Across cultures and epochs, in scientific and cultural frameworks, mountains have long operated as bridges between the terrestrial and the celestial. Whether functioning as sensing infrastructures for astronomical research – as in the case of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) – or as metaphysical axes connecting earth and sky, they can be understood as Cosmic Technologies.
001
Insistently material objects, but also frail and perishable abstract concepts, mountains play a central role in human imagination, serving both as spatial and symbolic landmarks. They occupy a key place in a large number of narratives, particularly cosmogonic ones – whether mythic, religious, or scientific. From ancient prophets and seers retreating into their heights – like Laozi (Lao Tzu), the founder of Taoism, who is said to have journeyed to the Western Pass to retreat from the chaos of society and seek deeper universal truths – to contemporary worship – like Mount Everest for Sherpa community as the Mother of the Earth (Chomolungma) – mountains represent more than just geological formations. Firmly grounded on Earth, territorially bounded, and yet stretching towards the heavens, they constitute sites of revelation in many different faiths, points of junction between the immanent and the transcendent: what Mircea Eliade long ago called axes mundi. Real or mythical, many cultures refer to the geographical imagery of mountains as situated at the center of the world: Meru Mount (India) for Buddhist cosmology, Haraberezaiti in Zoroastrian tradition, and the mythical ‘Mount of the Lands’ in Mesopotamia. In Chinese culture, moreover, mountains are the bones that comprise the very structure of the Earth; more dramatically or completely than any other natural formation, a mountain is a place for the interplay of such basic forces as qi 「气」 and li 「力」 , yin 「阴」 and yang 「阳」 . In short, a mountain is a place of places – a place from which other places originate: “the originating host of all the guest places in a given landscape.”
002
Often conceptualized as detached, isolated, and remote locations, mountains were also rediscovered by the Western scientific community during the Enlightenment as sites for observation. At that time, the emerging scientific establishment began to theorize a “rigorous scientific practice,” convinced that credibility and objectivity required remoteness from specific social or cultural influences. In this panorama, mountains became an ideal location for scientific practices, as the nascent site of the laboratory, because of their perceived distance, both geographical, physical, and conceptual. Indeed, the mountain and the laboratory were seen as sharing sterility (in the sense of pure, uncontaminated environments) and isolation (in the sense of separation from the rest of the world), features that were deemed as necessary to fulfill the requirements for what was conceived as scientific, to enable the “View From Nowhere.” The isolation of mountains produced what Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora define as “complex meta-geographies of purity.” It generated, in other words, a series of seemingly uncorrupted places, which allowed “to access both the variety and the majestic grandeur of the cosmos while remaining safely anchored within a self-enclosed space.” The notion of a mountaintop observatory as a self-contained space isolated from urban noise, even when idealized, often seemed to guarantee clearer scientific results. If initially astronomers were driven to mountain heights by an almost irrational desire to observe the sky from a mountaintop, during the course of the 20th century, they gradually discovered that higher altitudes offered a clearer, more stable view of the night sky due to reduced atmospheric interference.
003
Even if Astronomy during the course of the 21st century transformed, and astronomical observation extended beyond the visible spectrum – and thus new messengers, new studies, new instruments, and new observatories arose – mountains continue to remain central devices for cosmic imaging. At the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS), for example, scientists use 1400 meters of rock to filter out disturbances and achieve cosmic silence. Taking advantage of the geological composition of the Gran Sasso, which consists mainly of dolomite and limestone, the mountain range serves as a natural shield for the study of particular cosmic particles: neutrinos. Both dolomite and limestone are relatively dense rocks, meaning cosmic rays lose energy as they pass through them, effectively serving as shielding devices. Building on media geology and environmental media discourse, it can be argued that it is through its material – hence geological – composition that the mountain can function as a device. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that “media are environments,” then the reverse is just as true: environments are also media.
004
In various geographical and cultural contexts, mountains emerge as devices for the encounter with the cosmic – whether as metaphysical axes connecting the terrestrial to the otherworldly, as indigenous sacred locations, as high places that allow for a more stable atmosphere, or as geological shields enabling the study of the cosmos. Through stories, rituals, or astronomical observations, mountains help visualize “the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world,” becoming an active agent in the formation and negotiation of cosmological systems. Culturally distinct beliefs and widespread practices – and thus cosmologies – have given rise to different significations for this device. The way, always different, in which the mountain is conceived as a cosmic technology is situated in each culture’s technological thinking, which is to say, located within different cosmologies, that are individual, cultural, and social world views. This underlines that technology is not an external force that merely takes shape in history; rather, as Yuk Hui has extensively explored through the concept of cosmotechnics, it is a tool that is materially embedded in the world, inseparable from its geographical (n.b. cultural and social) contexts. Therefore, just as there is not a single cosmology or a single technological thinking, there is not a single framework for approaching the mountain as a technological device, but rather a multiplicity of perspectives.