​Thinking elementally, from the microbe to the vast seafloor

​"Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks." How do we visualize something that cannot be physically seen? What limitations do existing knowledge structures impose that reverberate through planetary problem-solving processes, including public health and environmental crises? This episode brings together two scholars who think elementally: Lisa Yin Han, who operates in the blue humanities or ocean humanities, who studies mediation and the deep seafloor; and Gloria Chan-Sook Kim, who focuses on scientific problems of knowledge and visualization and more specifically, microbes. Their astounding conversation goes from emerging microbes to the seabed to places where their research intersects, including catastrophic deferral, scalar mediation, the figure of the plume, and the concept of resolution.

Lisa Yin Han is assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College and author of Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is a scholar of visual culture, media studies, and science and technology studies, assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and the Security in the War on Microbes. 

Episode references:

Melody Jue

Celina Osuna, desert humanities

Nicole Starosielski

Christopher P. Heuer / Into the White

Andrea Ballestero

Adriana Petryna / Life Exposed

Celia Lowe

Stefan Helmreich / Alien Ocean

James Hamilton-Paterson / Seven-Tenths

Deepwater Alchemy and Microbial Resolution are available from University of Minnesota Press.

Episode Transcript

Lisa Yin Han (00:02):
There is a kind of deferral. We see there's a
problem with fossil fuels.There's a desire for green
energy transition. This leads tothen more extraction at the
seafloor, which is a differentkind of catastrophe or, I guess,
displacement of one catastropheonto another.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (00:17):
The emerging microbes are not
microbes per se, but theiremergence. They are beyond
microscopic. We're dealing notjust with the microscopic
microbe, but you're dealing withits unknown future horizon.

Lisa Yin Han (00:36):
Hello everyone. My name is Lisa Yin Han. I'm a
assistant professor of mediastudies at Pitzer College. And
I'll be talking about my booktoday, Extractive Mediation and
the Taming of the Seafloor. Thebook examines the relationship
between historical and emergentmedia operations in the deep
ocean and their relationship toextractive industry in

(00:57):
particular.
So I'm interested in theproduction of the seafloor,
specifically as a frontier spaceand a space of profit and how
media technologies ranging fromunderwater video to sensor
networks have contributed toproducing the ocean floor in
this way. That work is situatedat the intersections of critical

(01:18):
media studies, science andtechnology studies, and in the
environmental humanities. And ingeneral, I think a lot about how
we mediate water and aquaticspaces in my work. I'm thrilled
to be here today on theUniversity of Minnesota Press
podcast in conversation withGloria Chancell Kim, whose book
Visualization and Security inthe War Against Emerging

(01:41):
Microbes was also recentlypublished by the press.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (01:44):
Hey, Lisa. Thanks so much for that
introduction. I'm so happy to behere in conversation with you.
Hi, I'm Gloria Chan-Sook Kim.I'm a scholar of visual culture
and media studies working acrossthe environmental and medical
humanities, computation andculture, infrastructure, and
science and technology studies.
So in my work, I'm interested inthe cultural and historical

(02:08):
implications of scientific andtechnological developments as
they interact with theepistemological and political
stakes of vision in the twentyfirst century. I'm the author,
as Lisa said, of MicrobialResolution. In that book, I
chart The US led war on theemerging microbe to show how the
not yet existing futures ofmicrobes were transformed into

(02:29):
objects of global science andsecurity. I develop a theory of
microbial resolution in the bookto analyze this complex
problematic that arises in thateffort. So it's this problem of
how do you cook something notjust unknown, but unknowable
into view?
So there are a lot of paradoxesand irreconcilabilities inherent

(02:50):
in that project. And I'minterested in the ways that
those tensions animate twentyfirst century epistemologies,
aesthetics and ecologies. I'm soglad to be in conversation with
you, Lisa. And I'm reallyexcited to ask you this first
question as a just kind of wayto, I guess, dip our toe in the
water. I'm sorry about that pun,and it was intended.

(03:13):
I was struck by your book. Inreading it, I was very much
aware of your book coming up asthis new volume in the ocean
humanities. And I was interestedin the ways that you work in the
ocean humanities, but your bookgoes directly to the seafloor.
So I wondered if you might talkabout the move of just going

(03:37):
straight there to the seafloor.And, you know, when we're doing
elemental analysis, as you and Iboth do, we're often thinking
with and through the materialityof our objects.
So, you know, that means in theocean humanities, we've come
across analyses that aregrounded in the materiality of
things like the salinity ofwater or the pressure or

(04:04):
transparencies and opacities ofwater, these kind of ideas of
flow. And so I'm wondering howyou might think elementally
about the seafloor and how thathas kind of changed or shaped
your thinking around that.

