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Abstract

This article revisits and reconceptualises the geographies of reflection. Questions of reflection have been understood by geographers primarily in terms of vision and visuality and their implication in the representational constitution of the human subject. However, this article argues that reflection can be reconceptualised as more-than-visual and that its geographies should be resituated on a wider spectrum of electromagnetic radiance which includes but goes beyond visible light. Developing this argument, the article extends the geographies of reflection along three conceptual-empirical pathways – radiant worlds, speculative surfaces, and reflective media.

Keywords

elemental media radiance reflection speculation surfaces

I Introduction

The process of reflection, as a fundamentally spatial operation, has figured commonly in geographical thinking and its cognate disciplines. Consider, for instance, how the promise and problems of representational thinking have been framed and critiqued in terms of reflection (Barad, 2007; Gould, 1991; Haraway, 1997; Rose, 1995). Or how the most obviously reflective object – the mirror – figures in efforts to understand geographical issues from cartographic representation (e.g. Lowenthal, 1977; Rose, 1996; Wallach, 2011) to landscape (Strohmayer and de Búrca, 2025) within a discipline which itself has been described as a ‘distant mirror’ (Haggett, 1990). Or again, how a range of influential conceptualisations of spatiality have grasped the relations between bodies, subjects, and worlds in terms of mirrors and mirroring (e.g. Foucault, 2002; Lefebvre, 1991; Lacan, 1986). And consider how feminist geographers have reworked masculinist assumptions about the transparency of representational space to critique the spatial politics of subjectivity in a world conceived not only as a ‘prison house of language but also a hall of mirrors’ (Rose, 1995: 761; see also Rose, 1996).

In much of this work the relation between reflection and spatiality is usually, and quite understandably, conceived in visual terms. Given the sustained critique of the visual within geography (e.g. Roberts, 2013), it might appear that the frame of critical engagement with the visual geographies of reflection has been more or less defined. Certainly, it is by now well established that both reflection, and its close associate, reflexivity, are partial, problematic, and shadowed by dreams of transparency (Rose, 1997). Equally, reflection as a model of representational thinking based on the capacity of the subject to mirror an external world is now considered so outmoded to be naïve at best (Rorty, 1979) and politically dangerous at worst. Indeed, in some strands of social and cultural theory, epistemologies of reflection have been superseded by those of diffraction, which for Donna Haraway (1997) and Karen Barad (2007) offer more generative ways of thinking difference.

Given the acknowledged epistemological and political limits of reflection, why then revisit its geographies now? There are at least three reasons for doing so. First, disciplinary shifts since Gillian Rose’s notable interventions (1995, 1996), particularly within cultural geography, have complicated the conceptual, empirical, and political entanglements of reflection. These include the emergence of nonrepresentational theories (e.g. Anderson, 2019; Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Thrift, 2008) and the circulation of diverse materialisms (e.g. Tolia-Kelly, 2013; S Kirsch, 2013). Though multilayered, such work invites a reconsideration of the matter, meaning, and experience of reflection beyond the frame of the mirror as a representational space or metaphor. It also suggests that the affective materiality of reflection should be understood via a much wider set of sites, materials, and practices than had previously been the case.

Second, research within and beyond geography points to the importance of thinking of reflection as a process of technical mediation (Leszczynski, 2015) as well as symbolic representation. Work on digital and interactive media has shown how the screen has become the most ubiquitous of reflective interfaces, with all kinds of implications for understanding affective life (Ash, 2009; Coleman, 2013; Pedwell, 2017) and, indeed, for the status of the mirror as a cultural object (Rose, 2016). Equally important here is an expanded understanding of mediation, especially in relation to various elemental and environmental concerns (Peters, 2015; Starosielski, 2021; Jue, 2020). Although diverse, central to this work is an interest in the infrastructural mediation of relations between bodies and their elemental surrounds (air, water, etc.,) broadly defined, by different techniques, technologies, and materials. Importantly, this work points to the value of resituating geographies of reflection in the context of the wider electromagnetic spectrum of radiance.

Third, if reflection is resituated along a spectrum of radiant materiality, then its geographies become more complex, elastic, and multi-scalar than were previously considered. Critical engagements with reflection have tended to privilege the encounter between the phenomenological subject and the mirror as a reasonably well framed, if also deeply problematic and fractured space (Rose, 1995, 1996). This focus is complicated when reflection is understood in relation to wider elemental surrounds and zones (Hawkins, 2023) including earth, air, and water, in which human and non-human life is immersed. In the process, the geographical questions through which reflection is articulated can be stretched from the bodily to the planetary, and beyond to the extra-planetary.

In the context of these developments this article therefore has two key aims. First, it argues that reflection needs to be reconceptualised as more-than-visual. This does not mean that visual reflection is rendered insignificant but that it is situated within the context of a wider spectrum of electromagnetic radiation including but not limited to visible light. Put otherwise, reflection should be understood in relation to questions of radiance (Hecht, 1998; Mukherjee 2020a; Starosielski, 2021b). Then, and second, the article offers three pathways of enquiry – ranging from the bodily to the extra-planetary – through which the expanded geographies of reflection can be elaborated. These twin aims are developed as follows. To begin, I revisit engagements with the spatialities of visual reflection while also highlighting how they can be extended. I next consider how reflection can be reconceptualised as more-than-visual by examining its radiant materialities. I then discuss three pathways – radiant worlds, speculative surfaces, and reflective media – along which geographies of reflection can be further elaborated. In the conclusion, I point to possibilities for making more of the multi-spectral geographies of reflection in the contemporary conjuncture.

