{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":85,"pdf_page":101,"physical_index":101,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ad3b28548cb5e41b1061270804706bcf7a8053411c5bbbff25e97e37d38e0bc9"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"This process demonstrates that geography, geoscopy, and geopolitics are also related to the more ambitious and ambiguous operations of geoaesthetics. The composability of the Earth, as both figure and ground, mark and canvas, long precedes the global geometries of The Stack, but the latter inevitably still draws on many varied precedent gestures. Scores of ancient geoglyphs dot landscapes on all continents, carved into the skin of the planet or assembled with rocks put in lines for the viewing benefit of aerial audiences: deities, birds, skies, and whatever else might be observing from the top of the world. Landscape is given a face. <sup>34</sup> The advent and eventual predominance of formal agriculture permanently refixed that face ’ s expression, helped to geoengineer the Holocene climate, and with this terraforming also brought the archaic state and urban settlement. If viewed from the sky by the geoglyphs ’ audiences, agricultural megastriations might allow for a legible index of the accumulating distribution of different genres of biogovernance as distributed across the sphere; that is, different typologies of political form can be interpreted by differences in their physical landscapes viewed as geo-graphic drawings. In dialogue with the new externalized perspectives of the space age, this was not lost on art and design, and the very early years of planetary computation and global media (approximately 1964 to 1975) saw an explosion of land art, earthworks, and speculative megastructural architecture. For example, the Italian studios Archizoom and Superstudio made some of the most durable megastructural gestures from inside architectural discourse, while the American artist Robert Smithson left a body of work linking geoglyphic-scale sculpture with generative cinema <sup>35</sup> and cartographic semiotics with anarchist geography (his “ mapping dislocations ” ). <sup>36</sup> In these works, we see visual inscriptions into landscapes and images of those inscriptions blending into the same pottery, such that real drawing into the ground and the image of the drawing can swap places; the land becomes an image and the image becomes territorial, both of them equally infrastructural. This conduction between the two is by no means exclusive to institutional art and design and belongs to computation just as dearly. In 1968 Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders took the famous “ Earthrise ” photograph, which would become among the most iconic and influential portraits of the whole planet Earth, and as for any island utopia, the totality of the singular figure of the Earth against a black abyss, here seen from specific external position on the moon, would invite projects of total design. <sup>37</sup> This image map from the “ outside ” reframed the very figurability of territorial ground as such and suggested a single, absolute scale for Earthly culture and ecology and a single planetary “ inside. ” <sup>38</sup> That figure inspired as well the popular ecology movement by providing it a self-evident domain to conserve, commune, or administer.\n\nEarth Layer\n\n85","previous_page":84,"next_page":86}