Lisa Yin Han (04:16):
Yeah, great question, Gloria. Thanks for
that opener. I'm definitelyinfluenced by a lot of the
existing work in the oceanhumanities or blue humanities as
it's sometimes called. Much ofthat writing is sort of focused
on surfaces, on the surface ofthe sea. And that has to also do
with our popular media culturesand our popular imaginaries
about the ocean being sort ofvery centered on these more

(04:39):
accessible parts of oceanenvironments, the littoral
spaces, the beaches, thesurfaces.
And so I was interested in thespecificity of the deep sea and
the seafloor in particular, andalso thinking about the entire
volume of the ocean, really,ocean as a space from volumetric
mediation. And so to yourquestion about the elemental

(05:01):
framework, which of course was ahuge influence for me, I had
been reading, for instance,Melody Ju's work on ocean media
and thinking also about that,like how that changes the terms
through which we understandmediation. So the seafloor is
interesting to me because itreally is this trans elemental
space. It's all about theinterplay between fluid and

(05:23):
solid. So the thing that comesto mind for me is the importance
of sediment in thisconversation.
The movements of sediment becomeso important to understanding
how the seafloor is made, butalso how it's extracted from and
how it's visualized. Buildingoff of that question, I'd love
to kind of throw that back toyou and ask you how you came to

(05:46):
your book topic. So was theresomething in your personal
experiences, things that youwere studying or just living
through in particular that ledyou to want to write about this?
What might your initial entrypoint have been into the book?

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (06:01):
Yeah, I'm happy to get to that question. I
just want to come back to yourresponse and just say that it's
been really exciting to read abook in the blue humanities that
takes up sedimentation and, youknow, ground and earth because
this is precisely this kind ofcomplication of the ocean medium
that I think is a really welcomekind of intervention of a

(06:23):
different kind of materialityinto that space. As for your
question to me about how I cameto my book. So I've been asked
this all the time. Think I getasked this a lot and my response
changes all the time.
Part of it is that it's kind ofcome together in ebbs and flows
and bits and pieces. But thereis one thing that I can point to

(06:48):
that was a kind of definingmoment when I knew that this
project was kind of starting orsome part of me did. So I had
always been interested inscientific problems of knowledge
and visualization. And Ihappened to stumble across an

(07:09):
online ad in the online versionof The New York Times for the
deadly migration documentarythat I talk about in chapter
one. So it's a seven minutelong, for those of you who
haven't heard it or seen it,it's a seven minute long
documentary by IBM about thefutures of avian flu and how we
need to prepare for theseunknown futures today.

(07:30):
I encountered it in thisclickable banner as I was
reading The New York Times, Ialso discovered that it was the
kind of mandatory commercialcontent that one would receive
on select American Airlinesflights within a particular
period of time. So when Iwatched this commercial or this

(07:52):
documentarycommercial, it washitting all of my buttons. It
had this whole kind ofscientific knowledge problem
that I was interested in priorto this working on disease and
bodies. But this was a verydifferent kind of space, and it
picked up all of my interest incomputation, in planetary
management systems, in futurecasting, and governing through

(08:18):
weird kind of affectiveformation. So that's how it
started.
You know, as I was thinkingabout that, what the experience,
and thinking about and writingabout that experience, I'm
watching this documentary on anairplane. So the narrative
starts off with an airplane asthis kind of carrier of a global

(08:38):
future pandemic. So I'm thinkingabout that in this kind of
materiality of communication.And then I was also thinking
about you know, the experienceof picking up a newspaper. I
encountered this on The New YorkTimes.
It had me thinking about placeand doing this research and how
the research that we do kind ofinflects the ways that we live

(08:59):
and move as bodies in space. Ihad a question that I wanted to
kind of think and toss aroundwith you. This is really a
question about place andwriting. When we're writing
anything, and especially whenwe're writing books, we are so
deeply immersed in it, and ourentire field of existence is
blotted out by that research andwhere we need to be mentally in

(09:22):
order to be in that space. So Iwas curious about your research
into the seafloor, into theocean more generally, and your
various ways of being inrelation to that as a land
animal.
So I'm thinking here of the waythat, let's say, you know, Bouch

(09:43):
writes about this experience ofcoming out of a movie theater,
right? Coming out of this darkenveloping space and having to
kind of resituate in the worldoutside of it. Or the way that,
let's say, Selena Osuna, whowrites about desert humanities,
decided that they wanted towrite about the desert in part

(10:05):
through an experience of beingestranged from desert climates.
And so I was wondering if youcould talk about this kind of
transition from writing aboutthe ocean to being this kind of
land based animal, butespecially someone who lived in
the context of, you know,Colorado landlocked, but then
also, you know, developing partof this work in Arizona, where

(10:29):
we're in the desert, and then inSanta Barbara, right by the
ocean.

Lisa Yin Han (10:33):
Yeah, I love that question. You know, what you
said also about your initialentry point, thinking about that
film, and it made me reallythink about my own embodied
experiences as well with theanxieties of pandemics and being
in airports, especially where weget so much of that mediation.
But in any case, for me, it'sfunny because I think a lot of

(10:57):
what I've come to as a scholaris precisely because I haven't
been in placed, right? Like as amedia scholar, you know, I
hadn't really grown up watchinglike a whole lot of television
that didn't have cable. I thinkbeing in the ocean also,
definitely part of this was inplace.
I was writing the early parts ofthis book in Santa Barbara,

(11:21):
where I did have that proximityto the sea. But then in being in
the desert, come to think ofwater a little bit differently.
Mean, it's definitely still atthe forefront, but becomes much
more so a question of scarcityand also management. And so when
I was at ASU in the Phoenixarea, was thinking about that.