II Revisiting spaces of reflection

Reflection has figured prominently in many conceptualisations of space and spatiality, framed often by a critique of the promise and problems of understanding representational space as analogous to a transparent mirror (see Rorty, 1979). Foucault’s (2002) reading of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas in The Order of Things is notable in this regard. For Foucault the void at the centre of the representational space of reflection is a consequence of the fact that ‘the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing – despite all mirrors, reflections, imitations, and portraits’ (2002: 16; see Ogborn, 1995). Reflection and the mirror also figure prominently in Foucault’s discussion of heterotopia (Foucault and Miskowiec, 1986). The mirror, for Foucault, is a ‘utopia, since it is a placeless place’ and a heterotopia that generates a ‘mixed, joint experience’ because the perception of presence ‘has to pass through this virtual point which is over there’ (1986: 24). As an object and metaphor for understanding the contradictions of heterotopias, the mirror therefore offers critical possibilities for imagining spaces otherwise (Bonazzi, 2002).

Foucault’s ideas offer purchase on artistic experiments with reflection. Robert Smithson’s work is an influential example here. Smithson’s 1969 Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9) (see Linsely, 2000; Stuckelberger, 2006), consists of twelve-inch mirrors placed and photographed briefly at a series of sites in the Yucatan peninsula. Generating fragmentary affects and percepts of landscape in ways that parallel work by geographers (e.g. Wylie, 2005), Smithson’s mirrored displacements also reveal the mirror as simultaneously utopian and heterotopic (Miller, 2018; Kokora, nd; Stuckelberger, 2006). For Kokora (nd: np), ‘as a mirrored counterpart to the philosophy of Foucault, Robert Smithson’s projects create gaps in perception, displacements, non-sites, or negative ways of seeing in physical form’. Placed in a landscape it never reflects, the mirror, in Smithson’s work, is a space of fragmentation, abstraction, and absence. Notably, his photographic and textual documentation of the work does not feature any human figures. This decentring of the human subject is not without cost – it mystifies the sites of dis/placement, with brief side glances to Indigenous knowledges tending, in the process, towards an exoticisation and a ‘rather ahistorical brand of the sublime’ (Miller, 2018: 125).

The emphasis in Smithson’s mirror works on the tension between abstraction and the fractured duration of experience can also be read through the writing of Henri Lefebvre (1991), in which reflection plays an important role in the analysis of the dialectics of abstraction and lived experience. Lefebvre’s ideas about reflection are central to his critique of the generative and fractured relations between bodies and society (see Kinkaid, 2020; Simonsen 2005). Drawing on influences including Nietzsche, surrealism, and the mathematics of symmetry, Lefebvre devotes considerable attention in The Production of Space to the ‘evanescent, fascinating’ object (1991: 186) of the mirror. As he notes, ‘if my body may be said to enshrine a generative principle, at once abstract and concrete, the mirror’s surface makes this principle invisible, deciphers it’ (1991: 185). This generative principle is not just individual but also social. As Simonsen (2005: 6) notes, for Lefebvre, ‘social space itself’ becomes ‘a mirror, in a collective and historical sense’.

Lefebvre distinguishes his understanding of the socio-spatiality of the mirror from that offered by psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan’s discussion of the ‘drama’ of the mirror-stage as the moment the infant grasps the ‘lure of spatial identification’ (2006: 78; see Gregory, 1995). By spatialising self-recognition, the mirror for Lacan establishes a relational distance and difference between the place of the body and its counterpart (Pohl and Helbrecht, 2022). The psychoanalytic framing of mirroring has also informed, and been in turn subject to, feminist critiques of the relations between spatiality, visuality, and geographical knowledge. In her critique of reflection as transparent representation, Gillian Rose (1995: 776) draws on Lacan and Irigaray (Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b) to interrogate the ‘instabilities and the specificities of the phallocentric space of self-knowledge’ (1995: 776). Rose then points to the possibility of ‘differently feminine’ subject positions emerging in visual spaces beyond the phallocentric mirror and its presumption of transparency (1995: 776). Importantly, Rose qualifies her argument by admitting that in trying to ‘shatter the mirror of phallocentric subjectivity’ she continues to use ‘shards from the smashed mirror of theory’ (1995: 766). Rose’s critical intervention demonstrates both the allure of the mirror as an object of critique and the difficulty of going beyond reflection in critical thinking, especially via encounters with art and media (e.g. Chadwick, 1998; Metz, 1982; Mulvey, 1989; Shetley and Ferguson, 2001).

Psychoanalytic framings of the mirror of theory have influenced feminist critiques of the universalism of certain meta-theories, notably Meaghan Morris’ (1992) response to David Harvey’s (1991) analysis of postmodernity. Morris, drawing on Lacan, argues that Harvey’s theory contains an ‘unresolvable dichotomy of the good mirror (“social theory”) and the bad mirror (“aesthetics”), each necessary to each other’, a dichotomy that ‘installs [Harvey’s] discourse in the endless circuit of its own specularity’ (1992: 270). A psychoanalytic critique of reflection and the mirror has also shaped analyses of the geographies of colonialism (e.g. Lutz and Collins, 1991). Frantz Fanon’s argument about the subjectivity of colonised and coloniser is informed by a version of Lacan’s mirror-stage (see 1986; see also Weiss, 2013). Aspects of Fanon’s arguments resonate with other claims about the imaginative geographies of colonial and developmental discourses. Informed by Chabal (1996), Popke (2001: 7), for instance, considers both the ‘implications of viewing Africa with an ethnographic mirror’ and how this ‘mirror can be inverted’ in challenging geopolitical images of modernity (see also Howitt and Suchet Pearson, 2003; Sidaway, 2012). Such critical interrogations challenge the wider epistemologies that frame Western knowledge production. These are articulated most forcefully by Deborah Bird Rose (1999: 177), for whom the perspective of the white Eurocentric subject is situated within ‘a hall of mirrors; it mistakes its reflection for the world, sees its own reflections endlessly, talks endlessly to itself, and, not surprisingly, finds continual verification of itself and its world view’.

