Gems wrought by blizzards: Denaturalizing the image in Susan Schuppli’s Not Planet Earth

The article examines the feedback between the melting Svalbard Archipelago and the sensory and technological apparatuses through which it is perceived, considered through the lens of Susan Schuppli’s short conceptual film Not Planet Earth from 2021. Consisting of eleven shots made during a circumnavigation of Spitsbergen the previous year, Not Planet Earth offers a series of didactic reflections on how to visualize the process of Arctic warming, which primarily transpires on wavelengths below the small sliver of light accessible to human eyesight. The film responds to this challenge by utilizing the camera as a thermographic or seismographic tool. Transforming glitching recordings and image artifacts into environmental stress signals, it prompts the sensor’s system failures to act as proxies for the anthropogenically induced system failure of the planet.