(11:43):
And also the interestingsimilarities.
I think the desert is a highlyproductive way of thinking about
the oceans because there are allthese similarities between how
we imagine desert spaces asempty and comparable and how we
imagine the oceans also as vastempty spaces, spaces for waste,
right? And so that becomes anoccasion to reflect on how some

(12:07):
of these questions aboutenvironmental justice or
environmental harm might crossbetween different kinds of
environmental spaces for me.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (12:16):
What you're saying right now reminds
me of some of my experiences ofthe ocean. So full disclosure
here, I'm Canadian and I grew upin the Northeast. And I've just,
fairly recently, my whole lifehas been around research

(12:37):
positions in the Northeast andEast Coast and the Midwest. And
then I moved to California. Andright now I work in the desert,
that's where my institution is,but I live right by the ocean.
So I live in Long Beach,California, right by one of the
major logistics ports of The US,but also right by the oil

(13:02):
islands there in the ocean. Sofor those of you who don't know
what this area looks like, theocean, have this large, there's
a Port of LA, and then you havethese three or four islands not
too far from ashore. And they'repopulated by what appear to be

(13:24):
palm trees and these kind ofvague architectural structures,
you know, like a tower of somesort, but they're actually
pretend. So what these are areoil islands, the palm trees and
the other structures there arethere to conceal this
infrastructure. My orientationto the ocean, since I moved to

(13:45):
California and my awareness ofits not emptiness, but it's very
fullness and how active it isand of the kinds of things that
happen in it are all theseeffects of surfacing.
So whether they be these kind ofbizarre structures of the oil
islands, where trees are nottrees and buildings are not
buildings, but are oil, or evenjust kind of walking along the

(14:09):
shore with my dog, where youmentioned this in the kind of
small moment in your book, wherethere are little dots of tar
that get stuck to my feet, in mydog's feet. I see very sadly,
some of the animal, deaths thatoccur, I think, in part through
some of the sounding experimentsthat you're talking about. So

(14:30):
once in a while I do see adolphin that has died from what
appears to be a sonic blast. Sothere's this really interesting
kind of relationship betweensurface and depth that your work
is kind of calling up to me. Sowhen you go down to the sea
floor, it's really interestingthat you do that because I
experienced all the surfaceeffects of it.

(14:52):
Yeah, I wondered if you mightwant to think about that kind of
relationship.

Lisa Yin Han (14:56):
I think that's a super interesting question. And
I like that you use the wordsurfacing too. It reminds me of
actually Nicole Saraselski'swork. I think she had an
additional project calledsurfacing and her critical
orientation towards likesurfacing fiber optic
infrastructures in the ocean.So, I see the kind of surfacing

(15:17):
that you're describing hereabout how infrastructure is made
visible in very specific ways.
I think that speaks back to alot of early work in
infrastructure studies that wassort of making this argument
that infrastructure isinvisible, right, until it
breaks. But that's not the onlyway that it becomes visible. And
sometimes that surfacing isabout spectacle, right? Like

(15:39):
transforming a liability into anasset, right? By like making an
oil infrastructure beautiful.
Or we see that also with celltower infrastructure, right?
Through design. Of course, notall surfacing is profitable, not
all surfacing fits into thatkind of condition of making do
and adapting the product, right?So there's so much there in

(16:03):
terms of I think what we canengage with in regards to the
idea of what it means to surfacesomething. And that I think
leads me to a question about youand your own orientations
towards infrastructure and whatthat makes visible.
I mean, thinking in particularabout your discussions about
particularly at the end of thebook around standardization, and

(16:26):
I guess sort of these largerconceptual as well as physical
infrastructures around microbialemergence. So, yeah, what was
important to you about likecritically examining
infrastructure or things likestandard setting?

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (16:40):
I love infrastructure and I love
logistics. The last two chaptersare about infrastructure and
logistics, which is kind ofweird maybe at first take
because we're talking aboutmicrobes, these really And not
just microbes, but emergingmicrobes. So these things that
don't yet exist, right? So oneof the things that in the

(17:02):
process of researching andwriting the book and talking to
people about it, one of thethings that constantly kind of
came up was this kind ofconfusing materiality or
immateriality of microbes andemergence. So I guess I want to
say two things.
One of the things that I wastrying to do in writing about
emerging microbes inrelationship to things like
logistics infrastructures was toreally kind of pull into a very

(17:27):
kind of durable materiality, allof the kind of stuff that kind
of gets built up around thiskind of scientific knowledge
project, right? So in talkingabout infrastructure and
logistics, I'm trying to showthat this project that gets
erected around this ever presentpossibility that never fully

(17:52):
arrives actually has thesereally, really material effects,
right? They are ecological, theyare infrastructural, and they
kind of move through the worldin these very systematic ways.
Another thing, another reasonwhy I'm interested in
infrastructure and logistics inthis discussion is because, in,

