I demonstrate how practices as disparate as cryptocurrency and field recording share at their root media techniques for the subordination of the environment to regimes of human signification and value production.

Recent scholarship in elemental media studies has sought to develop frameworks of interpretation rooted in elemental substrates and qualities. ‘Forms of pressure’ traces pressure as one such framework through the ways pressure contributes to or is associated with various social and culture forms. The article makes this case through evaluating the emergence of Science Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications (SMART) subsea sensing cables, the discourse surrounding them, and their imagined purposes. Then, it considers the historical events that motivated their emergence, including the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, as well as the history of the subsea cable industry. Pressure is understood through its emergence in the deep sea as massively intense and producing significant forms of movement and environmental change. In particular, the article highlights this capacity of deep sea pressure to the social and temporal condition of catastrophe. SMART cables and the histories explored are responsive or reactive to the force of pressure. As a counterpoint, the article considers what it would mean to think through or with pressure and turns to an art piece, Inframundo (Underworld) as a demonstration of a phenomenology informed by deep sea pressure. In either case, pressure produces various forms, technological and historical forms or forms of being and experience, based on its capacity to transform environments and elemental arrangements as a force that facilitates movement, change and elemental mixing.

Since the 1970s, oceanographers have used underwater sound to measure ocean heat by means of a scientific technique called acoustic tomography (AT). This article historicizes AT, arguing that both the technique itself and the climatic knowledge it produces propagate colonial, military and capitalist pursuits that are to blame for oceanic warming in the first place. The argument plays out in four parts. Part one situates AT in relation to the discovery of the deep sound channel and Cold War acoustics research. Parts two and three analyse two pivotal AT experiments, namely the Heard Island Feasibility Test (1991) and the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate experiment (1996–2006). Both experiments were premised on scientific understandings of the deep ocean as ‘nearly transparent to low-frequency sound’, as one oceanographer put it. We term this simplified image of the depths oceanus nullius, after the nineteenth-century legal doctrine terra nullius, which has long been deployed by settler colonists to justify violently expropriating land. We propose instead that the deep ocean should be conceptualized as a loud and sonically dense space – an oceanus maximus – resonating not only with the sounds of ships’ propellers, air-guns and sonar pings, but also with the sonorous tones, clicks, buzzes, grunts and howls of manifold undersea creatures. The article concludes with a discussion of sound’s relation to ambiguity and violence in oceanographic knowledge production.

Recent scientific inquiry into the lives of jellyfish has typically tied them to two, seemingly dichotomous futures. For nearly a decade, scientists have suggested that jellyfish may be taking over the oceans. Favourably responsive to the conditions of warming and increasingly hypoxic oceans, jellyfish blooms have – it seems – grown in number in recent decades, a sign of depleted oceans to come. Simultaneously, scientists have experimented with jellyfish biomaterials – including their tentacles, mucus, collagen and stem cells – to better sense and respond to environmental and biological conditions. In doing so, they have mined jellyfish for pharmaceutical, environmental and cosmetic treatments, suggesting that these jellyfish matters will play a role in the salvation of human life on Earth. Such trends in jellyfish research have re-made them as, in the words of Dmitri Papadopoulos and his co-authors, a ‘reactivated element’ of bioremediation. For them, elemental reactivations can create new situations by ‘catalyzing new modes of thought and action, waking up new insights from the slumber of the familiar and mundane’. While the uptake of jellyfish within a newly entangled sensory environment seems to promise a redistribution of agency and knowledge production across a multi-species collective, I argue here that it ultimately reifies familiar worlds. Namely, I explore how jellyfish have joined other biological agents as sensory devices and remediation technologies amid a world of petrochemicals. Through a close reading of scientific texts and interviews with scientists, I show how engagements with jellyfish reproduce the structures of petrocapitalism rather than shaking them. I ultimately consider how the concept of the ‘glitch’ in digital media might expand understandings of jellyfish beyond fossil fuels and the history of extractivism.

This article traces the emergence of modern smell as a media relation, one that evolves trough geographic practices of making and knowing the world. We follow the quintessential olfactory media, ambergris, from the context of its proto-industrial commodification on the New England whale fishery ship decks, through its formal application in the perfumer’s atelier, and then into proprietary molecular formulation by the global flavour and fragrance industry. Smell in this medial frame can be understood as a process and method of connecting things in the world a certain way, of querying how power moves through things, and how sensory experience itself structures history.

Embodied and proximate experiences of cryospheric environments are often pitted against the more abstract realms of climate science, especially those associated with remote sensing, laboratory analysis and computational modelling. In this article I argue that knowledge of ice must be poly-perspectival and relational. Experiences from the field actively shape scientific insights and provide important contextual understandings of how the work was carried out and the ways in which measurements may have been arrived at and verified. This in turn elicits an ethical plea and methodological prompt as to how technical modes of sensing of ice could be further integrated into sociocultural assemblies especially those involving local knowledge traditions and the embodied experiences of living and working on ice.

The Mackenzie Valley Pipelines were two competing natural gas pipelines proposed in the early 1970s that faced unprecedented scrutiny after then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called for an inquiry into its impacts at the behest of the Dene, Inuit and Métis whose ways of life would be impacted by these lines, appointing Justice Thomas Berger to be its commissioner. After holding formal hearings with stakeholders and a series of hearings in the primarily Indigenous communities along the proposed path of the pipelines, which made the Inquiry take about twice as long as normal, Berger recommended a ten-year moratorium on construction to resolve outstanding Indigenous land claims and devise a new route to avoid disrupting the annual migration of a caribou herd numbering in the 100,000s. Around fifty years later, the pipeline has not been built. This short article turns to the senses and sensing of permafrost communicated at the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, speculating on what figuring permafrost as infrastructure and media might offer us today as we enter an age of planetary thawing.

In this photo essay, we mobilize digital media to sense elemental phenomena at the same time as we ask what ‘elements’ – what constitutive, material and fundamental substrates – enable digitally mediated sensations. Taking an infrastructural perspective, we focus on data centres as core elements that condition digital systems. We describe data centres as zones of elemental intensity where globally distributed material compositions are concentrated, transduced and crystallized. Drawing from fieldwork across the Midwestern United States, we reflect on ‘haze’ as a material trace of these zones as well as an aesthetic sense of the terraforming undertaken to develop infrastructures of computation.

This article presents a photo essay reflecting on the past, present and potential futures of infrastructural mediation in the northern Canadian town of Churchill, Manitoba. Focusing on an array of sensing media and practices, it considers the complexity of emerging environmental relations in Churchill in light of its colonial and industrial pasts, and current plans for Indigenous-led economic development.

Review of: Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton (2022)

Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 436 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-77046-289-2, h/bk, $39.95

Crude: A Memoir, Pablo Fajardo, Sophie Tardy-Joubert and Damien Roudeau (2021)

University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi, 127 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-27108-806-8, h/bk, USD 19.95