10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17385
application/pdf
2038-3460
17385
2
en
Caspar Menkman
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth. Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet, University of Minnesota Press, 2016
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Book Reviews
2018-01-29
2023-06-25
2018-01-29
2023-08-24
229-233
TS
Caspar Menkman
2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17385
229
Maynooth University
2038-3460
2
en
233
Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth. Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet, University of Minnesota Press, 2016
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17385/16245
8
Book Review                                                                    229
tures of the future” (Knox 2017, 363). Such observations of performativi-
ty do not only affirm the relevance and timeliness of The Experimental
City, but also the importance of substantial STS engagement with the is-
sues it puts forward and the types of cities it enacts.

References
Castán Broto, V. and Bulkeley, H. (2013) A survey of urban climate change ex-
       periments in 100 cities, in “Global Environmental Change”, 23 (1), pp.
       92-102.
Geels, F.W. (2002) Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration pro-
       cesses: a multi-level perspective and a case-study, in “Research Policy”, 31
       (8–9), pp. 1257-1274.
Gieryn, T.F. (2006) City as Truth-Spot: Laboratories and Field-Sites in Urban
       Studies, in “Social Studies of Science” 36 (1), pp. 5-38.
Karvonen, A. and van Heur, B. (2014) Urban Laboratories: Experiments in Re-
      working Cities, in “International Journal of Urban and Regional Re-
      search”, 38 (2), pp. 379-392.
Knox, H. (2017) The Problem of Action: Infrastructure, planning and the infor-
      mational environment, in P. Harvey, C. B. Jensen, and A. Morita (eds.),
      Infrastructures and Social Complexity, a companion, New York,
      Routledge, pp. 352-365.
Laurent, B. and Tironi, M. (2015) A field test and its displacements. Accounting
       for an experimental mode of industrial innovation, in “CoDesign”, 11 (3-
       4), pp. 208–221.


                                       ***

   Jennifer Gabrys
Program Earth. Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a
Computational Planet, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
2016, pp. 368

Caspar Menkman Maynooth University

    Program Earth is about the becoming environmental of computation.
In this book Jennifer Gabrys attends to the (per)formative role that calcu-
lative and sensing technologies play as part of everyday and extraordinary
environments. These spatializing properties have previously been re-
marked on in other academic disciplines. For instance authors in com-
puter science (Weiser 1993), social science (Kitchin and Dodge 2011),
230                                                         Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

