To label yourself a materialist does not necessarily by itself mean much. The term is something that demands explication, instead of explaining by its own powers. The long histories of materialism and idealism in philosophy are one reference point, but so are the everyday uses of the term: do we refer to it as the opposite of spiritual or ethical (as in expressions of disgust toward the materialist aspects of consumer society) or refer to the reality of machines and technology that structure our life. The Marxist legacy in political thought and theory has given us indication what historical materialism...

The debates about the Anthropocene and electronic waste underline a necessity to engage with the geophysical stakes of media cultural infrastructure. Much of recent years’ focus has been on the cloud and its promise of disappearance of hardware and the immaterial embeddedness in data. However, the cloud brings with it a demand to develop new political vocabularies that address the double bind of technical materiality and conceptual immateriality, as Seb Franklin argues.¹ The issue of the cloud extends to software cultures and their disappearance into a branch of the service industries;² it brandishes the importance of the hardware in new...

A lesson from the early geological discourse of the eighteenth century: earth is a massive heat engine. Inside it lies the bursting hot molten core as a seemingly eternal and yet historically formed source of energy. The rise and movement of landmasses from the seas is the breath of the earth. What sounds like the later Gaia theory of the earth as a living entity is already in limited ways part of the earlier geological discourse. Inhale, exhale. The soil is a central mediating element. Agriculture cultivates life, but soil is media—or like the currently increasing demand for synthetic...

I used to live in the north. Even southern Finland had its fair share of snow some years, which meant the necessity to bring skis to sports class and, on alternate weeks, skates. Next to the ice skating rink was something to which one never really paid attention: the snow depot, growing from the snow gathered by clearing the streets after snowy nights. The mounds were sometimes rather big even in such a small town and perfect natural, although temporary, hills for sliding or building a snow castle.

I never thought of them as much more than that. I never...

This chapter follows the path of geology outward to space. It also moves from deep times to future times by speculating on the idea of future fossils, as a future temporality turned back to the current moment. The fossil is in this sense a question about the contemporary that expands across multiple times. We are forced to investigate the persistence of the fossil as a material monument that signals a radical challenge to prevailing notions of time. This happened in the early modern times, with fossils presented as material evidence that was incapable of fitting into the scheme of biblical...

Geology of media deals with the weird intersections of earth materials and entangled times. It includes several events that reveal this combination of the planetary ancient and the technologically advanced. The futuristic changes place with the obsolete in ways that are at times too close to notice. The design culture of the new hides the archaic materials of the planet.

The explosive event of industrialization was dependent on new forms of energy; coal, oil, and gas became main drives replacing the reliance on wind, water, plants, trees, and animals as energy sources.¹ After dirty aesthetics of coal that painted the...