Introduction: Machinic Visions of the Planetary

At a time of increasing challenges that concern our relationship to the environment, including looming and continuing environmental crises, sociopolitical designations of alterity, and the uncertainty of a planetary future outside of capital’s globalizing social forms, we address how new forms of vision and visuality brought forth through technologies envision planetarity and planetary relations. Imaging technologies are central to consider as sources of knowledge about the environment. Their image output has the power to reconfigure relations of the planetary and can and can act as a source of speculative reimagining. The development and dependence on machine vision technologies such as satellite imaging, wide-scale algorithmic platforms, statistical modeling programs, drones equipped with LiDAR, and other sensing networks with visual output bring about an expansion of the perceptual scope. Through inquiries into the themes of scale, alterity, nonhuman entanglements, and operational imaging, this issue asks how machinic ways of seeing generate a new aesthetics of planetarity.