Hoyng, Rolien (2025) On Liminal Grounds : Smart Farming and The Politics of Uncertainty. In: Speculative Machines and Us: Histories and Futures of AI, 2025-07-17 - 2025-07-17, LICA.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
The “zillion-dollar question” (a million dollar would be an underestimation) for agriculture lies exactly at the intersection of the climate and the situated: How will the impacts of climate change manifest in a particular location, where the enormous complexity of the climate intersects with the specific complexities of situated ecosystems and local geographies that matter to farming? Data-and AI-driven smart farming inserts itself in this liminal space between dominant disciplines (physics and biology), scales (the planetary scale of climate change and the local scale of ecosystems), and models (climate models and weather models). I focus on how the attempted smart make-over of agriculture enacts a technological politics residing in the translation of uncertainty into calculated figures of risk/opportunity, along with liminal excess that is uncalculated. Exploring distributions of risk, opportunity, and precarity allows me to conceive climate injustice through the lens of liminality. Against such unjust distributions, I draw on Hayles (2025) and Stengers (2023) to imagine climate justice as organization of sense and cybersymbiosis in farm ecologies.