Unvironment: the dark cloud of smog and intelligent data

To propose any ‘environment’, be it cultural or natural, is to assume a perceiving subject or group of subjects present within its milieu. Although the subject(s) may be intimately linked, even a part of, the given milieu there is a degree of separation required to have identified the environment as such. An ‘environment’ to a human is not like water to an urchin – an urchin doesn’t perceive it’s surrounding water. A human, on a sliding scale from the immediate to the global, perceives an environment.

This paper will introduce the idea of an ‘unvironment’as an affect of two contaminant entities: the debated geological epoch of the ‘Anthropcene’and of ‘Ambient Intelligence’, the quasi-intelligent infrastructure of a digital meteorology capable of acting on behalf of the human. The ‘Anthropcene’and ‘Ambient Intelligence’ have twofold effects – both increase the intimacy of the human with its milieu, whilst at the same time diminishing the very same human agent, fulfilling the ultimate dream of techne: to collapse time by unleashing the past in the form of hydrocarbons.

Likewise, seen synthetically ‘Ambient Intelligence’ and the ‘Anthropcene’can be seen as reaching one unified body that intensifies the tie between the technical and the natural. This deepening comes at the specific cost of the human. This is no longer an environment for us, but an ‘unvironment’of our own making. The paper will draw specifically from Fritz Leiber’s weird fiction classic The Black Gondola,wherein amongst the oil derricks of Venice California, raw crude oil murders the only heretical witness to its demonic pact with these machines.

Matthew Shannon is an artist and writer living in Amsterdam. He has previously exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and is currently at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. He has written for a number of Australian magazines including Art & Australia and is currently researching and producing a film structured according to how a computer recognises the trace of the human.