In short, both reflection and the mirror have figured prominently in efforts to make sense of the entanglements of spatiality, representation, and power. They have been the focus of critique while also providing frames through which critique is articulated (see Coleman, 2013; Rose, 1997). These efforts emphasise the politics of reflection as a representational and epistemological mode of problematic relationality in ways that go beyond the philosophical tradition of thinking of the ‘mind as a great mirror, containing various representations – some accurate, some not’ (Rorty, 1979: 12). In this context, and as part of a broader engagement with the material cultures and politics of reflection (see Shrum, 2017), thinking critically about the mirror clearly remains important for apprehending different spatial formations and experiences, not least when it complicates the perspectival geometries and politics of the white, male, western subject (see also Goscilo, 2010).

III Making more of visual reflection

Significant scope remains therefore for continued critical engagement with the visual spatialities of reflection, and especially through artistic works that employ mirrors and mirroring. These experiments draw attention to a range of issues. First, they offer possibilities for unsettling the spacetimes of monumentalised memory in ways that echo but go beyond Lefebvre’s discussion of the mirror as a socio-spatial locus of bodily difference. A notable example here is The Battle is Joined (Bowman-McElhone et al., 2021), a 2017 work by Karyn Olivier.¹ In a Baltimore park, Olivier used mirrored panels to cover and conceal a 1903 memorial to a battle during the American Revolutionary War (Bowman-McElhone et al., 2021: 1182-1183). As Olivier describes the work:

“The Battle Is Joined had a mirrored facade that revealed in real time its viewers and the ever-changing landscape. The mirror also reflected the neighborhood's demographic, which is predominantly African American (it was once a German immigrant stronghold). […]. This reflection was also tied to invisibility—of marginalized people and communities. Through the act of concealment (with mirror), a new opportunity was offered for my neighbors to be visible; we were in fact displayed. […] This piece was installed a week after the Charlottesville attack, in which peaceful protestors were run down by a driver who was part of the Neo-Nazi/white supremacist rally. In the aftermath of that violence, The Battle Is Joined became something of a rallying cry” (in Bowman-McElhone et al., 2021: 1187).

Second, focussing on artistic experiments with mirrors attenuates and displaces associations between reflection and western-centric perspectival geometries. Consider Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019), the first Iranian artist to have a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, whose mirrored mosaics, based on principles of Islamic geometry, produce distinctive forms of abstract reflection that displace entirely the viewer.² Her work is also an influence on Shirin Abedinirad, an Iranian artist based in the US who uses ‘minimalist arrangements of elemental materials like water, mirrors, and light’ to craft works that distort perceptual relations between landscape, depth, and distance.³ These works include Babel Tower (2015), and Mirrored Ziggurat (2016) in which tiered mirrored structures placed in different locations produce a ‘transformative image of the world by decomposing it into parts and recomposing it as a new union’.⁴

Third, more attention could be paid to how reflection figures in artistic experiments with diverse cosmologies and futures (see Elwood, 2024). For instance, Kenyan-born and Brooklyn-based artist Wangechi Mutu produces paintings, collages, and figurative sculptures combining themes of blackness, womanhood, Afrofuturism, and sci-fi. Some of Mutu’s figural works make prominent use of mirrors, including The NewOnes, will free Us (2019) and Mirror Faced 1, Mirror Faced 2, and Mirror Faced 3 (2020).⁵ These sculptures feature figures appearing simultaneously traditional, alien, and regal. A distinguishing feature on the heads of these figures is a mirrored disc which in some cases occludes the face completely. The incorporation of the mirrors is part of the elaboration of an elemental Afrofuturism as well as a challenge to the dream of transparency within Enlightenment self-reflectivity. As McDaniels, commenting on The NewOnes, will free Us, puts it:

“The fact that these discs intentionally reflect light and “flash at you from a distance” suggests that Mutu is familiar with the importance of shining as an important modality or visual aesthetic within African diasporic culture and religion, further connecting NewOnes to their cosmological significance” (2022: 12).

Fourth, artistic work offers opportunities for exploring further the affective spatialities of reflection, building on earlier engagements with the politics of vision, subjectivity, and desire. As geographers and others have reworked understandings of ‘representations-in-relation’ (Anderson, 2019) the scope of such engagements has increased significantly, encouraging attention to what Christina Albu (2016) has called ‘mirror affects’. Albu uses this term to name ‘the intense bodily experience triggered by’ artworks with a mirroring function, whether they involve traditional mirrors or not (2016: 6). Mirror affects, according to Albu, refer to the ‘more or less conscious attunements that emerge between participants’ acts’ (Ibid., 6) and to the ‘diffuse collectivities’ (ibid: 7) that take shape through the process of immersion in these works. Encounters with reflective/responsive artworks can generate forms of affective imitation and experiences of displacement beyond the site-specificity of those encounters. Informed by a genealogy of artistic experiments with mirrors and reflective media (see also Furuhata, 2022), Albu foregrounds works that blur boundaries between participatory art and new forms of digital responsiveness, not least through various screens and interfaces. In many of these works the mirror is not a passive reflective surface but an interface actively mediating relations between self, other, and world.

Echoing this claim, Ksenia Fodorova (2020: 3) has argued that the technical mediation of mirroring and reflection, sometimes informed by assumptions about so-called ‘mirror neurons’, is central to the interface as an affective ‘condition that brings to the fore and gives structure to the relational nature of being human’. In this context Fodorova foregrounds artistic works that experiment with the affective disquiet generated by modes of automated or algorithmic reflection and mirroring. Such claims point to the importance of the screen more generally as a differentially reflective interface through which the relations between body image, self, and others are negotiated. Rebecca Coleman (2013) has explored this in relation to a series of ‘interactive mirrors’, building on her earlier work about body image and mirrors (Coleman, 2009). Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's (2005) ideas about the mirror in cinema, Coleman argues that as interfaces rather than conventional screens, interactive mirrors ‘organise images through the screen and encourage particular modes of experiencing the image that operate through intensity and the body. In this sense, interactive mirror images are not so much representational texts to be read and deciphered but are virtuals that are felt and lived out’ (2013: 2).

