ABSTRACT
Heidegger made a distinction between the conditions of "earth" and "world". Heidegger suggests that just as art is not about aesthetics, so the essence of technology is nothing merely technological. There has long been a resonance between the technological manipulation of that landscape and the manipulation of the image generally. Rather, as Bernard Stiegler asserts, such forms of technical manipulation matter profoundly to the condition as human beings. The modern system for organizing the prairie dates from the nineteenth century, but it has a strange resonance with today's imaging technologies. The various engagements with time are instances of that paradoxical complexity and indeterminacy that Stiegler asserted are characteristic of complex technical systems. The last mentioned digital archives can be understood as instances of what he refers to as the intertwining of anthropogenesis and technogenesis, in which human memory is displaced into an epiphylogenetic history, a historical record outside of the species.