and media studies (Hayles 2009) have emphasised the complexities that
arise as coded technologies and spatial operations become mutually de-
pendent.
    What makes Gabrys' contribution to this discourse distinctive is her
propositional approach. She presents the reader with an engaged narra-
tive on the role of sensors, computation, and associated technologies as
part of everyday environments. Throughout the book she introduces en-
counters that range across different environments and involve different
actors with wholly different intentions. In some of these, technologies are
made explicitly visible, while others show them as part of the back-
ground, quietly going about their work. However, what all they have in
common is the formative role of sensor technologies. In Program Earth
Gabrys asks the reader to reflect on what this means. And, to accomplish
this effectively, she develops a set of theoretical and philosophical asser-
tions that carefully position the public alongside environments and tech-
nologies. Such an appreciation, she argues, can change how we are part of
environments, how environments function, and how otherwise distinctive
spaces are able to relate to each other.
    The book could possibly have been called “Programmable Earth”.
Whereas a program refers to a structure that is followed, Gabrys intends
to describe something else. She sets up computation, code, and data as
part of encounters between environments, devices, and other entities to
show how they become together. This approach is distinct from utilitari-
an narratives that promise technology's immediacy, neutrality, or efficien-
cy; and equally from those critiques that point towards programmatic or
disciplinary capacities. For Gabrys, sensors enable an “expanded en-
gagement with programmability” that helps to consider “how code is not
a discursive structure or rule that acts on things, but rather is an embod-
ied and embedded set of operations that are articulated across devices,
environments, practices, and imaginations” (p. 41). This distributed ap-
proach to action and encoding, links her work to theorists of more-than-
human relations (Haraway 2016), co-production of politics and space
(Jasanoff 2004), or other literatures that are hesitant to accept ex ante
normative categories or deterministic relations. That is not to say that
power and the potentials associated with technology are forgotten. A re-
curring theme is the distributed spatial effects including the issues that
arise with access, constraints in use, and skills. However, her focus re-
mains with interdependencies and the productive qualities that emerge
from these operations.
    Program Earth consists of three sections: “Wild Sensing”, “Pollution
Sensing”, and “Urban Sensing” and each is made up of three chapters.
The sections represent distinctive epistemic projects wherein sensors to-
gether with humans and non-humans constitute directed techno-
geographic milieus. In the individual chapters Gabrys settles on a handful
of empirical examples that follow comparable logics to illustrate a partic-
Book Review                                                             231
ular, often theoretical, contribution. While the chapters can be read indi-
vidually, as they are relatively self-contained, all of them rely heavily on
the introductory chapter. Throughout these first thirty pages the reader is
familiarized with the author’s spatial thinking that comes from construc-
tivist roots, with Whitehead, Simondon, and Stengers being the primary
interlocutors. Here she also introduces her key spatial metaphors: envi-
ronment, milieu, and ecology.
    The section on “Wild Sensing” describes remotely monitored envi-
ronments that primarily serve human learning and understanding. This
topic is explored to illustrate how sensors act on existent environmental
relations. While the adjective “wild” in the section's title suggests these
spaces are typically not considered subject to human intervention, the as-
sumed distance between observed environment, the technologies that
monitor, and other entities enrolled in the process of observation is ques-
tioned. Gabrys does this by stating that within these environments sen-
sors operate “not as instruments sensing something ‘out there’ but rather
as devices for making present and interpretable distinct types of ecologi-
cal processes” (p. 29). Sensors and networks do not just extend the reach
of people, but equally make environments show up as active. This fits
with recent work in STS that turns to ontology (e.g., Law and Lien 2013)
to focus on the contingency of events, objects, and entities. In doing so,
Gabrys shows the generative potential of sensors to produce and couple
previous unconnected environments with contextual knock-on effects.
    A demonstrative example is Spillcam, a stationary webcam installed to
livestream the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil-spill. Gabrys shows how a
single camera allowed for the distribution of interest to this environmen-
tal disaster by enabling the formation of new spaces, practices, and identi-
ties in response to it. It visualised the ongoing crisis, the scale of which
would otherwise remained largely inapproachable and hidden to the gen-
eral public. While turning to such a vision of an event evidently also
leaves things out, the overarching thesis of the chapter is that sensor-
based monitoring can draw those not immediately present into a relation
to particular events.
    In the chapters themed “Pollution Sensing” Gabrys explores the sta-
tus and potential uses of sensors as having an impact on the coding of en-
vironments. By doing this, she strikes a more political tone as strategic
and speculative applications of data to environments are considered. The-
se, she argues, can contest otherwise taken for granted environmental re-
lations. So where the first section explored how environmental relations
work, here she qualifies what uses they afford to those affected by them.
This involves the tapping into alternative repertoires of knowledge and
possibly the remaking of environmental relations.
    For example environmental citizenship is introduced as a category
that runs counter to modern state-bound definitions of belonging. As the
becoming part of a milieu, it proposes more open-ended ideas around
232                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