(18:17):
again, in the course of readingand researching and talking
about this topic, one of thethings that I really noticed
both in official discourse andin more casual discourse, there
was this kind of confusion aboutwhat the horizons of possibility
were for, let's say, globalhealth, right, around pandemic

(18:37):
management. There's a way inwhich a lot of these kind of, so
let's say, activist discoursesor progressive discourses, was
some oftentimes come to dovetailwith some of these more
militarized and corporatizedforms of dealing with with
pandemic risks.
So this is a point where, youknow, we saw with COVID a lot of

(18:59):
people across whatever politicalspectrums or whatever social
beliefs were pleading for, youknow, more preparedness. Like,
Oh my God, why weren't we moreprepared? We should have had
more stockpiles of this andthat. And so one of the things I
really wanted to kind of get atwas that this is a kind of
militarized discourse that haskind of taken hold over this

(19:20):
area, this topic. And one of thethings that I'm trying to do as
I'm talking about infrastructureand logistics is to kind of show
clearly through the policiesthat determine how these kind of
conduits of transmission andsharing and all of those
standardization andharmonization, how all of those
processes, what actually ends uphappening through them is this
kind of, very cleanneoliberalization of these

(19:43):
things.
So part of that kind of largereffort, as I discussed in the
book, is a way in which when youhave this kind of system, it
becomes very difficult todecipher what is humanitarian
and what is an extension of awar logic. Right? But I think in
drawing out the infrastructureand logistical kind of
arrangement of the bioeconomy,I'm trying to show the reasons

(20:04):
why it feels so hard to kind ofmove in that space and why it
feels so hard to think outsideof it.

Lisa Yin Han (20:12):
Wow, that resonates so strongly. I mean,
this this idea that thehumanitarian and military gazes
not only intersect, but are sowrapped up in each other. I
think that for me reallyresonates with what I was
thinking about aroundconservation and its kind of
elements with militarizationalso, And neoliberalization.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (20:32):
That gets me thinking around your book and
the ways that we mobilize thiskind of similar dynamic. We both
look at that text NaturalCapital, right? But this moment
where conservation and enclosurecome up in the same take, right?
And where they are notcontradictory, they are no
longer contradictory in such alogistical system. And through

(20:55):
these kinds of policyinfrastructures or regulatory
infrastructures, what happens isthat they become, they actually
do, are made to dovetail, right?
They come together cleanly. Youcan have the biospheric and the
economic come together withoutcontradiction, right? Or where
they do contradict becomes asite of productivity in terms of

(21:19):
capital, right? So you talkabout this in your book in that
kind of salvage and extractiondynamic. So do you want to take
us there for a moment?

Lisa Yin Han (21:28):
Absolutely, yeah. So in the first chapter of my
book, I lay this out in mydiscussions of shipwreck
salvage. This is one of thedominant ways in which we
mediate the seas or understandthe sea floor, right? I think if
you ask the lay person toimagine shipwreck media, they
might tell you about theTitanic, or they might tell you

(21:49):
about shipwrecks. And so, youknow, I was thinking about the
politics of that, really howthose dynamics around salvage
are unfolded into projects ofnation building and the ways in
which how we understand, how wemediate or imagine the sea floor
as a kind of archive of the pastis at the same time tied to this

(22:12):
dynamic of extractivism andfrontierism that I talk about,
right?
The need to also build aparticular kind of future from
that ability to narrativize thepast. And so that's where I kind
of come up with this idea of asalvage extraction dynamic that
really, you know, bothinstitutionally as you were
talking about, right? Likethere's an institutional

(22:33):
connection to all this. And onthe kind of more like figurative
level, we see these collusionsbetween extractivism and ideas
of heritage and ideas ofpreservation of culture.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (22:49):
I mean, you brought up shipwrecks. So
now I want to go there. I likethat you begin with a scene of
wreckage. So your book startswith shipwrecks, and then you
open your narrative ofextraction from that and through
it, right? So I'm alwaysinterested in these kind of
narratives of failure and howthey might structure the ways

(23:11):
that we think about how theymight structure certain
projects.
So, you know, it's inherent inmy work, certainly, and we can
talk about that later. But I waswondering, there other ways in
which failure, you know, becauseof the ocean and because of what
it does and how it acts, ispresent as a kind of fundamental
dynamic in your work? So maybejust to clarify the question,

(23:35):
I'll let you know where I'mcoming from a little bit. So,
you know, I'm thinking of workthat is looking at the desert
and all of the things that itselemental conditions disallow,
like, you know, it distorts, itbleaches. So it has this kind of
negative, I guess, mediation, touse Dewey's term.
But then I'm also thinking aboutbooks like Christopher Heuer's

(23:59):
book Into the White, where hetoo starts off his book with
failed Arctic explorationefforts, right? And the book is
about, in part, about this kindof visual theory structured by a
fundamental condition of theinability to see in the Arctic.
And the quest for the Arctic iskind of dotted and populated by

(24:22):
stories of folly and hubris anddisorientation and literally ice
coming into people's eyes andblocking vision. And so I'm
wondering if there's a kind oflarger structure of failure or
dynamic at work in the thingsthat you research in this book?