IV Radiance matters

Continued critical engagement with the complex relations between space, representation, and reflection, particularly through artistic experiments with mirrors and mirrored surfaces, remains important (see Strohmayer and de Búrca, 2025). In the rest of this article, however, I build on and extend such framings of reflection to reconceptualise its geographies as more-than-visual. In doing so my aim is not to ignore the visual dimensions of reflection but to resituate them in more-than-representational (Lorimer, 2005) relation to a broader set of conceptual and empirical trajectories.

An important way of foregrounding this issue is through attention to reflective materials. In their critique of representation, earlier conceptualisations of the spatialities of reflection were relatively inattentive to its material-specificity. This specificity matters, however. On one level, it multiplies the kinds of reflective materials to which attention might be paid as part of a broader engagement with surfaces (Forsyth et al., 2013). These range from the surfaces of elemental materials like water, to more obviously anthropogenic materials like glass, aluminium, and mylar, all of which have also been used in artistic experiment (see, for instance, McCormack, 2024). Equally important, although beyond the scope of this paper, are reflective materials designed to render objects less visible or traceable through militarised tactics of camouflage, stealth, or cloaking (on this see, Forsyth 2014; J Robinson, 2013). Focussing on the material-specificity of reflection means doing more than expanding the range of natural or anthropogenic surfaces considered reflective, however. It also requires thinking about reflection along a wider electromagnetic spectrum that includes both visible and infra-red light. Understood thus, the materiality of reflection is as much about the movement of energy as it is about the surfaces of objects and devices. The spatiality of reflection therefore encompasses forms of radiant energy, most obviously heat, that can sometimes be grasped in wave form (Helmreich, 2023). Reconceptualising the geographies of reflection as more-than-visual in this way repositions the specificity of reflective objects in relation to such radiant energy (Mukherjee, 2023).

A more-than-visual understanding of reflection is informed by ongoing work on environmental or elemental media (Bao et al., 2023; Peters, 2015; Starosielski, 2021; Jue, 2020). Interrogating how media infrastructure and devices depend on the manipulation, modification, and transformation of environmental processes and materials (Jue and Ruiz, 2021; Parikka, 2015), this work also assumes that the operation of media involves the process of environing – of producing and modifying environments (see Sörlin and Wormbs, 2018; Wickberg and Gardebo, 2020). What counts as environmental mediation therefore becomes very elastic, ranging over the many processes through which bodies and their surrounds are mediated via devices, techniques, and infrastructures (Peters, 2015). This work needs some qualification, not least because it stretches categories of media and mediation so far that it is difficult to know what, if anything, they exclude. Such qualification notwithstanding, rethinking reflection through environmental/elemental media is useful because it foregrounds the role of reflection in a range of techniques and technologies for sensing spatiality in multiple registers including, of course, the visual and the sonic. As George Revill (2016) notes, reflection is one of the processes through which the spatiality of sound is mediated. Such mediation can be phenomenological, but it can also be more technical and environmental, evident through the deployment of a range of reflective technologies to sound the depth and volume of elemental milieus (see Engelmann, 2015; Gallagher et al., 2017; Han, 2021; Lehman, 2018; Shiga, 2013). Beyond sound, thinking reflection in terms of environmental media encourages attention to how reflective materials mediate the more-than-visual relations between bodies/devices and their surrounds.

The more-than-visual dimensions of reflection can be elaborated through their relations with radiance or radiant energy. Scholars of elemental media including Nicole Starosielski and Rahul Mukherjee have argued for the value of an elemental materialism that conceives of relations in terms of radiant emission and exposure (see also Hecht, 1998; Jarvis, 2022; Wynn Kirby, 2023). Starosielski (2021b: 15) articulates this in terms of ‘radiant regimes […] invisibly embedded in the world around us’. Going beyond subject-centred orientations to solar radiance, Starosielski argues that radiant regimes foreground how ‘mediation is a vital part of solar materialities’. As she continues, it is not simply that ‘beings are sustained through the consumption of solar rays broadcast to earth, but that media work to reorganize radiant life, to redistribute life as it is entangled in a field of spectral exchange’ (2021a: 15). Relatedly, Mukherjee (2020a) discusses ‘radiant infrastructures’, through a study of cell towers and nuclear reactors in India. Beyond the fact of their technical operation, these infrastructures are central to the environing processes of media through the creation of fields of electromagnetic energy with the capacity to transform the experience of worlds. Importantly, Mukherjee highlights the affective dimensions of radiance (see also Hecht, 1998). Radiance connotes a kind of affective allure around infrastructure as the sense of something ‘glittering’ while also having the potential to generate anxiety, not least through concerns about the presence of and proximity to infrastructures (Mukherjee 2020a: 7). Foregrounding radiance in this way is important because reflectivity is central to how the radiant relations between bodies (human and non-human) and their surrounds are mediated materially and affectively.

In the remainder of this article, I elaborate on a more-than-visual understanding of reflection and radiance by developing a discussion of three themes – radiant worlds, speculative surfaces, and reflective media, each of which is simultaneously geographical and elemental. These themes stretch reflection across the bodily, the planetary, and the extra-terrestrial while implicating one or more of the different versions of the elements circulating in diverse forms of life and death (Engelmann and McCormack, 2021).

V Radiant worlds

I turn first to how reflective materials participate in forms of living with/in radiant worlds. By radiant worlds, I mean durational envelopes of experience shaped by the promise and problem of living within fields of electromagnetic energy generated across multiple anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic sources and sites of emission, transmission, and exposure (Hecht, 1998; Mukherjee, 2020, 2020b; Starosielski, 2021). These worlds are phenomenologically felt forms of attachment within more-than-human fields of radiance and are mediated by bodies, devices, and infrastructures at various scales. They don’t necessarily show up as visible or tangible spaces but can sometimes be given visible or material form.

