Materia Prima

Beginning from the position that no media are neutral, I have devoted my work, over 15 years or more, to enquiring into the ideologies embedded in technics. Working inside an audio apparatus was a means of revealing, or more often revoking, its unspoken rules of usership. Break to remake. Like many of my generation whose youth witnessed the gradual distillation of multiple media formats into the universalising interface of online, this work took something of a media archaeological bent, scrutinising materialities of sound reproduction. But now, following this convergence into computation, the concurrent globalisation of industrial manufacture, and what Isabelle Stengers refers to as the intrusion of Gaia, other aspects of media materiality have asserted themselves with urgency: namely their reliance on extractive industrial practices. Here, I follow this thread through a singular comparison between the metallurgy of portable Bluetooth speakers and the magnetism of our planetary commons.

Bluetooth

Leaving my office as dusk fell one autumnal evening, I hear the familiar synth from Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack—as sampled in Dillinja’s jungle anthem The Angels Fell—emanating from the nearby skate park. The bassline drops as I stroll past, and, in a heady moment of rave nostalgia, it occurs to me that the fidelity of portable sound available to these teenagers is once again as rich as that produced by the cumbersome ghetto blasters of my childhood. Time-stretched amen breaks roll over ramps, two descending bass notes reverberate around concrete curves. It’s almost thirty years since this tune first tore up dancefloors and a thirty year journey through tinny portable audio technologies that separate my earliest memories of boombox-touting rastafarians treating the London bus to sunshine reggae and this evening’s Bluetooth- enabled drum-n-bass.

Bluetooth uses the 2.4GHz spectrum band, the default frequency range for low power, short-range communications: from baby monitors to wifi routers. As with all bandwidth in the radio and microwave range, this narrow spectral sliver, now set aside for local personalised use, rubs up against wavelengths used for radio astronomy, satellite communications, and passive meteorological sensing. The air between the skatepark and my ears is compressed and expanded by vocal samples, bass pulses, scattered exclamations and clattering wheels. The same air is dense with inaudible signal traffic whose vibrations carry communications from the banal to the cosmic. A jungle anthem, encoded and broadcast in the microwave range, flutters through this spectral environment to emerge as audible vibrations capable of transforming the tone of their listeners’ brainwaves.

According to Gilbert Simondon, in spite of their resemblance, we should not assimilate soundwaves with the electromagnetic spectrum because whereas “light’s elongations are always transversal, ... those of sound propagating in a gas are always longitudinal”.¹ Yet, from a media technical perspective, audio archiving and amplification are contingent upon electromagnetic technics.

Audio has been magnetically stored: on wire, tape, and in grains of cobalt-alloy spread across an aluminium hard disk platter; and magnetically reproduced: in loudspeakers powered by copper coiled around ceramic ferrite or neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) magnets. Rather than seeing the progression of media in terms of their modality of encoding (analogue/digital), we can describe this same transition as primarily metallurgical:

from Ferric to Lanthanide-Metalloid. This conception follows Lewis Mumford’s historic characterisation of the paleotechnic and neotechnic phases of technological development. Although the developments discussed here all occur within the neotechnic phase, which he calls “an electricity-and-alloy complex”. ² For Mumford, replacing paleotechnic iron with neotechnic aluminium lifted “a dead weight ... from all forms of locomotion” ³, catalysing a shift in design ideologies that disposed with excessive dimensions and overengineered structures: “lightness and compactness are the emergent qualities of the neotechnic era” ⁴. These qualities, reframed for the consumer as convenience and portability, are ideologically intrinsic to the current crop of Bluetooth speakers, whose portability and functionality are founded on the rare earth metallurgy of its components.

Geomagnetism

The resemblance and adjacency of audible vibrations with those of the electromagnetic spectrum is echoed at the planetary scale in the relationship between tectonic vibrations and magnetospheric interactions with solar and cosmic radiation. Unlike sound or light, the seismic waves of plate tectonics can be transverse or longitudinal: primary waves compress and expand the land, akin to the motion induced in a loudspeaker diaphragm, whereas secondary waves are analogous to electromagnetic radiation, shaking and shearing the ground perpendicular to their trajectory.