Lisa Yin Han (24:41):
Absolutely. That's such an important question, I
think. I feel like it's failure,but it's not just failure in
itself, but the risk of failure,the idea of possible failure,
and risk taking, that is a hugeaspect of what I'm looking at.
And so, yeah, the threat of, Ithink, the ocean as a risky

(25:03):
space has informed ocean mediafrom the very beginning, right?
Even our very conceptions ofrisk and is tied to early ideas
of insurance as they emerged inthe maritime space, Through
trade, through this idea thatyou would need to secure
something in case, right?

(25:23):
And so for me, like it's, yeah,it's the it matters the way that
because the ocean is seen asrisky as a space of failure,
potential failure, underwatermediation then becomes this
heroic act of overcoming in thewake of that, you know, similar
to space, similar to I think tomicrobial emergence, right? Like

(25:45):
this dynamic that I think it wasPaul Verrillio, right, who said
this, that when you invent theship, you also invent the
shipwreck. There's a kind ofinevitability to ruination, but
also a productivity in that alsobeing present. And so that I
think really gets to a questionthat I want to ask you, which

(26:06):
is, you know, I think you talk alittle bit about catastrophe or
catastrophic deferralsspecifically in the final
chapter. And it's different thanthe kind of, you know, I was
thinking like in the early yearsof the COVID pandemic, right?
There was a kind of like senseof catastrophe. Now we've kind
of entered this stage of like,yes, there will be more. We know

(26:28):
that there will be more. We'reanticipating catastrophe after
catastrophe. And so I'm kind of,yeah, I'd love to kind of throw
that back to you and ask likehow you think about how that
discussion of risk andcatastrophe changes in the wake
of microbial emergence and theseprojects to also then like

(26:49):
secure, I guess, the microbialfuture.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (26:54):
Yeah, so I'm thinking about, and I'm
hearing that question right offthe tails of our conversation
about failure. A spoiler alertof the book is that in the end,
you know, so I describe all ofthese technologies and
techniques that I have to kindof bring this unknowable and
ungraspable future that's alwayschanging into stability as a

(27:19):
scientific knowledge object. AndI call that whole process in the
project microbial resolution,right? And then in the end, we
come to see that in fact, all ofthis stuff, all of the policies,
all of the technologies, all ofthis and that lead basically us
to an irresolvable scene. So atthe crux of the project of

(27:41):
microbial resolution is failure.
Is not this thing that is to beFailure is not this thing that
is now to be overcome, but theproject of microbial resolution
actually inheres in thatfailure. It is because it fails,
because our pandemic projectionsnever really kind of hit the

(28:03):
right mark that this projectmust continue, right? It's
because the next one will alwayscome, you know? So it's not that
COVID came, right? But we areliving in this kind of extended
and indeterminate kind of, Ihesitate to call it an
afterlife, but just this kind oflong and vague shadow of it
because it's still here.

(28:23):
But even as we're doing that,and even as that event has
happened, if I can kind of use apresent tense, put past tense
loosely for now, the gaze ofmicrobial resolution is always
on that next thing. And that's aquest that is just its logic is
not to ever end, right? So interms of catastrophic deferral,

(28:47):
you know, I can't remember theexact context in which I use
that phrase, but it resonatesthroughout the project where the
point of all of the of the waron emerging microbes is not to
end emergence, but in order to,you know, this becomes a

(29:07):
question, it becomes this questto kind of ride the productive
waves of its continuallydeferred disasters, right? So we
will always be preparing for thenext one, right? We will always
take our past experiences asthis way to kind of think and
kind of anticipate and live inthat kind of anticipatory mode,

(29:28):
right?
So that catastrophic deferralanimates this idea that we're
living in these kind of multipletemporalities and all the
contradictions that brings intoits fold animates the conditions
of living today.

Lisa Yin Han (29:47):
Yeah, very much so. You know, that resonates for
me in my discussions of seabedmining and in general, the
energy crisis that we experiencealongside that, right? That
there is also a kind of deferralgoing on where we see there's a
problem with fossil fuels. Andso there's a desire for green

(30:10):
energy transition. This leads tothen more extraction at the sea
floor, which is a different kindof catastrophe or it's a
deferral, it's also a kind of, Iguess displacement of one
catastrophe onto another.
And so maybe those dynamics ofdeferral and displacement also
kind of go together. And I thinkit's so interesting that there

(30:34):
is that dual temporality to it,right? That it's both deferral
and delay and preemption andprecaution and thinking ahead.
And so I see maybe possibleconnections then, right? Between
how we can temporally orientourselves to both our projects
and to these questions ofcatastrophe, of risk and

(30:56):
ruination, etcetera.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (30:57):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a really
broad and kind of unformedquestion, but I'll just talk for
a minute because you're makingme think about another point of
overlap or another area ofoverlap. And that happens to
this kind of beautiful and weirdtemporality, both of emerging
microbes, but also of the stuffthat you're describing in the

(31:20):
seabed. When I'm thinking aboutthe temporality of emerging
microbes, I'm thinking aboutthis really weird complex
interplay that unfolds the pastand the future, this kind of
endless future and this kind ofcontinuous catastrophic
deferral, right? So this is allenfolded in the entity of
emergence, right?