To illustrate, consider electro-hypersensitivity (EHS) – a reported sensitivity to fields of electromagnetic or radiant energy. Symptoms associated with EHS include muscle pain, lack of sleep, dizziness, and cognitive difficulties like memory loss. Evidence suggests that while these symptoms are real for those who experience them, the causal link between those symptoms and exposure to fields of electromagnetic energy remains contested (see Rubin et al., 2010; Stein and Udasin, 2020). The symptoms of EHS can be understood in a similar way to how the ‘afflictions of environmental illness or multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS)’ render ‘the ordinary spaces of late-capitalist life uninhabitable’ (Murphy, 2000: 87). Exemplifying wider infrastructural fears (Frith et al., 2022) in a radiant world, EHS shapes profoundly the worlds of the ‘electrosensitives’ who experience it. As Mukherjee, 2020b: 4) observes, ‘what adds to the anxiety of electrosensitives and to the indifference of many who consider wireless signals to be benign is that these signals are invisible and impalpable’. I introduce EHS here not to adjudicate on its ontological or epistemological uncertainties but because it throws into sharp relief the role of reflective materials in fashioning forms of living in radiant worlds. Exposure to radiance is a condition of all worlds but for those living with EHS it often becomes the defining relation to a world. These worlds become forms of un/inhabitability organised around the relative foregrounding or backgrounding of exposure to radiance from anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic sources (on this see Farías and Kemmer, 2024). Crucially, in these worlds reflective materials are often central to the mediation and modification of exposure to radiance.

The Netflix series Better Call Saul (see Rubin and Wessely, 2015) provides a popular if problematic depiction of how worlds take shape and fall apart between radiance and reflection. The main character (Jimmy) has a brother called Chuck, a lawyer living with EHS, whose life, career, and relationships are impacted profoundly by this experience. His anxieties about EHS go beyond wireless infrastructure and extend to anything with an electric current. In Chuck’s world, everything with an electric current is radiant and this radiance is always and everywhere felt as harmful. He lives in an electricity-free home, and all visitors must remove portable electrical devices while ‘grounding’ themselves before entering. In this world, reflective materials mediate the effects and affects of exposure to radiance. Chuck is often enveloped in what he calls a ‘space-blanket’ – a metalised sheet of mylar. He even has a suit lined with this material to help him to leave home on limited occasions. In short, reflective materials allow Chuck to carve out a space of constrained agency in a radiant world of multiple fields of emissions and exposure, even if his world eventually collapses in his obsession with finding and mitigating exposure to sources of electromagnetic emission. The depiction of EHS in Better Caul Saul is controversial, toggling as it does between an empathetic portrayal of Chuck’s condition and a view that EHS is entirely psychological. In that sense it dallies with a wider tendency to ridicule this condition, and to associate it with tinfoil hats and conspiracy theories. In doing so it also undeniably foregrounds the aesthetic ambiguity of reflective materials, combining as they do the allure of shine and the inconsequentiality of lightness.

Chuck portrays a caricatured version of living with EHS in radiant worlds. A more sensitive, if also aestheticised depiction can be found in Thilde Jensen's (2013) photobook Canaries. The book consists of portraits of people (including the author) living with environmental illnesses including EHS. Importantly, the book foregrounds the role of reflective materials in the mediation of exposure to electromagnetic energy. Some of the portraits in Jensen’s book feature people in rooms or homes wrapped almost entirely in reflective materials. Notably, the book itself is wrapped in foil to amplify the importance of this material for those living with EHS. Drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) work, Ruby DeVos (2021) argues that the prominence of reflective materials inside and around the book reveals the ambiguities of practices that, by tempering exposure to radiance, make the ‘experience of transcorporeality liveable’. For DeVos, the reflective material in the book has ‘has a double function: its material qualities are used to protect people with EI [Environmental illness] from chemicals, and it has an aesthetic function that induces reflection of the experience of trans-corporeality’ (2021: 4).

Both Jensen’s photographic documenting of EHS and its depiction in Better Call Saul demonstrate the importance of the materiality of reflection in relation to the problem of how to live in radiant worlds. Using reflective materials provides a way of modifying exposure to electromagnetic radiation and other environmental phenomena. Reflective materials temper transcorporeal exposures in worlds where radiance is felt as a threat, allowing radiant worlds to potentially become more liveable and inhabitable, albeit with all kinds of costs and consequences.

VI Speculative surfaces

Although still concerned with the modification of exposure to radiance, in this section I zoom out to think about reflection in relation to matters of planetary concern. I do so through a focus on speculation about surface albedo. Technically, albedo refers to the reflectivity of a surface understood in terms of the ratio between incident energy and reflected energy measured over a given unit area. Its origins lie in the Latin term albus, meaning white. Whiter surfaces (e.g. clouds) have a higher albedo and tend to reflect energy while dark surfaces (e.g. forests) absorb more. Anthropogenic activity has already modified the albedo of many planetary surfaces in a complex interaction with changes in the atmosphere. For instance, the shrinking of the cryosphere means greater absorption of solar radiation by the earth’s surfaces in ways that figure in ongoing work across the social sciences and humanities (see Dodds and Sörlin, 2022).

As Julianne Yip (2021) notes, albedo is not just a technical term. It is also the focus of various forms and practices of speculation. Through albedo the question of reflectivity is woven into material transformations often gathered under the name of the Anthropocene, while also being part of its diverse speculative imaginaries. For Yip,

“Speculation joins the optical origins of albedo with the etymology of “speculate”—from the Latin specere “to look at, view,” and specula or “lookout point,” “contemplation, observation”—into a creative practice of imagining. Borrowing from speculative fiction, albedo as a speculative concept invites people to envision how things could be otherwise: What if the planet did not look like the one we know today? What difference would this make for life and living today?” (2021: np).

This form of speculation centres the reflective properties of surfaces (see Forsyth et al., 2013) as part of radiant regimes in which techniques of ‘thermal mediation’ are a vital part of solar materialities (Starosielski, 2021a: 15).

