The status of that ecology in relation to the designer, considered now in emergent models of software and sovereignty, conjoins sensing, sense-making, and image-making into a generic infrastructure of sensors, databases, displays, firmware-in-the-wild, and so on — in other words, a “ stack ” system that both reflects and congeals what it “ represents ” technically and politically. The columns going up and down the paths of this Stack link a politics of seeing to a politics of our being seen, and through them, one becomes the other. It compiles a diagnostic image by diagramming present and potential relationships between agents within its line of sight. We assume that any (human or nonhuman) component ’ s ability to recognize and consume that image, and thereby also consume the projection of a set of potential governable relationships between the variables within that interface, does so not just for utilitarian imperative but with real affective intensity. In this utility and intensity, another proposition is made about how it is that we may sense the world, or how the sensibility of the world might be distributed or organized, made infrastructural, and activated to become part of how the landscape understands and narrates itself. It is not only a diagnostic image then; it is a tool for a geo-politics in formation, emerging from the parametric multiplication and algorithmic conjugation of our surplus projections of worlds to come, perhaps in mimetic accordance with one explicit utopian conception or another, and perhaps not. Nevertheless, the decision between what is and is not governable may arise as much from what the model computational image cannot do as much as from what it can. Its geopolitical effects are as reliant on stockpiles of failures as on capacities for success. This is no less true of the surplus of interfacial utopias constituted with information visualization than it is for the parliamentary politics born of an agrarian time and persisting long enough to provide funding for those Viking missions to Mars.
The Stack to Come
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