International Journal of Communication 10(2016), Feature 3186–3202 1932–8036/2016FEA0002 Copyright © 2016 (Kate Maddalena, kate.maddalena@gmail.com; Chris Russill, chris.russill@gmail.com). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org. Is the Earth an Optical Medium? An Interview with Chris Russill KATE MADDALENA University of North Carolina at Wilmington CHRIS RUSSILL Carleton University A discussion between Canadian media theorist Chris Russill, associate professor at Carleton University, and Kate Maddalena, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, articulates Russill’s work in terms of current conversations in media-related cultural studies. Russill uses media theory, particularly the intersecting lineages of Michel Foucault, Harold Innis, and Friedrich Kittler, to describe planetary media that record, store, and transmit light. He then discusses implications for the technical media apparatus being created, largely in earth systems sciences, to read, process, and deploy appropriate action in response to the same. The conception of earth as optical medium affords insight into the power politics of ozone holes, climate change, the photosynthetic machines of science fiction, and sunscreen. Keywords: Michel Foucault, Harold Innis, Friedrich Kittler, earth science, media history Kate Maddalena: This symposium is called Media, Epistemology, Power, so let’s start by talking about how your work addresses media, knowledge making, and power dynamics. Chris Russill: I ask how media theory can engage crises disclosed by the earth sciences. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) argues that the earth sciences force a distinction between the planetary and the global, and he claims the politics of climate change turn on taking up how the planetary is disclosed by contemporary earth science, a nice approach to Gayatri Spivak’s (2005) call for the planetary to overwrite the global. How do we register, record, and process the planetary? The problem challenges media theory in interesting ways. We get glimpses of “the planetary” in the mid-20th century. The first off-planet imaging of the atmosphere by missiles and satellites, and the first computations of global atmosphere, these challenge how we imagine, see, know, sense, and measure the world. Yet, these glimpses—the satellite imaging of the earth’s atmosphere, the prehuman atmospheres found in ice cores, the atmospheres modeled