Speculating with albedo is a practice of potential planetary modification cutting across technoscience, environmental art, and genres of science fiction. The former is organised around the promise of modifying atmospheric or surface albedo to mitigate anthropogenic atmospheric warming. Such promises are not new. A 1965 report published in the United States, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, prepared for the Johnson Administration by the President’s Science Advisory Committee, noted that a ‘change in albedo [could] be brought about by spreading very small reflecting particles over large oceanic areas’ (1965: 127). It further estimated that a ‘1% change in reflectivity might be brought about for about 500 million dollars’ annually if the particles were spread in low latitudes. Since then, various techniques have been proposed, including space-based mirrors (Keith, 2000) in orbit or the stratosphere (see Lior, 2013; Teller et al., 1997; Yonekura, 2022). Other techniques focus on altering atmospheric composition through marine cloud brightening, or by increasing the transparency of high-altitude clouds to outgoing radiation. The most controversial proposals involve injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere, something noted but not highlighted in the 1965 report.

Paul Crutzen’s (2006) essay on albedo enhancement was critical in lending credence to proposals for investigating the stratospheric injection of sulphate aerosols. Acknowledging the risks of this technique, Crutzen nevertheless argued it was worth considering given inaction on CO2 emissions. Crutzen’s intervention has since been an important reference point for various US government agency reviews. A 2015 report by the National Research Council cautioned about the risks of such techniques and recommended that ‘albedo modification at scales sufficient to alter climate should not be deployed at this time’ (NRC, 2015: 9). A more recent 2021 report, Reflecting Sunlight: Recommendations for Solar Geoengineering Research and Research Governance, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommended that the ‘U.S. federal government should establish – in coordination with other countries – a transdisciplinary, solar geoengineering research program’ (2021: 8). Efforts to undertake practical experiments in this area have been few, controversial, and contested. In Kiruna in Sweden during early 2021, the Stratospheric Control Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx, aimed to test the spraying of particles into the stratosphere.⁶ The test flight would not actually have involved spraying any aerosols: instead, a small amount of chalk was to be released to gauge how particles mix in the atmosphere. Opposed by organisations including the Indigenous Saami Council, the test was postponed by the SCoPEx advisory council, before the project was scrapped entirely in 2023 (Greenfield, 2021).

Technoscientific speculations with albedo modification reveal Western-centric dreams of environmental mastery, while also making all kinds of assumptions about the effectiveness of governance (Macnaghten and Szerszynski, 2013; Szerszynski et al., 2013). As Pierrehumbert (2019) has argued, terms like solar radiation management and solar geoengineering ‘give the false impression of a comforting level of precision’ despite the ‘substantial uncertainties surrounding’ knowledge about how ‘the climate will respond to these novel forcings’ (2019: 217). While preferring the term albedo modification, Pierrehumbert suggests that Kintisch’s (2010) term ‘albedo hacking’ is more appropriate for understanding the ‘nonsensical’ claims made about injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere. This is not least because these aerosols do not accumulate in the atmosphere (unlike CO₂) and would need to be continually injected to maintain cooling and to avoid a termination shock of rapid warming. It would also require global co-operation for centuries in a world likely to be further destabilised by albedo hacking. Equally, as Davison notes ‘the resulting narratives of enlightened planetary stewardship reduce earthly multitudes to a common denominator, shoring up the mirrored horizons within which modern humans encounter only themselves’ (2015: 298).

Such technoscientific dreams of albedo modification under new kinds of radiant regimes have also figured in and been reworked in speculative fiction. The geopolitics of solar geoengineering figures in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), in which the Indian government injects sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere. Neal Stephenson’s Termination shock (2021) also focuses on geopolitical responses to the uneven effects of a similar US based experiment. These narratives focus on – and to some extent critique – modifications of albedo through geoengineering by foregrounding the complex and contested spatialities in which such experiments are inevitably entangled.

Experiments with modifying albedo have also become part of artistic speculations with reflectivity. These experiments parallel already existing forms of small-scale modification of reflectivity in localised radiant regimes, through modifying the reflectivity of rooftops, or by using high-reflectance materials on roads and buildings in urban settings (see Salvati et al., 2022). A modest example is Tomás Saraceno’s 2018 Albedo project. The work consists of 40 reflective, out-turned umbrellas that form what Saraceno calls a ‘temporal pavilion’.⁷ Acting like curved mirrors, these ‘aeroreflectors’ focus sunlight onto a balloon envelope, or solar sculpture. The air inside is warmed until the balloon lifts. On one level, Albedo demonstrates the effectiveness of using radiant energy from the sun to power low carbon devices. But it points also to how reflective surfaces can be used to foreground possibilities for the wider reorganisation of radiant regimes. The work is described as inviting ‘a collective turn towards the most important energy source for earthly life, the Sun’ and ‘forming an act of hope-filled togetherness and solidarity with the Earth’s natural surface reflectivity, known as albedo’ (Aerocene, 2018: np).

Albedo hacks the speculative fantasies of solar radiation modification/engineering by staging a situated reorientation of radiant regimes through reflective materials. It focuses attention on the ethics and politics of reflective surfaces at a range of scales. More generally, these experiments point to the value of interrogating how properties of reflective surfaces (Forsyth et al., 2013) figure in different practices of environmental and elemental speculation alongside concerns with volume (Dodds, 2021). Such interrogations are especially important at a conjuncture where anthropogenically induced changes to surface albedo, especially of arctic sea ice, are already shaping the elemental spatio-temporalities and ‘thermocultures’ (Starosielski, 2021a) of melting worlds (see Ruiz et al., 2024).

VII Reflective media

Finally, I turn to reflective media to signal the distinctive role of reflective materials in media experiments and infrastructures. More narrowly, as part of an expanded sense of the elementality of visual media (e.g. Angus, 2024) and geomedia (Fast et al., 2018), my focus here is on how reflection participates in the mediation of extra-terrestrial or extra-planetary geographies (see Dunnett et al., 2019). As Gál et al. (2021: np) note, ‘outer space and the cosmos have always been media specific’, with much attention given to the specificity of technologies of seeing, including by cultural geographers such as Denis Cosgrove (2008). In this section, I extend such work by drawing attention to how reflective materials are critical to the operation of media devices and infrastructures in outer space and how, in the process, this operation mediates senses of time and distance.

