Forecast Earth: Hole, Index, Alert

Abstract

The author discusses the media developed to record and process sunlight as an environmental threat, especially ozone holes, ultraviolet indexes, and automated hazard alerts. These media are illustrative of how environmental precaution is produced by Earth-observing systems and indicative of how the politics of industrial transformations are shaped by the logistics of maintaining a data-processing infrastructure for observing dangerous environmental changes. The article attempts to process the effects of the shifting technological dimensions of Earth-observing with respect to the mathematical models and media infrastructure required for processing signals of environmental change, and to re-situate how we understand precaution on this terrain.