(31:40):
Where present day living isreformatted within that
temporality. There's this reallyweird and confusing and
disorienting temporalorientation, that comes with
emerging microbes. When I wasreading your chapter on plumes,
I also am interested in plumes,but I've been watching all of
those slow motion animations andcalculations and, you know,

(32:04):
algorithmic kind of crunching ofsneezing and coughing plumes. I
was really interested in yourdiscussion there about plumes
and the kinds of knowledgepractices that need to kind of
surface or come up around makingthese weird formations knowable,
right? So I wondered if youcould talk about that.

Lisa Yin Han (32:23):
A hundred percent. Yeah, the plume was such an
interesting figure for me,largely in part because of the
difficulty of it's the projectof capturing a body in motion, a
body that is always changing. Ifound a lot of inspiration from
Andrea Balcero's discussions ofconcentration and the way that
we make concentration visibleand how that also is connected

(32:45):
to these anxieties about theinvisible. But then also the
research itself was interestingto me, way that people used
markers and dyes and state ofthe art sensors to really try to
achieve this aesthetic ofcontainment and control. I think
that really brought to mind someof the existing regimes of

(33:05):
surveillance that we have andother kinds of social spaces, in
spaces of mobility inparticular.
And so like the connection tothe temporality discussion is
interesting because it's allabout that real time tracking,
right? It's the desire for realtime and we see that like time
is a kind of frontier as well.Know maybe it's not just Terra

(33:28):
incognita but also a Tempusincognita or something along
those lines.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (33:33):
It's a churning, churning. Was
thinking, I mean, one way that Ithink about plumes and it's been
really helpful for me to kind ofcomplicate, When you're talking
about plumes, I'm thinking ofall of these things that are
unsettled from the seabed,right? And then put into this
plume as this really turbulentforce, right? And it had me

(33:55):
thinking about plumes in mywork, which I'll talk about in a
second. But I was thinking aboutthings like, you know, so
Adriana Petrina in Life Exposed,it's a book about the Chernobyl
Nuclear Power Plant, meltdown in1986.

(34:16):
Somewhere in the beginning ofthe book, there's a kind of map
of the plume of radiation. Andwhat was interesting about this
plume and Petrone's discussionof it was that you have the
plume that you can see, right?But it's radiation, it's nuclear
technology. Mean, the plume isthis thing that evades

(34:37):
territorial boundaries. Itreally complicates questions of
bodies and citizenship and whatrights a body has in
relationship to something that'sbeen affected by, let's say, a
different state, right?
So you have the plume, thevisible plume, but then you have

(34:57):
all of the kind of shadoweffects of that. You have it
through space. So there's aplume you can see. Then there's
all of the radioactive stuffaround it that can't quite be
traced, right? Then you have theplume kind of acting and
unfolding generationally throughtime.
Right? So that plume is stillactive in ecologies and bodies

(35:21):
and so on and so forth today.And this brings to mind the kind
of aquacious plume mappingsaround Fukushima Daiichi, that
nuclear power plant meltdown.So, I'm interested in that
formation of the plume as thisthing that has to Because it
calls into being all sorts ofscales beyond the visible plume,

(35:44):
all sorts of temporalitiesbeyond what is visible there in
the moment, something that, youknow, and for me it involves,
you know, like a sneezing plumeor a breathing plume is a scene
of great material displacement,right? It's just things being
moved from one place to anotherthat are coming into a body,

(36:05):
that are going out of a body.
And so that kind of what wemight call your tempest in a
plume demands these kinds of,the cultivation of different
kinds of knowledge practices andperceptive capacities to try to
get a hold of that. That's kindof how I've been thinking about

(36:25):
it in my work. And it's beenhelpful to look at it in the
seabed, because you have this,you know, you have the ocean,
which we think of as water andsalt, which oversimplification.
But then now when you introduceall of the material
displacements of sedimentation,it becomes an interesting, very
messy object.

Lisa Yin Han (36:46):
This is great. Yeah. I think you're so right.
And I love that you invoke likeboth this question of bodies and
the multi scalar ways in whichbodies are kind of like
intersected with these forces. Imean, so much about the tensions
around like perception.
I think you mentioned this alsoin your own formulations of

(37:07):
resolution, right? Likeresolution is kind of about
scale. I think you talk aboutthis metaphor of the fishing net
and like what falls through thenet and you know the pixel is
falling through the net. So Ithink it's important to me to
think about that scaling up andthe scaling down that happens.
And the plume is a great figurefor being able to kind of think

(37:29):
about the mediation acrossscales.
For me, definitely it's tied toa kind of fear of like
mobilities or inability to seeat certain scales. I could
definitely see that withmicrobes, right? There's that
project of both needing toperceive the imperceptibly tiny
while also understanding it asglobal, right? That you talk