The relation between reflective media and the geographies of extra-terrestrial space is at least four-fold. First, experiments with reflection have been important to the emergence of technologies and techniques of communication that draw the terrestrial and the celestial into an infrastructural relation. This includes, for instance, the use of the moon as a reflective object. In 1954, the US Navy Operation Moon Bounce utilised Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication to bounce radio waves off the surface of the moon, the first of a series of such experiments that led, in 1961, to the Technical Research Ship Special Communications System (TRSSCOMM). This ‘allowed a ship, anywhere in the world, to transmit a message by beaming microwave transmissions toward the Moon. The Moon, acting as a passive reflector, would bounce the emission back to receiving stations on Earth, located at 90-degree quadrants around the globe’.⁸ Reflective materials in space were used also to fabricate the first passive communications satellites, Echo 1 and Echo 2, launched in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Essentially large balloons made from metalised film, they were used as passive surfaces against which to bounce media signals across the United States and became objects of spectacular public fascination (see McCormack, 2018). The use of reflection to generate spectacles in the night sky has attracted interest from artists. In Orbital Reflector (2019), for instance, artist and geographer Trevor Paglen attempted to recreate a celestial spectacle by launching a large reflector fabricated from a mylar-like material via rocket into orbit. A prolonged government shutdown meant contact was lost before the work could be deployed as intended, while the work itself was also considered problematic by astronomers on the basis that it added to the light pollution in the night sky. Nevertheless, according to Paglen, the reflector and other ‘unseen stars’ are valuable as artistic experiments provoking conversations about the politics of space.⁹

Second, beyond the allure of orbiting spectacles, reflective materials have and continue to be important to the thermal mediation of exposure to space as an elemental milieu. Understood elementally, space is the most thermally extreme milieu, foregrounding acutely the necessity of reflective materials in processes of what Nicole Starosielski (2021a) calls thermal mediation. Materials like mylar and kapton, both developed by DuPont, are used routinely in the thermal mediation of devices and bodies exposed to the extreme elemental conditions of space. The latter was used, notably, as insulation on the Apollo progamme’s lunar landers, lending components on that craft a distinctive gold colour, and heightening the association between the space program and shiny, reflective materials. This association appealed in turn to artists including Les Levine (see C Kirsch, 2021), Andy Warhol (see Danto, 2009), and Ira Cohen (2019), each of whom used versions of these reflective materials in their work. Kapton’s role in the thermal mediation of bodies in space was also emphasised in 1973, when the Skylab orbital workshop lost its thermal shield during launch and had to be repaired hastily (NASA, 2015). As Mike Weiss, technical deputy program manager of the Hubble Space Telescope, observes, ‘thermal blankets are to spacecraft as clothes are to people… Just as clothes cover our skin and help protect us from nature’s elements […] thermal blankets protect Hubble from the harsh environment of space’ (Martinez and Paquin 2008: np).

Third, as these comments suggest, the reflective properties of materials are critical to the very possibility of distinctive ‘milieu-specific’ (Jue, 2020) space-based media devices like the Hubble and James Webb telescopes (Kessler, 2012; Vogl, 2007). Beyond the Earth’s atmosphere these telescopes are exposed to solar radiation and require shielding by materials including kapton. When combined with the almost perfectly polished mirrors on these telescopes, the reflectivity of materials like kapton is central to the infrastructure of distinctively space-based ways of seeing, allowing radiant energy from distant and ancient objects to be detected, isolated, and transformed into aestheticised visual images of deep space. The James Webb telescope requires a tennis-court sized sunshield comprised of 5 layers of aluminised kapton to provide the equivalent of a sun protection factor of 1 million (NASA, nd). The sunshield provides a cool and thermally stable environment for the infra-red systems of the telescope, which work between −234 and −266°C. Kapton also mediates the very radiant relation between the telescope and its own physical structure. The material prevents the telescope’s own radiant heat (or infra-red light) from crowding out the infra-red light from other objects (NASA, nd). Mediation of thermal milieus by such reflective materials is essential to the operation of these telescopes as media devices for producing durational images that stretch time and space beyond the frame of any terrestrial mirror. In the process, the very question of the ‘distant’ (Wylie, 2017) becomes as much a matter of time as of space.

Finally, the ubiquity of these materials in space infrastructure is also extending the spatiality of the reflective encounter of the technologically mediated subject as part of what might be understood as a distinctive ‘metaphysics of encounter’ (Adams, 2017). In July 2022, NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars ‘tweeted’ a photograph of a fragment of shiny material wedged between rocks. The anthropomorphised rover ‘reflected’ on this encounter with a discarded fragment of itself. The text accompanying the image read: ‘My team has spotted something unexpected: it’s a piece of a thermal blanket that they think may have come from my descent stage, the rocket jet pack that set me down on landing used to control temperatures’. A second tweet contained a close-up of the fragment, adding that it was a ‘surprising finding’, with Perseverance wondering: ‘Did this piece land here after that, or was it blown here by the wind?’ A third tweet featured two photos, including one of the team at the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) responsible for the fabrication of the blankets. For some commentators, the tweet illustrated how NASA was, in effect, rediscovering its own trash and setting it up as an object of wonder. Others saw the thermal blanket as a future archaeological artefact (on this, see Gorman, 2019). Regardless of the response, the ‘discovery’ occasioned a reflective encounter that drew together terrestrial subjects, their technical prostheses, and the question of how extra-terrestrial geographies are mediatized. In what was perhaps a technically mediated version of the Lacanian mirror-stage, an encounter with an image of a reflective fragment of itself allowed Perseverance to reflect on its own material composition and the difference/distance between terrestrial and other worlds.

