Multispecies Sensing
Jussi Parikka
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Much of media history and media theory has been written in the register of human sensing and communication. This, at first, seems an almost naturalized state of emergence of a whole discipline, considering that by definition media have been seen as extensions of Man (as per Marshall McLuhan’s phrase) and as a regime of human sociality through different social and technical conventions defining distance and proximity, as in many social science approaches. Feminist, queer, and posthuman critiques of grounding premises of media studies, alongside other approaches that have broadened the scope of media and communications, have opened up a much more vibrant field of material interactions that redefine also what is at stake in this keyword: from human to more-than-human and multispecies sensing. This approach combines animal studies and environmental humanities. It is also present in media and STS research that is interested in the expanded set of sensing and mediation that both a) captures animals as datapoints (Benson 2010) and b) reframes sensing altogether as part of an ecological field of concerns. As Gabrys and Pritchard (2018, 395) articulate well: a multispecies ethical stance to sensing understands it as a varying set of practices, and such a critical field is paying attention to “different articulations of sense, particularly in relation to technologies of environmental monitoring, data gathered for evidentiary claims, the formation of citizens, and more-than-human entanglements. Sensing-as-practice also allows for an attention to experience that does not concentrate exclusively on a human subject, but instead accounts for a vast range of sensing subjects, from stones to insects.”
I have tried to tackle related concerns through the history of animals and technology. I’ve proposed insect media, which was also the title of my book-length earlier exploration of the theme (Parikka 2010), as a hybrid term that is meant to mark a particular kind of theme for intellectual inquiry with a historical bent. It is a navigational concept that ties threads of media history, or “media archaeology,” into a conceptual argument about the multispecies context of technical media in ways that challenge the human-centred premise of media theory. Animals are not (technical) machines, but the historical epistemic map of animals as intelligent, sensing, complex entities has a lot to say in ways that have and can inform design, computation, and thus media theory too.
Insect media expands from human communication to a cartography of non-human animal forces that define particular moments in historical terms. Some of these might be seen as metaphorical uses, but as I insist, there are also other registers of materiality or material semiotics at play that reach much beyond the metaphorical. I am here echoing Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, and Lucia Pietroiusti (2020, 6) – “as we see machines achieve even greater capacity for computation and action that mimic human consciousness, several traditions, beliefs, and lines of work continue to remind us how human intelligence finds itself always already interwoven with a multitude of thinking and sensing entities”. This is also one good summary of the stakes in multispecies sensing and its relation to emerging fields such as multispecies intellectual history (see Honda, forthcoming).
A cultural history of animals, read through the gradual birth of modern entomology since the 19th century, reveals a pertinent example. A comprehensive insight into insects was needed for reasons of control of agricultural production and pests, including migrating populations of animals, but also plant specimens, as part of the logistical intensification of global movement of biomass. In addition, though, the implications of the alternative sensoria of non-human animals produced a discourse that itself was part of the experimental set of understanding sensing in a variety of registers of the physical world, irreducible to humans. Such late 19th century scientists as John Lubbock – at least as well-known also for his archaeological work and his political career – are excellent examples of the work that picks up on the sciences and media of the electromagnetic spectrum in relation to animals such as ants.
Lubbock’s experimental work produced his influential claim about ants’ capacity to sense ultraviolet radiation and the extension of sensing of invisible light: “My main conclusions were that ants, Daphnias, etc., were able to perceive light of different wave-lengths, and that their eyes were sensitive to the ultraviolet rays much beyond our limits of vision.” (Lubbock 1888, 207). Such work is part of the broader lineage concerning the problem of vision and visuality that emerges at the intersection of new media of the 19th century, psychophysiology, and the broader investigation of materialities of sensing that are often seen through a focus on research of human capacities of seeing, vision, and nerves (Crary 2001) but actually include this wider animal spectrum too. It is AI – animal intelligence, animal sensing.
Such work of multispecies intermingling happens not only in view of questions of materiality of sensing that form a significant part of the media archaeology of visual technologies. They are also present in discourses of space – such as architecture (Ramírez 2000) – as well as, for example, in the later mid-20th century research in information, intelligence, and cybernetics. This helps to frame a particular position that goes beyond writing empirical cultural and intellectual histories of non-human animals, but also builds a model of sensing that expands into the fundamental question of what agents, entities, and ecologies of sensing are being sensed in historical research. It is thus also a methodological question.
As much of current critical debate about AI and similar technologies of “intelligence” are about showing how reduced understanding of (human) intelligence is at play, I am more interested in what other models of intelligence have been circulating in earlier discourses of AI as animal intelligence or “ant intelligence”, to refer to one of Lubbock’s articles (Lubbock 1877). The incorporation of animals such as bees into informatic frameworks of signs, signals, and patterns already in the 1950s (Von Frisch 1955; Parikka 2010, 121-130) is emblematic of the instrumentalization of animal sensing into what comes out as models of technological sensing (including, for example, movement) too.
It is of course not merely about bees as a distinct category that forces us to consider the fundamental unit of “media” and sensing: the whole bestial history of technology is witness to this, from Cold War projects on multispecies dolphin communication (Peters 2020) to the variety of other animals that either become models of embodied sensing other than human or that become incorporated into the measurement apparatuses that form central elements in history of data and media: cats, birds, and horses in early cinematic experiments, such as Étienne-Jules Marey’s late 19th century chronophotography are an example of this.
Even if much of the human history of capture of multispecies sensing concerns utilitarian ends, we can and should entertain the question of whether there is more radical potential even in cartographies that expand beyond the anthropocentric narrative and continue the project of critical posthumanities (Braidotti 2019), too. Such directions have gained much more currency over the past years, especially in the context of anthropological scholarship and multispecies histories and ethnographies (Locke and Muenster 2015). In this vein, we can continue the investigation of how multispecies angles can feature in media studies and media theory as well.
Acknowledgements
The research for this chapter was supported by the AUFF (Aarhus) grant Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data (2022-2025).
References
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