While there is no causal relationship between the planet’s magnetic field and its tectonic motion, the one leaves its mark in the other. Following World War II, military magnetometric surveys, originally intended to find sunken ships, discovered an alternating pattern of magnetic charge in the ocean bedrock. At spreading mid-oceanic ridges, cooling lava upwells between divergent continental plates. Liquefied rock is not magnetic, but, once cooled to about 580oC, the iron and nickel content of basalt acquires a small charge from the geomagnetic field. The alternating charged bands of bedrock were eventually understood to constitute evidence of reversals of Earth’s magnetic field: a petrified record of oscillations in planetary polarity. Knowledge of these fluctuating magnetic fields, known as paleomagnetism, can be used to date the formation of igneous geological features. Lanthanide metals, including neodymium, are primarily produced from the minerals bastnasite and monazite, both of which are paramagnetic, meaning they can be weakly magnetised by the prevailing magnetic field. Electrical sound signals are alternating currents and our ground is an alternating magnetic environment whose inversions are sensed and recorded by the imperceptible mobility of terra firma. Rilke famously proposed that any physical line in nature could be heard phonographically, but the Earth has been inscribing a magnetic recording of itself in perpetuity.

In 1896, Giuseppe Folgheraiter, a pioneer of archaeomagnetism, conducted a study of Greek and Etruscan vases discovering that iron particles in the clay were magnetised during firing. By studying their inclination, Folgheraiter found that when they were fired, the earth’s poles were reversed from their current position: in the eighth century BC the mediterranean was closer to the south pole than the north.⁵ We inhabit a planet whose magnetic field oscillates at a temporal rate to which we are insensible, but our vessels retain a trace of these oscillations. A more extreme manifestation of this relationship between technics and geomagnetics is found in the ITER nuclear fusion reactor in southern France. The intensity of a magnetic field is measured in oersteds, named after Hans Christian Ørsted who, in 1820, discovered the relationship between electrical current and magnetism. The intensity of Earth’s magnetic field is approximately 0.5 oersted. The central solenoid at ITER is capable of producing a magnetic field 280,000 times more powerful. If the traces of Earth’s magnetic field are registered in ancient rock formations and ceramics, then could such intense industrial fields not also be introducing anthropogenic anomalies that will endure as evidence of human society’s energetic infrastructures?

Extraction

In June 2023, an article published in Geophysical Research Letters reported that the extraction of water from underground reservoirs has altered the tilt of Earth’s axis. This measurable anthropogenic deflection of planetary magnetism echoes the Anthropocene thesis of humanity’s geological impact. The quantity of groundwater depletion was estimated in excess of 2 trillion tonnes between 1993 and 2010, causing an eastward drift of the pole at a rate of 4.36cm/year.⁶ A similar observation—of Earth’s axis tilting—was made by Inuit elders 13 years earlier in the film Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change. As Susan Schuppli points out, the filmmakers were “admonished by the scientific community for presenting such a spurious hypothesis” (2020, 281). At the time, scientists proposed that the cause was optical rather than physical: that the accretion of pollutants had altered atmospheric refraction sufficiently to shift the sun’s apparent position. Whatever the cause, the Inuit observations were accurate. The Bluetooth speaker is merely the latest entrant into a history of audio technologies that embody the western ideology of constant motion and travel to far flung horizons, but perhaps deep knowledge of planetary ecology is easier attained by those whose stay in place and attend closely to their local surroundings.

The primary mining of all metals from raw ores consumes extensive amounts of water. As Julie Klinger estimates in the case of rare earth refining at Baotou, China: “every tonne of rare earth concentrate produced generates approximately one tonne of radioactive wastewater [and] seventy-five cubic metres of acid wastewater”.⁷ At these quantities the mining and refining of rare earths are clearly not solely accountable for a shift in the planetary axis. But this vastly disproportionate production of wastewater is emblematic of a systemic problem in un/economical thought that ignores the externalities and ecological impacts of its worldview.

The paradigm through which policymakers hope to address and mitigate these consequences is energy transition. And central to this transition are the high power neodymium magnets required for wind turbines and electric vehicles. The materiality of Bluetooth speakers imbricates the technics of portable audio in the resource race currently underway to secure the digital and energy futures of nation states and political blocs. Music’s mobility emanates from the same magnets that transduce wind into electricity. China’s enduring near-monopoly in the production rare earth metals, and the reluctance of European countries to shoulder the deleterious effects of its prodigious tailings, means energy transition in Europe will remain reliant on imports in the medium or even long term.

