Topographic Algorithms: Reimagining Environmental Sensing and Representation

Abstract

forms—as carried through the optical sciences, the striations of cartography, and the diagrammatic reasoning seen in graphs, charts, and, later, databases. Sean Cubbitt’s own genealogy of the graphical line is predicated similarly on its use as a conceptual tool of perceptual and cognitive delimitation and stratification: ‘to abstract form from the manifold of perception, to select and translate reality and the experience of it into signs . . . to extract edges from what can actually be seen: color [sic] and texture. Line is itself an instrument of order, imposed as artifice on a world without lines’. Nevertheless, it is from within this crucible of varied technical, conceptual, and aesthetic striations that alternative imaginaries also become apparent. In Landform, the lines generated by its machine vision routine are largely nonconformal with any particular terrain features, their circuitous vectors being driven by a logic that is expressly nonrepresentational—treating the terrain as a matrix of abstract values, rather than emulating the intuitions of human vision. The effect is to emphasise the enacted nature of such framings within sensory operations, staging the more-than-human functioning of digital perception as the product of computed thresholds that can realise a plurality of forms otherwise unapparent in the source imagery. This is a conscious gesture within Landform towards an expanded conception of visual intelligence more broadly, to invoke Gabrys’ earlier call, while resisting any assumption that digital representations are direct, humanistic captures of the world they depict. Cubitt similarly observes the potential of lines that unsettle the predominant expectations of conformity and demarcation: ‘once the line declares independence from its representational function as edge and takes on a life of its own, it becomes something— albeit not something fixed’. In Landform this sense of becoming is carried through the generated lines functioning not as arbitrary striations across the terrain, but as esoteric algorithms that provide directives for subsequent operations. These programmatic aspects can be characterised instructively through Timotheus Vermeulen’s conception of the ‘altergorithm’: algorithms that aim not to predict and foreclose the future from a defined present, but instead treat the present as a space of becoming from which myriad futures can be facilitated. More specifically, altergorithms concern the production of artistic ‘models that, first, relate to the possibility of a world that develops differently with, or even independently from human interaction; and second, utilize [sic] technocratic models of prediction to envisage these alternative scenarios that defy all prediction’. As with Stubblefield and Parikka’s own conceptions of the role played by art in generating varied possible futures, the emphasis here lies in enacting speculative gestures, alternative narratives, and more-than-human imaginaries that are firmly rooted in established sociotechnical configurations, but which evaluate the vectors of potential within them, however strange or unlikely, and so highlighting their essential contingency. It is in this sense that the programmatic aspects of Landform operate: making manifest the underlying divergence of digital sensing and sense-making from the privileged standpoint of human perception, and, therefore, its capacity for enacting vectors of expression and knowing that are very different from those reproduced by established sensory operations. 238 R. A. CARTER