Microbial Scale and the Undoing of Vision

Eadweard Muybridge famously photographed galloping horses to settle a bet over whether horses, when running at full speed, ever lift all four hooves off the ground. Étienne-Jules Marey photographed falling cats, flying insects, and alighting birds to demystify the mechanics of movement. In the history of scientific imaging, visualizing technologies have been used to coax a world imperceptible to humans into visibility. In transforming the unseen phenomenal world into indexical accounts, scientific vision operates on the premise that uncertainties could crystallize into knowable things once visually apprehended. The indexical record provides proof, and in doing so, invalidates competing theories, narrowing those possibilities down to something more sure. We might then call such visualizing technologies "technologies of certainty."

GPS-harnessed wild birds migrating between two distant lakes in mainland China may seem at first glance to function in continuity with this lineage of scientific vision. Since at least 2012, these wild birds have been captured around two lakes in mainland China, harnessed with GPS devices, and then returned to their migrating flocks.¹ The GPS devices on the birds allow researchers to track the migratory flyways of their flocks, with their pathways transcribed as bright lines superimposed over satellite images of a map (Figs. 1a and 1b). This data is then layered and compiled with other data that shows researchers how the ground underneath these routes is used, for example, where there are rice fields, hydration patterns, locations of wild and domestic poultry farms, and documentation of the commingling of so-called domestic and wild geographies. What researchers are trying to decipher through these wired animals is where and how domestic and wild realms overlap and how densely.² They believe this will be key to understanding the possible futures of cross-species influenza transmission. Finally, all of this collected data is used to produce a data visualized risk map (Fig. 2). This risk map is the work that the birds do: their bodies are used to create this map to measure in colors and cartography, various levels of future pandemic possibility. I refer to this entire biotechnological assemblage, as a single technology, which I call "animal sentinel media." I use "sentinel" because one definition of "sentinel" is the one who goes first in a battlefield to see what dangers lay ahead.

These animal sentinel media are one of many such technologies developing from a specific historical moment beginning when microbial life was being reconceptualized. In 1989, as the Cold War was reaching an end, American scientists and security experts turned their attention toward more amorphous and diffuse global threats, including the risks posed

Figure 1a.

Wild Ruddy Sheldrake outfitted with GPS, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Photo by Diann Prosser, 2007.

Figure 1b.

Mapped flyways of GPS-tracked flock. Image documents concurrent use of wetlands and agricultural fields by domestic poultry and migratory birds. Image by USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Diann Prosser et. al. 2011.

Figure 2.

Data visualized risk map displaying regions around lakes Poyang and Qinghai. GPS-tagged birds are used here to help visualize possible spatial patterns of disease transmission risk between poultry and wild waterfowl populations. Image by: USGS, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Diann Prosser et.al., 2013. To access the full study, "Mapping avian influenza transmission risk at the interface of domestic poultry and wild birds," see: https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpubh.2013.00028.

by new patterns and formations of microbial life. At the same time, the biological sciences were revealing that microbes were not eradicable as once thought but were actually dynamic entities endlessly proliferating in ever-new mutant combinations as they traversed the world through global systems and ecologies. In response to these factors, those scientists at DARPA invented a new concept of microbial life as "emerging." Heralding a future of unfixed and unyielding emerging microbes, the concept of emerging microbes loaded pandemic risk into the ever-nearing but constantly deferred future. A US-led project to counter microbes throughout...