Thermocultures of Geological Media

tags

Media

Notes

the techniques through which geological matter is transformed into circulations of media

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manipulation of heat is critical to the transformation of the earth’s raw materials into media and to maintaining those materials as media.

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thermal technologies underpin the standardization of culture,

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The drive toward purity that structures the thermal production of digital hardware is neither necessary nor neutral. It is designed specifically to reduce error and compartmentalize digital content.

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we might imagine a tolerance for subtle variations across media objects

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The Purity of Elements

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The idea that copper and silica exist as separate entities is a cultural belief already informed by their potential extractive uses.

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separate valuable minerals from the “waste rock.”

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components of most contemporary elec- tronic devices, however, are not produced from natural quartz mined from the earth but rather cultured silica glass or synthetic silicon substrates that are grown via the Czochralski process.

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99 percent copper, but even this is insufficient for contemporary electronics production. In a final stage, electrolytic refining, large slabs of almost pure copper are immersed in a solution that is shot through with a current of over 200 amps, dissolving the copper atoms from the slabs and generating a material that is 99.99 percent pure.

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When the first undersea telegraph cables were laid in the 1850s, the lower-purity copper that was available contributed to the signal’s attenuation as it crossed the seas.

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Without the emphasis on purification and its enactment via thermal technologies, digital media would appear neither instantaneous nor seamless.

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the definition of purity — the designation of one set of phenomena as clean (in this case, the copper or silicon communications circuit) — is integrally tied to the production of pollution. The higher the purity required in a particular element or compound, the more chemicals and thermal control are needed and the more waste is generated.

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Even Temperature

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If superheated furnaces are prime instru- ments of elemental purity, air conditioners are technologies of media’s uniformity.

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uranium and thorium impurities of only one part per billion, but the radioactive decay of these elements can nonetheless cause “soft errors” in semiconductor technologies

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the susceptibility of paper to climate was “one of the great- est difficulties the color printer [was] up against”

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The problem of temperature was not only of the external climate but of the excess heat generated by the presses themselves.

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Presses in different climatic zones could thus operate at different speeds with differing degrees of accuracy.

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every morning, the machines would be cold: “It requires considerable time to warm up . . . if one put his hand upon a press or cutter he experiences a cold shock,” and it was not until midday that everything worked “just right”

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Libraries and archives depend heavily on cooling technologies

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most thermal practices of preservation are devoted to maintain- ing an even temperature, preventing the natural fluctuations over the course of a day or a year.

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there can be no discussion of avoiding temperature altogether

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museums, through such expansive technologies of climate control, become “ ‘objectification machine[s]’ that [endeavor] to transform and stabilize artworks as meaningful ‘objects’ that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated.”

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Productive Variation

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the shift to energy-intensive cooling mechanisms substitutes the waste of media objects for the waste produced by fossil fuels.

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“the work of computation is the work of managing heat.”

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In fiber-optic cables, it is precisely the failure to produce a totally pure silica glass that makes the capability of earth sensing possible.

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Thermocultures

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even though “cooking in general, and breadmaking in particular, may be regarded as central to the empirical foundations of technology and science, even the most general references to either is consistently and conspicuously absent from standard historical surveys of Western technology,”

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