Seeding and Seeing

The inner colonisation of land and vision

Abstract

In this paper, the coupled performance of both visual apparatus and infrastructures on the ground will be considered from what Eva Horn has called a ‘medial a priori’: the “assemblages or constellations of certain technologies, fields of knowledge, and social institutions” (Horn 8) that become the conditions of possibility of processes, transformations or events. A medial a priori consisting of “discourse networks, cultural techniques and formations of knowledge” (Siegert The map is the territory 15) that, in the broadest sense, goes even beyond the technical assemblages, to deal with the flows of energy and matter that give rise to them. In this vein, the interweaving of operations of light that gives rise to the seeded and the seen steps into what Jussi Parikka has framed as an alternative deep time of media, where “any consideration of media should start not from media but outside it” (Earth Volumes 124).