In Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, a novel set before the digital era and more focused on the modulation and standardization of processes of light for the use of technical media such as photography, one gets a sense of the chemistry of media. Pynchon’s status as part of theoretical mapping of history of media and technology has become consolidated ever since Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) tied together war, technology, and a weird narrative mix of paranoia, conspiracy, and mental states. The V-2 rocket motivated insights into technology and science as an essential part of power relations inspired by the likes of Kittler but also a range of later scholars.  In Against the Day (2006) the theme is similar but with a focus on light, optics, and chemistry, where especially the latter is what connects to our need to understand media history to its materials. It is an account that persists from the early histories of photography such as geologist-photographer W. Jerome Harrison’s History of Photography (1887), which if you read it through the perspective of geology of media becomes a story of chemicals instead of merely the inventor-experimenters such as Niepce, Daguerre, or Talbot: bitumen (in lithography),  tin, iodide, lactates and nitrates of silver, carbon processes, uranium nitrates, and chlorides of gold.^[1]  History of technical media is constantly being reenacted in different ways in contemporary media arts. For photochemical artists getting their hands dirty with gelatin and silver nitrates this is part of the artistic methodology infused in chemistry: cyanotypes’ esthetic effect comes down to chemicals  (ammonium iron (III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide). A film artist with a media archaeological bent knows the amounts in combinations needed in testing and experimenting with chemicals/materials.^[2] But this knowledge is more that of a metallurgist than of a scientist: experimentations in dosage, learning the materials’ characteristics by practice.^[3]

In Pynchon’s own version of media materialism and optical media the list of objects constitutes a sort of a pre-mediatic media materialism, a list of voluntary or involuntary participants in the process of technical imaging, circa nineteenth century:

Besides the object world with which the narrative continues—the world an object-oriented theorist might call “flat,”^[5] which includes a litany from humans to lampposts to trolley dynamos and flush toilets—much has already happened on the level of chemical reactions. In other words, the media devices are not the only aspects of “materialism.” We are, however, interested in questions of what enables and sustains media to become media.

In this sort of perspective on deep-time geologies as well as chemistry of media one cannot avoid at least a brief mention of the long history of alchemy. Isn’t it exactly the lineage of alchemy that is of relevance here? It has meant attributing a special force to the natural elements and their mixes, from base to precious: from realgar, sulfur, white arsenic, cinnabar, and especially mercury to gold, lead, copper, silver, and iron.^[6] The history of alchemy is steeped in poetic narratives that present their own versions of deep times (for instance in pre-Christian Chinese alchemy);^[7] The discipline occupies a position between arts and sciences.^[8]In a way, as Newman notes, alchemy prepared the experimental way for much of later technological culture. There were many such developers: Avicenna with his De congelatione (at one point mistaken for a writing by Aristotle), and scholastic writers such asVincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon are examples of early thirteenth-century practitioners. In Vincent’s Speculum doctrinale, written between 1244 and 1250, one gets a sense of alchemy as a “science of minerals,” a practice-based excavation of their transmutational qualities. In Vincent’s words alchemy “is properly the art of transmuting mineral bodies, such as metals and the like, from their own species to others.”^[9]

In Against the Day Pynchon presents his own condensed narrative prose lineage from alchemy to modern chemistry and technical media. According to his way of crystallizing the chemistry of technological culture, this transformation of materials in knowledge and practices corresponds to the birth of capitalism, which is characterized by a regularization of processes of material reaction and metamorphosis. In Against the Day a dialogue between two characters, Merle and Webb, reveals something important about this turning point from alchemy to modern science:

What Pynchon brings into play in this admittedly short quote is labor. Such issues link up with histories of exploitation and capture of surplus value, as well as with media histories of matter. Indeed, besides writing a material history of media before it becomes media, Pynchon is able to highlight the magical nature of commodity production related to the novel forms of “alchemy”: the new magic explicated by Marx as the fetish of the object hiding the material forces of its production is characteristic of this aspect, which is usually defined as material history understood as a history of labor and political economy. We need to also understand, however, the technological and media elements in this mix, which also returns to the issue of geology, the earth.

In short, techniques of experimenting with different reactions and combinations are also media practices. Our screen technologies, cables, networks, technical means of seeing and hearing, are partly results of meticulous—and sometimes just purely accidental—experimentation with how materials work; what works, what doesn’t, whether you are talking about materials for insulation, conduction, projection, or recording. The sciences and the arts often share this attitude of experimentation and the experiment—to make the geos expressive and transformative. The transistor-based information tech culture would not be thinkable without the various meticulous insights into the material characteristics and differences between germanium and silicon—or the energetic regimes; whether that involves the consideration of current clouds (as in server farms), or the attempts to manage power consumption inside computer architectures.^[11] Issues of energy are ones of geophysics too—both in the sense of climate change accelerated by the still continuing heavy reliance on polluting forms of nonrenewable energy production and through the various chemicals, metals, and metalloids such as germanium and silicon, media cultural aftereffects of the geological strata. That is also where a deep time of the planet is inside our machines, crystallized as part of the contemporary political economy: material histories of labor and the planet are entangled in devices, which however unfold as part of planetary histories. Data mining might be a leading hype term for our digital age of the moment but it is enabled only by the sort of mining that we associate with the ground and its ungrounding. Digital culture starts in the depths and deep times of the planet. Sadly, this story is most often more obscene than something to be celebrated with awe.