who or what should have a stake in the politics of environments. Gabrys
inverts the “politics of environment” to “environmental politics” and ex-
tends membership to all entities with a stake in it. An environment's poli-
tics, she speculates, can be produced from within instead of being im-
posed from without. This is illustrated through sensor technologies that
can act as speculative tools enabling positive engagements with complex
issues like climate change, that for once do not have to pass through the
state. Moreover, the assertion that sensors and the data they generate are
relevant to how environments are performed comes with the considera-
tion that this requires new forms of sensor-based participation. This reve-
lation results into questions like: “What experimental forms of politics
and environmental practices might we develop that are able to attend to
these indeterminate and emergent matters of concern?” (p. 155).
    Finally, in “Urban Sensing”, Gabrys explores the potential of sensors
and their networks to curate and control environments. She introduces
environmentality as an inherently spatial form of governmentality, to
show how sensors can pose a variety of challenges to environments and
their constituencies. The smart city is the paradigmatic example of an en-
vironment where sensors are part of “universal visions” of lived environ-
ments that are “always the same in their striving for optimization” (p.
261). However, as a common thread the author argues for contingency
and difference. Writing that there exist important frictions between re-
gimes that privilege processual expediency on one hand and those that
value privacy and comfort on the other. Not breaking character, Gabrys
develops a set of strategies and tactics to deal with this as “to be simply in
opposition is to be already defeated” (p. 291).
    One tactic for critical reflection is through the conceptual persona of
the idiot. This ideal person does not follow conventions, but instead
questions constitutive characteristics that would otherwise be common-
sensical. This inquisitive approach to sensor technologies allows a fram-
ing that is part of larger infrastructural narratives, where people can move
beyond “simple choices” of subjectification between buy-in or opt-out, to
more open conversations about alternative modes of engagement that
make possible substantive participation in issues involving sensors.
    To conclude, Jennifer Gabrys' book is a timely publication that com-
bines empirical insights with a necessary speculative attitude in an emerg-
ing field. It complements earlier publications that critique or applaud the
utility of sensors by embodying the “could be different” attitude so at
home in STS. It works well as a companion with the work from Gabrys'
own Citizen Sense project as it shows why these trajectories around
emancipation, education, and action based narratives are important. Oth-
er productive directions are discussions on the democratic potentials of
technologies such as those stemming from STS sub-disciplines like the
public understanding of science and technology (Irwin and Wynne 2003).
The abundance of possible connections the work make attest to its fit as
Book Review                                                                   233
part of the current discourse on science and technology. Whereas by itself
it offers a provocative and engaging read. To me its the propositional ap-
proach Gabrys follows, in combination with the rich empirical accounts
on societally pressing issues, that makes it helpful in challenging the oth-
erwise settled rules and roles of science and technology.

References
Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene,
      Durham, Duke University Press.
Hayles, N.K. (2009) RFID: Human agency and meaning in information-intensive
       environments, in “Theory, Culture & Society”, 26 (2-3), pp. 47–72.
Irwin, A. Wynne, B. (2003) Misunderstanding science?: the public reconstruction
        of science and technology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Jasanoff, S. (2004) The idiom of co-production, in S. Jasanoff (ed.), States of
       knowledge: the co-production of science and social order, London,
       Routledge, pp. 1–12.
Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. (2011) Code/space: Software and everyday life, Cam-
       bridge, MA, MIT Press.
Law, J., Lien, M.E. (2013) Slippery: Field notes in empirical ontology, in “Social
        Studies of Science”, 43 (3), pp. 363–378.



                                       ***

     Markus Krajewski, Jasmin Meerhoff and Stephan Trüby
(eds.)
Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen. Zwischen Service-Korridor und Ambient In-
telligence [Architectures of Subservience. Between Back-Corridors and
Ambient Intelligence], Tübingen-Berlin, Wasmuth, 2017, pp. 462

   Andreas Meier and Edy Portmann (eds.)
Smart City. Strategie, Governance und Projekte [Smart City. Strategy,
Governance and Projects], Wiesbaden, Springer Vieweg, 2016, pp.
346
Susann Wagenknecht Siegen University

    Smart cities, talk of the town. But are we about to construct a new ur-
ban architecture indeed – an architecture that will serve the needs of our
cities better, in more efficient, more sustainable and more participatory
