Artificial intelligence is often presented as a technology that intervenes in a world already given: it maps territories, processes data, produces images, predicts movement and sets messages in circulation. Three recent developments in anthropology complicate that picture. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is involved in a project that shifts attention from land as surface to the relations composing a landscape; Sherry B. Ortner returns to political documentary to explore how truth acquires the capacity to act; and a new handbook of media geography brings Tim Ingold’s work into conversation with the Internet, geodata, sensored life and artificial intelligence.
The three authors do not share a single theory. What emerges instead is an editorial reading across distinct materials, one that sees technology not as something arriving from outside but as part of the relations through which a world becomes visible, credible and habitable.
Anna Tsing in Barcelona · From land reform to landscape reform
On 30 June, during Pollen2026 in Barcelona, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing presented the LAND — Land and Life in the Anthropocene: Landscape Reform project alongside Jun Borras, Esteve Corbera and Ian Scoones.
The question organising the project is deliberately broad: how can we learn to live on Earth in new ways?
LAND began on 1 May 2026 and will run until April 2031. The official CORDIS record lists an EU contribution of €8.33 million and a core team made up of Borras, Corbera, Scoones and Tsing.
The conceptual shift is already there in the name: not land reform, but landscape reform. A plot of land is never merely a surface to be owned, exploited or redistributed; it is traversed by relations between humans and non-humans, forms of property, economic regimes and climate systems. LAND organises this complexity around four Ps: Partners (human–non-human relations), Property (the production of property), Profit (land regimes) and Planet (Earth–climate systems).
These dimensions intersect with four challenges of the Anthropocene — climate, biodiversity, food and infrastructure/investment — across four reference landscapes: the Colombian Amazon, the savannas of southern Africa, the Mediterranean plains of Spain and the coasts of Southeast Asia. The project also plans to work with public institutions, social movements and local communities, turning research towards practical approaches to a possible reform of the landscape.
This shift is particularly fertile in an age that promises to observe, sensorise, classify and optimise territories. Where that promise tends to reduce them to available surfaces, LAND restores the lives, economies, histories and relations that make a territory a world.
The full project record is available on CORDIS.
Sherry B. Ortner · Telling the truth is not enough to change the world
On 17 August, CaMP Anthropology published an interview by Kenzell Huggins with Sherry B. Ortner about Screening Social Justice: Brave New Films and Documentary Activism.
The book appeared in 2023. What is new is the 2026 conversation and the way Ortner revisits her research from a different media landscape. Her project began at Participant Media, a production company that said it made films intended to “change the world”. Over time, she became sceptical of that conception of change and eventually turned to Brave New Films, a documentary organisation more directly connected to activist networks. The difference was not simply a matter of producing documentaries with stronger political positions, but of what happened around the films.
Ortner returns to the idea of powerful texts: texts that can become points of support for new forms of political consciousness when they come to be recognised as carrying important truths about the world.
A film, however, does not acquire that power simply by existing. Brave New Films embedded its documentaries in collective processes of circulation, discussion and mobilisation. This leads to another of the book’s central concepts, agency, which Ortner distinguishes in critical, affective and networked forms. Politically effective audiovisual work does more than inform: it can alter how a situation is interpreted, stir affects capable of mobilising people and connect viewers with other people and organisations.
The interview gathers force as it turns to truth. For Ortner, the combination of a truth claim and a quasi-ethnographic relationship with real people forms part of documentary’s historical power. Yet that power runs up against a problem of scale.
Independent media can produce critical perspectives and uncomfortable truths, but they reach comparatively small audiences. Mainstream media have audiences and resources capable of intervening in public conversation at a different scale.
When that central infrastructure for the public production of truth deteriorates, Ortner argues, alternative media become even more important. Her argument is not about generative artificial intelligence, but it illuminates the ecosystem that generative AI is accelerating. As images, video, voices and text become cheaper to produce, scarcity may shift from content production towards the relations capable of granting it credibility, circulation and the capacity to act. Content still matters, even as its political effectiveness depends increasingly on the networks that sustain and distribute it — and make it possible for something to happen after it is seen.
This attention to mediation extends beyond the public life of images. It also reaches the spaces through which we move, now increasingly inseparable from the devices that make them legible.
Tim Ingold · The geography of a mediated life
In August 2026, Nomos published Mediengeographie: Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium, a 469-page volume edited by Tristan Thielmann and Max Kanderske.
Contributors include Tim Ingold, Sarah Pink, Bruno Latour, Mark Andrejevic, Caren Kaplan, James Ash and Jessica McLean, alongside other figures from geography, media studies and the social sciences.
Its editorial presentation lists the Internet of Things, Big Data, drone media, artificial intelligence, mobile GIS and sensored life as part of a transformation in which geodata increasingly participate in both everyday life and the scientific practices used to understand it. The handbook combines synthetic contributions with earlier key texts translated into German. Its novelty lies not in everything it contains having been written in 2026, but in placing work such as Ingold’s within this contemporary constellation of mediated geography.
One of Ingold’s persistent critiques is directed at the idea of space as an abstract surface onto which people, objects and events are subsequently placed. To inhabit means to move, perceive, follow lines, learn routes and establish relations within a world. Mediated geography adds another layer: increasingly, these movements unfold alongside technologies that locate, calculate, orient and represent the environment being traversed.
A digital map does not merely tell us where we are. It can decide which route appears first, which place counts as nearby, which business becomes visible and which journey seems reasonable.
What emerges are places experienced through technologies that detect, map, calculate and recommend them as we inhabit them.
Landscape, truth, space
Read alongside one another — without turning their authors into spokespeople for a common theory — these three developments trace a related movement. With Tsing, land ceases to be an isolated object and appears as the relations composing a landscape. Ortner shifts attention from political content to the networks through which truth acquires agency. Ingold’s work, newly situated within contemporary media geography, leads from abstract space to the practices and mediations through which a place becomes lived.
A plot of land is traversed by property, climate, food, infrastructures and human and non-human lives; a documentary by publics, affects, organisations and distribution technologies; a place by movement, perception, maps, sensors and systems that organise what appears to those passing through it. Artificial intelligence does not act upon a pristine world that precedes it either. It enters these relations and participates in shaping what becomes visible, credible, habitable and open to action.