The largest known rare earth deposit considered to be within European territory is the proposed Kvanefjeld mine in Greenland, where, as Lise Autogena & Joshua Portway’s film Kuannersuit / Kvanefjeld shows, the mineralised combination of uranium, thorium and fluorine has no extractive precedent. The rare earths there cannot be mined without also extracting the uranium, a practice prohibited by Greenland’s Uranium Act of 2021. As a result, Kvanefjed is now the site of a long, increasingly bitter dispute between Australian owned mining company Energy Transition Minerals and the Greenlandic and Danish governments. Kvanefjeld looks like it may become a rare example of local-legal resistance to extractivism winning over multinational economistic profit motives and set a precedent for post-colonial self-determination.

Nevertheless, global demand for neodymium is anticipated to rise from 40,000 tonnes at present to 190,000 tonnes by 2050, which—if it were to be refined entirely by primary production methods—would produce an astonishing 14.25 million tonnes of acid wastewater. Recycling of rare earth magnets from end- of-life devices is not currently possible as NeFeB magnets are automatically sorted along with all other ferrous metals. A European Union research project—REEPRODUCE—aims to implement a scalable recycling process for rare earths. At the time of writing, a prototype mobile sorting facility is being developed to sort neodymium magnets from ferrous waste streams. This waste will subsequently require several steps of dismantling, shredding, advanced hydro-metallurgy, and high temperature electrolysis, each developed to be industrially scalable and economically competitive with novel mining production for the recycling of rare earths from permanent magnets to be viable.

Electric Conflict

In Buckminster Fuller’s essay ‘The Music of the New Life’, a diagram titled Profile of the Industrial Revolution shows—chronologically over an 800 year period—the isolation of the 92 regenerative chemical elements. Initially progress is slow, with two centuries passing between each isolation, until the thirteenth: cobalt in 1739. After this the chart rises steeply, with the final 80 elements isolated in just under 200 years. Neodymium, it shows, was the 72nd chemical element to be isolated - in 1885 in Austria. For Fuller, the diagram’s appeal is its demonstration that grasping chemical reality at this level of granularity has profoundly altered the trajectory of that reality: “probably the most significant consequence of the application of this knowledge is man’s alteration thereby of his ecological patterning in universe”. ⁸

A similar profile could be drawn of the isolation and instrumentalisation of the electromagnetic spectrum. Such a diagram might begin from the near-synchronous discoveries of infrared (by Herschel in 1800) and ultraviolet radiation (by Ritter in 1801) and build towards the density of contemporary national spectrum allocations. For Mumford, this harnessing of spectral energies is a defining characteristic of the neotechnic phase: “[the] unification of electricity and light is perhaps the outstanding symbol of this new phase”⁹, he writes. Where Fuller’s diagram demonstrates the technical advances of metallurgical isolation by including a parallel timeline of transportation, the progression of spectral technics is better illustrated by the development of communication and energy technologies, including radio, television, wireless internet and infrared fibreoptics to one side of the visible spectrum, and photoelectric and nuclear energy generation to the other.

Hans Christian Ørsted would feature in both diagrams. In 1824, four years after his discovery of the magnetic properties of electrical currents, he successfully isolated aluminium - surprisingly late given its terrestrial abundance. In these two discoveries: one magnetic, the other metallurgical, he laid down two foundations of the mobile communications revolution of which the Bluetooth speaker is one commercial outcome: the inductive and penetrative potential of electromagnetic waves, and the strength to weight ratio of aluminium.

Ørsted demonstrated his discovery of electromagnetism by the deflection of a compass needle when placed adjacent to an electrical current, a phenomenon he described at the time as the conflict of electricity.¹⁰ A tool whose unwavering orientation to the poles had served to geomagnetically locate its user, was shown to deviate in the presence of man-made energy sources. Ørsted would surely not have conceived that the industrialisation of his metallurgical and electromagnetic findings might eventually contribute to a declination of planetary polarity. But, two centuries later, from the perspective of the Anthropocene, the experimental proof he offered—of a sensitive geomagnetic instrument swayed by an anthropogenic current—suddenly feels like a parable foretelling the current conflict between industrial society and the earth system it inhabits and exploits.

Bio

Stephen Cornford is a media artist and writer whose research investigates the relationships between technologies and landscapes, between media systems and planetary systems. Critically questioning the environmental impacts of consumer electronics and scientific sensing practices, his work challenges the viability of addressing ecological collapse through extractive and economic logics.