(37:51):
about the planetary macrobiopolitics and those dynamics
that come with the larger scalemediations. So yeah, I'm curious
maybe if you can kind of alsoreflect on the role of scalar
mediation for you and it's alsorelationships to these questions
of security.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (38:11):
Okay, yeah. Let's see. So the scalar
mediations of microbes, so wehave that formulation by Latour
that the presence of the microbepermits basically the
hygienicist right to beeverywhere in social relations,
right? But for me, the reallyinteresting thing about the

(38:36):
emerging microbes, so notmicrobes per se, but their
emergence, is that they arebeyond microscopic. In fact,
they are immaterial because Imean, immaterial in the sense
that they don't yet exist,right?
We're dealing with not just withthe microscopic microbe, but
you're dealing with really itsunknown future horizon. And so

(39:00):
it's not even the minimum, it'sjust this thing called
possibility. So in the book, I'mreally interested in
understanding how this risk andthis kind of ever present
possibility infuses, for lack ofa better word, this kind of the

(39:20):
planet. So, when I think aboutin that chapter where I write
about macro biopolitics, I'minterested in working through,
we'll talk about plumes, but,you know, Cecilia Lowe's notion
of the viral cloud as this kindof inseparable formation of
relations and entities andthings that when we're thinking

(39:44):
about viruses and microbes,we're not, and I'm not thinking
about that little kind ofmicroscopic thing, I'm thinking
about this incohate kind ofungraspable force and how that
might scale out and how fearsaround that and a kind of global
scientific project to makeknowledge out of that informs

(40:04):
planetary existence, I suppose.Yeah.
I mean, I wondered, I mean,thinking now about these diffuse
formations like plumes andclouds and breath actually
brings me to a question that I'mburning to ask. And I like
asking this of a lot of peoplewho've written books, but it's a

(40:28):
question that was asked to me bya graduate student at NYU. In
the books that one writes, thereis a subject, there is a topic,
there are its objects and itsarchives, right? There are the
core things that one, you know,so you wrote about the seafloor
and mediation. So we expectcertain things to be there,
certain people and scholars tobe in conversation with you.

(40:50):
And I did the same withmicrobes. But this student
pointed out that, you know, allbooks they understand are
haunted. That is to say thatthere is a lot of literature and
scholarship and all of the stuffthat authors are thinking
alongside and with, and they'renot really the object itself,

(41:12):
but they help to kind of informand shape a lot of the thinking
in the book, even though theymay not be directly about its
topic. So if that makes sense asa question, I wondered if, or as
a provocation, I wonder if youmight take that up and think
about and talk to us about whatwere some of the kind of places
around the book that don'tappear as its main objects.

Lisa Yin Han (41:36):
That's a great question. I think my mind goes
in two directions for this. Thefirst is definitely waste. You
know, there's so much amazingwork around plastic waste in our
oceans, other kinds of waste.And I was thinking about it the
whole time, you know, eventhough I don't address
necessarily address wastedirectly.

(41:57):
I mean, the plume chapter isabout, you know, a kind of toxic
plume, but that literature is soconnected to the conversation
about extractivism as well assomething that produces waste.
Since I've written the book,I've just continued to think
about waste a lot. It's become alot more central after the fact

(42:18):
of the book. And also, know, Ihave to say microbes as well.
One of the first books that Iread about the oceans in this
kind of field was StefanHelmreich's Alien Ocean, which
probably features, you know,marine microbes.
And even when I kind of thinkabout my own, like, entry points
into academia, when I was a kid,you know, my dad was a microbial

(42:38):
researcher. Spent a lot of timein front of a microscope, like,
looking at these microscopicorganisms. And so in a way,
like, that also informed myinterest in scientific vision in
a much deeper sense. Yeah, I'mvery interested in those
questions of scale, waste,animal labor is also something
that I've taken up and that'ssomething that you know I was
super interested to read in yourbook when you were kind of

(43:01):
talking about flightways andtracking animals and how
sentinels also become animportant proxy for you in
microbial resolution.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (43:09):
You know, so thinking about waste, there's
so much great work now on, youknow, the economies of waste and
how value is and productivity isdirectly tied to this special
moment in this discourse ofwaste and bodily waste, earthly
waste. You know, as I wasthinking, you brought up Stefan
Helmreich's book, and, you know,that was one of the books that

(43:32):
came up when this student askedme this question. And, you know,
it was such a great questionbecause it really clarified for
me at a point where I was justkind of finishing things off.
All of our books are aboutsomething and then they're about
something as well. I had done alot of research in microbes.

