Empathy machines
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It’s just a sky on a facebook post. Covered with clouds, portrayed in black and white, slightly overexposed on the lower right corner. It could be roughly an anonymous shot shabbily shared on social media by someone at ease on a picnic blanket. Relaxing. Familiar. Confident. It could be a glimpse after dusk. Yes, they are clouds. They would be any cirrus clouds, were it not for the fact that they are a few million kilometers away, precisely on “Mont Mercou” as seen by the Right Navigation Camera onboard Nasa’s Mars rover Curiosity. The Planetary Geologist Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, describes the phenomenon at the beginning of Gale crater’s cloudy season. Floating up in an atmosphere unbreathable to human beings, those clouds are made up of water ice crystals. Above the over 30K comments spilling both astonishment and rude irony stands the image caption, glossing a “taken by my right Navigation Camera”, followed by the testifying hyperlink to martian weather forecast. It is not someone reporting from afar, rather a rover labeled as Curiosity. A label is a name and a name means identity, backing to an empathy machine conflating soft emotions into the space development register. With a side effect. This lens brings back elements of primordial animism, straight there in the middle of scientific research, with a storytelling point of view not new to the aerospace communication developers. We can recall the Opportunity’s poignant “My battery is low and it’s getting dark”. They aren’t really the same as the coded signal data that the rover sent before it lost contact. The phrase originated by a Twitter thread by science reporter Jacob Margolis and then fastly went viral.
Alexander Galloway spotted the opaque lens in user interfaces. They are not objective, they rather represent. You know what’s in the system described by a telescope analogy, yet the system is actually working as a black box. Once transliterated in a text-based domain, those raw data borrow a syntax rooting way back before Europe was stormed by a bat-winged plague traded by dust devils along the Silk Road. In days of pandemic impermanence, this could be a still from a stummfilm featuring Colin Wilson’s voice. It’s a timely Golden Journey to Samarkand, while earthlings strive to find a balance within their Pale Blue Dot and, somewhere, their probes are squandering water-drained lithospheres with remnants of their exoskeletons. We could try digging deeper into Bruno Latour assumptions that all societies continue to “animate” the world around them and human beings continue to create personal relationships with rovers as if they would be teddy-bears or pets. We could stress over to Nurit Bird-David animism as a “relational epistemology” rather than a failure of primitive reasoning, or blink to a Chalmer’s extended mind thesis. Packed in a Deep Space Network, this is only one of the many future points «at which virtually all information will be spontaneously available and copyable at the individual level». By this perspective, the mystical allure of the natural elements is since ages operating the vast transformation hollowly repeated by the late Gene Youngblood in his seminal Expanded Cinema.
«Che la materia pensi, è un fatto», Giacomo Leopardi was used to say. And, while the echo of Rosi Braidotti’s controversial statements on space colonization has not yet extinguished, social media are flooding our devices with drilling widgets paving the way to Nuwa City. Stromatolites or not, this momentary shift to panpsychism will be wiped out once the terraforming of Mars will take place. Can you hear it? A mechanical cricket is already rubbing the elytra one hundred and eighteen years after Kill Devils Hills, millions of kilometers away before its leaps. Let’s enjoy this astral journey, staring at the sky as if on our lawns, safely covered under our screens as evening blankets in a warm promising springy evening.