Ethno-cartographies

The TERRA FORMA Equipex project aims to design and test in-situ observatories providing a new multi-messenger vision, coupling the sensors’ viewpoints on human, biotic and abiotic dynamics. This project relies on the latest technological advances to design and test an evolving network of intelligent, connected, low-cost, socially integrated sensors adapted to the field on sometimes difficult sites (examples of sensors: material flow sensors, high resolution chemical flow mapping, carbon tracers, GPS collars, microbial activity monitoring sensors). Three pilot sites have been selected for an initial implementation phase, showing landscape diversity: a mountain ecosystem with Lautaret-Oisans (Alpes), a coastal ecosystem with Plœmeur Guidel (Brittany) and an agricultural ecosystem with Auradé (Occitanie). 

The aim of the « gaiagraphic » cartographies is to produce maps of these observatories and their sensors, both existing and speculative ones. Based on the soil model (developed in the book Terra Forma, Chapter 1), these maps are also an exploration of speculative territories seen through the particular instruments – sensors – that measure environmental variables but also question our relationship to the entities that compose the Earth. The maps aim to trace the emergence of these new environments, or new territories, composed of assemblages of entities, techniques, phenomena, humans and non-humans. 

What do we know about the sensors? How is a sensor set up, for how long is it staying on site? How is data collected and disseminated, translated, and where? What conclusions – or ‘stabilized knowledge’ – are drawn from these sensors, and how does this redefine territories we think we know well, but in fact only understand/apprehend a fragment of? Do we also know which territory is redefined by the aggregate sum of these sensors?

Observatory and sensor maps, and associated research into these new types of inscription (Latour), aim to answer these questions. The use of a cartographic model with an unconventional frame of reference problematizes territories in the present ecological crisis (Aït-Touati, Arènes, Grégoire). Maps are more than just a sum of sensors, even if their tracing is important and constitutes the map’s data. In fact, the map also enables us to read the territory by reterritorializing scientific issues linked to human disturbance, which scientists trace and measure in order to elaborate scenarios for curbing the environmental degradation that threatens the earth’s habitability for non-humans and humans alike. 

The project follows an art, science and politic approach, which aims to propose a redescription of our environment: where and from what do we start, what environment and what (or who) populates it (humans, nonhumans, machines, etc.)? and then consider measured actions. Indeed, these observatories don’t start from ‘nothing’: ecological issues are already well identified, and multiple instruments are already measuring key variables. Therefore, one of the hypotheses explaining why there is no political action commensurate with the current catastrophe may be that science is not sufficiently territorialized – or terrestrialized (Stengers). This territorialization could be achieved by acquiring maps describing this critical zone, which is localized in particular environments but also reactive to major planetary cycles (Gaillardet). Maps to show what the sensors show, but above all to concresce environments (Gabrys) through the different viewpoints of the sensors that give us access to realities. This concrescence of points of view (or « points of life » to borrow Coccia’s term), progressively composes a more cosmopolitical understanding of territories, where more entities are taken into account without living/non-living discrimination. 

Related to Science and Technology studies, this research is also asking the question: what is a sensor? Is the body (human, animal, bacterial, plant) a sensor? What is the new Earth metrology that TERRA FORMA is seeking to establish? Ultimately, the project aims to renew images and imaginaries of the Earth with new instruments-sensors and visualizations (cosmos, cosmograms, etc.).

The methodology for this project is based on field studies, informed visits in situ, with interviews, records and notations; the approach is both quantitative and qualitative (fieldwork). The data is then used to produce a text and a map, followed by a return to the field to discuss the map with local stakeholders (workshops). This stage allows us to write stories about this new discovered Earth.

To create these gaiagraphies, we conducted ethnographic observations (following science in action), to understand the practices of scientists in the field, and the development of the technical process of the sensors and their implementation on site. Then, we mapped the complex environments monitored and measured in the three observatories. By observing and analyzing the practices of geoscientists in their field, the critical zone observatories (OZCAR) and the Zone Ateliers networks that are part of the TERRA FORMA project, we have generated mappings and narratives on how sensors change the way we understand environments. In further development, we aim at using this knowledge in design of territories to inform spatial policies and practitioners on the necessity to care about scientific results discussing the habitability of our degraded environment.

The three main objectives of this research are:
I. To follow the scientists who gain new knowledge on territories by developing new sensors to understand geophysics, water circulation, chemical exchanges (circulation of carbon, nitrates, phosphorus, either activated by microorganisms or disturbed by human activities such as agriculture or industry), etc. II. To trace the instruments/sensors developed and implemented in the observatories which made visible phenomena or entities or dynamics not yet understood. III. To collaborate with the scientists at a visualization of the territories through the scope of the new sensors.

Among the objectives of these maps are the embodiment of global issues in a local narrative that considers the links between human and non-human collectives, both in its material, cartographic and affective dimensions (attachment to the territory). The description of the sensors with new infrastructures enables both the scientists and citizens to collect new signals, lift the veil of invisibility, facilitate ubiquity in order to seize hot spots and hot moments, and increase points of view on this unknown and suddenly reactive Earth. These territories in metamorphosis that will be explored with these new sensors.  

By following science in the making and landscapes, scientists, sensors, water, soil, atmosphere, chemical particles, wind, etc., and presenting these views to stakeholders, companies, policy makers, investors, landowners, NGOs, citizens, the project will attempt to bridge the gap between sciences and politics, through the arts (art of cartography, architecture, etc). A unique feature of these maps is the use of « boundary objects » to extend conventional ethnographic research in a collaborative way, engaging scientists in the production of knowledge through the prototyping of new maps of territories, and thus building communities around the observatories in order to take coordinated action. These maps stemming from the sensors are made from the inside, from the ground with alternative measures to develop new coordinate systems for the habitable part of the Earth we depend on, which should be as robust as they are distant from the latitude-longitude grid. This is indeed crucial for reorienting politics towards the “terrestrial” (Latour), through the re-materialization of damaged landscapes (Tsing) in the Anthropocene where we can all feel lost in incommensurable space and time.