VIII Conclusion

Perseverance’s encounter with fragments of itself offers a reminder that critical engagements with the spatialities of visual reflection remain important, foregrounding as this encounter does how the technological mediation of those spatialities stretches across bodies, devices, and worlds. But the properties of the material fragment on Mars also offers a compelling reminder that reflectivity is more-than-visual and, as such, needs to be considered in relation to the wider electromagnetic spectrum of radiance. Put otherwise, the geographies of this encounter are as much about radiant materialities as about visual reflection.

Rethinking reflection in this way offers an important opportunity to elaborate and extend connections between research agendas in environmental/elemental media (Brodie et al., 2023), geomedia (Fast et al., 2018), and ongoing work by geographers on topics as diverse as light (Edensor, 2017), heat (Corlucci et al., 2023; McHugh, 2022; Opperman et al., 2020), and the wider reconceptualization of thermal materialities (Barry, 2015; Cederlöf, 2024). This does not mean that reflection offers a conceptual or empirical problematic through which versions of the ‘geo’ and formulations of media become straightforwardly interchangeable. Instead, reflection’s geographies can be traced through the mediation of multi-spectral materialities in ways that also parallel recent work, for instance, on the relation between light, seasonality, and affective experience (Bodden et al., 2024). Working with an expanded understanding of reflection therefore offers an occasion for thinking through the multi-scalar materialities of anthropogenic (if not inevitably Anthropocene) worlds. These materialities connect, on the one hand, properties (both innate and engineered) of different materials and elements with, on the other hand, practices and experiences of sensing, feeling, and seeing across the radiant spectrum. Critically, such connections also foreground how, on a planet warming differentially and unevenly, the question of reflection will also become increasingly geopolitical. This is because the distribution of capacities to modify exposures to radiance through practices and materials of reflection at a myriad scales from the body to the planet will become a more explicit part of the politics of radiant regimes and infrastructures (Bellamy and Palmer, 2019; Buck, 2018).

If a revised understanding of reflection has ontological and political implications, it also has epistemological consequences. Specifically, earlier influential critiques of reflection as a metaphor for an exclusively representational form of thinking arguably need revision. Prominent here are critiques of reflection articulated by Donna Haraway (1997) and Karen Barad (2007), for both of whom reflection is wedded too closely to a model of representation as resemblance. In contrast these scholars embrace diffraction as a mode of thinking more attentive to difference, suggestive as it is of patterns of interference and overlap. This critique may well be justified so long as reflection is understood primarily in visual terms. It is more outmoded if the materiality of reflection is taken to be more-than-visual and is resituated within diverse radiant registers and regimes. The point here is not simply to unproblematically rehabilitate the kind of visual reflection that became the object of critique by Haraway and Barad, and by geographers like Gillian Rose. Instead, this is an invitation to speculate with reflection as a practice and orientation that goes beyond without leaving behind forms of representational thinking. Such speculation allows what Lefebvre (1991) calls the ‘familiar abstraction’ of the mirror to become part of curated opportunities for interrogating diverse experiences and experiments, including within art. These opportunities might also extend to ‘more than reflective’ writing experiments that conduct the elemental charge of what Anna Secor (2023) names ‘spacetimeunconscious’.

Beyond this, as part of a careful consideration of speculative geographies (see Williams and Keating, 2022), feminist practices of speculation with reflection have the potential to generate images and figures that reposition reflection in relation to a wider sensorium of radiance. For Engelmann et al. (2022: 237), such ‘practices can contribute to the collection and production of images of a planet in climate crisis’. As they continue, by ‘unsettling the mediated optics’ of technoscientific observation, these practices can write experience into forms of partial planetary image-making in ways that are accountable to the conditions in which they are made. Building on this, it might be possible to devise situated techniques for mapping reflection through the reappropriation, for instance, of the remote-sensing technologies that monitor changes in albedo. Making images in this way is not so much about the recognition of others or selves through an encounter with a reflective surface that promises transparency. Instead, it is an important method of drawing together the politics of planetary reflectivity with the question of which bodies are exposed, and under what circumstances, to different forms of radiance.

What kinds of images and figures might articulate these different dimensions of reflectivity? By way of concluding, I turn briefly to Himali Singh Soin’s interdisciplinary artwork we are opposite like that (2017–22).¹⁰ Over a series of iterations and performances, Soin juxtaposes contemporary concerns with global warming and earlier Victorian anxieties about the return of an ice-age in ways that summon historical and contemporary radiant regimes of heating and cooling. Performing a kind of South-Asian futurism Soin makes prominent use of reflective materials to fold together, without reconciling, different temporalities of radiant exposure and exchange. Central to we are opposite like that is Soin as an enigmatic figure wrapped in shiny reflective thermal blankets, a figure who ‘emerges from a block of ice to narrate a story about her non-human origins in a fossilized past’ (Fowkes and Fowkes, 2022: 107). The material in which Soin is enveloped does not offer a transparent space of visual reflection, even as it allows Soin, embodying the non-human persona of ice, to complicate the whiteness and masculinity assumed in many figurations of reflectivity. Moving and fluttering around Soin as she walks slowly through the landscape, the material in which Soin is enveloped is both an intensely thermally reflective surface and one in which no visual reflection can be discerned easily. It surrounds a figure who summons, and reflects, without transcending, historical and contemporary anxieties about radiant futures. In doing so, we are opposite like that perhaps exemplifies the key point of this article, namely, that reconceptualising geographies of reflection can contribute to the gathering, folding together, and interrogating of multiple relations of radiance from the bodily to the planetary.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Chris Gibson for his careful editorial advice and patience with this paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive feedback on earlier versions.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Derek P McCormack

Notes

Author biography

Derek P McCormack is Professor of Cultural Geography in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. His current research and writing lies at the intersection of cultural geography, the elements, and different versions of media. He is the author of Atmospheric Things and Refrains for Moving Bodies, both published by Duke University Press.

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Geographies of reflection and radiance: Radiant worlds,speculative surfaces,and reflective media

Abstract

Keywords

I Introduction

II Revisiting spaces of reflection

III Making more of visual reflection

IV Radiance matters

V Radiant worlds

VI Speculative surfaces

VII Reflective media

VIII Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References