Dr Stephen Cornford

• Art & Technology
• Media Ecology
• Digital Image Cultures

My research critiques the unsustainability and asymmetry of digital technology and scientific knowledge production, specifically engaging with the visual cultures of earth science, mineral prospecting, and remote sensing. The technical images of geophysics and atmospheric sensing have the potential to mitigate or ameliorate climate change, just as the digital images circulated in the attention economy are exacerbating and accelerating it. In these cultures of pervasive imaging, data visualisations are often held up as objective arbiters that access otherwise imperceptible truths. My filmmaking practice questions the power held by such images, scrutinises their invisibilities, biases, and the interests they serve. Much of this research is conducted through collaboration with scientific researchers: for example alongside the Horizon EU project GREENPEG, or via an Earth Art Fellowship at Bristol University.

In my theoretical writing, I conceive of these earth-sensing technological systems as "spectral geotechnics" which incorporate the technicities of geological materials—their capacity to reflect, refract, transmit and detect the electromagnetic spectrum—into their functions. Understanding the production of knowledge as equally inherent in the environment as it is in the brain provides a means to counter human exceptionalism and acknowledge the material agencies essential to science and technology.