THE NEW TOPOGRAPHICS, DARK ECOLOGY, AND THE ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE OF NATIONS: CONSIDERING AGENCY IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDWARD BURTYNSKY AND MITCH EPSTEIN FROM A POST-ANARCHIST PERSPECTIVE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Edward Burtynsky’s aesthetic and the New Topographic aesthetic from which it derives, I argue, should not be seen as apolitical but rather as traces of an empire in ruins and a sociality to come; that is, by employing a post-anarchist analysis, I demonstrate how Burtynsky’s photographs in his recent collection Oil, and Mitch Epstein’s images from American Power, produce an aesthetic of what Yves Abrioux calls “intensive landscaping,” or “landscaping as style, as the promise of a social spacing yet to come” (264). What Burtynsky and Epstein accomplish in their photographs related to energy in particular is “to invent relations, rather than assert ideological or cultural control” (ibid.); the place of energy extraction and transport becomes not a self-contained striation of ecological degradation, but a “place of passage,” to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, a depiction of wildness and civilization in contact, assembled and reformulating the landscape into something other. The aesthetic under consideration has much in common with Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” and Stephanie LeManager’s “feeling ecological,” theories that attempt to understand the affective connections between the infrastructure of oil capitalism and ecology (“Petro-Melancholia” 27).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".