(43:59):
Neither of my parents weremicrobiologists, and so I did a
lot of that research on my own.And, you know, there are
sections on microbes that Iactually just took out of the
book because I realized thatthat well, first, it's all about
this war on the microbe andmicrobial resolution is about,
not the microbe itself, but it'sabout its absence and the

(44:22):
profound kind of penumbra ofthings that come up around it.
Like, you know, how in thebeginning of your book you
describe, that character whotries to fill in that void.
Right? So, you know, in thesimilar in a similar kind of way
for me, the absence of themicrobe was important.
What I wanted to show, goingback to your infrastructure

(44:45):
question, is all of this stuffthat has to come around to kind
of block in the shape of thatkind of future horizon. When I
was asked this question, itforced me to just embrace
something that I had been kindof denying. Don't know why, but,
you know, writing is a struggle.But I thought, well, you know,

(45:05):
the stuff that I read when I'mnot writing and where I get
really excited about the stuffthat I'm doing is about the
ocean. It's about outer space.
It's about deserts. It's aboutall of these kind of extreme
conditions in which catastropheis close at hand in these places

(45:26):
where that pose challenges tocomfortable modes perception and
orientation. But also, you know,scientific knowledge in these
places is perpetually this questof edging onto whatever that
kind of movable horizon of thefuture is going to be, right? So
there's a space between theunknown and this pursuit of it.

(45:47):
That was really exciting for me.
I mean, you talk aboutHamilton-Paterson's book
Seven-Tenths . And, you know,that chapter about the deep
where he talks about all ofthese ways of fantasizing about
the deep, know, differentdensities, different quests,
that was really evocative to meas I was thinking through how

(46:10):
are we going to try to build outthis social project around this
kind of abyss called Americans?

Lisa Yin Han (46:17):
That's the other shadow I think is space. So I
think it's super interestingthat you brought that up too.
Mean, I don't know if you don'tmind elaborating also, you know,
what was there somethingspecific about space that you
were thinking about? And yeah, Ilove the question as well about
the stuff that didn't make it inthe book. I'm curious if you

(46:39):
would be interested inelaborating more on what didn't
quite make it in the book, butmaybe things that like you've
taken up afterwards.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (46:46):
Well, a lot of bad writing didn't make
it into the book and failedthoughts didn't make it into the
book. In terms of your first Thefirst part of that question was
about outer space in particular.The features of outer space that
really speak to me in this workare, you know, these weird,

(47:08):
disorienting inhuman experiencesof time and scale that occur
when one is out of space. I waslistening to Oh, I won't even
try to recreate it because allsound like I'm bananas. But
there's, I was listening to aspace scientist, someone whose
job it is to go up and repairspace,

Lisa Yin Han (47:29):
some

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (47:29):
of these satellite pieces. This person
was talking about being up inspace and repairing this one arm
of something and watching thesun kind of move around the
planet a few times, like itmoving between dark and light
very quickly. And I justthought, oh my god, that's such
a trip. It's such a differentorientation to time. To have to
try to orient one's body andmind in that is a really

(47:52):
exciting thing.
Where that is taking me in thefuture, I won't say too much
right now because it's stillinformation, but I am in my
second book, moving towards astudy extreme environments and
revisiting some of thesequestions and redirecting some
of them. What about you?

Lisa Yin Han (48:11):
I've been thinking about living waste. So the kinds
of organisms that crop up oninfrastructures that we don't
want to be there, we callbiofoul, and also like the ways
in which waste becomes part ofour understanding of ecology,
thinking about how we interveneinto those ecologies by for
instance like we're thinkingabout microbes eating waste

(48:32):
right or also my case studyspecifically was looking at
drones and cleanup and the postnatural vision of like using
technologies to clean up theocean en masse and how that in
some ways is another kind of, touse your term, catastrophic
deferral that is happeningaround our oceans. So yeah,
those questions of like livingwaste and waste have become much

(48:55):
more central to what I thinkwill be my next book project,
but that's definitely still inthe works too.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (49:00):
When I teach my course in elemental
media and I show, say, Internetcables in the ocean or these,
let's say, Microsoft's datastorage centers that are
submerged in the ocean. And whenthey're pulled out or when
someone goes to repair them, youhave this footage of all of
this, I guess, what we callbiofouling on these
infrastructures. My students arealways shocked to see that

(49:24):
because it is so at odds withhow we think about the Internet
or, you know, the cloud assurrounded by delicious little
sea creatures.

Lisa Yin Han (49:37):
Yeah. I mean, guess I just want to say,
Gloria, that reading your bookreally helped me rethink my own
projects, particularly yourarticulation of resolution as
kind of being the mainframework. I really enjoyed that
and also the discussion ofresolution and what doesn't get
resolved. And so I appreciate somuch that we were able to be in
conversation about this becausein some ways I think we're

(49:57):
telling a similar story but indifferent realms.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (50:01):
Yeah. That is one thing that actually came
to mind when I was reading yourframework of alchemy. We're both
using this analytic, yoursalchemy, mine resolution, in
various ways, but as atransmuting dynamic of
mediation. Thank you so much forsharing it with everyone. I'm
glad it's out in the world andfloating around, bobbing its

(50:23):
head going there.

Lisa Yin Han (50:27):
The metaphors continue. Continue.

Narrator (50:32):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The books DeepwaterAlchemy by Lisa Yin Han and
Microbial Resolution by GloriaChonsook Kim are available from
University of Minnesota Press.Thank you for listening.