[ecrea] Technologies of Space: Verticality, Volume, Infrastructure

Technologies of Space: Verticality, Volume, Infrastructure


A one day symposium with lectures by Mark Dorrian, Stuart Elden and Lisa 
Parks

Friday, March 3, 2017, 10:00–17:00, University of Oslo, Helga Engs Hus, 
Auditorium 3


Our conception of space is presently undergoing significant changes. 
While issues concerning the constant redrawing of territories and 
security measurements caused by increased mobility, organized terror and 
prolonged colonization continue to gain precedence, we also face an ever 
intensified and unhinged financial capitalism propelling increased 
differences along spatial divisions such as gated communities, 
gentrification of neighborhoods, privatization of public and air space 
and neoliberal property speculation. This is again linked to the more 
than human rights concerns of resource deficiency, global warming and 
climate change and the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. While these 
changes are simultaneously propelled and remediated by an exponential 
proliferation of digital and networked technologies, scholarly work 
often fail to inquire the technological assemblages that produce them.

In geography especially, territory, sovereignty and human experience 
have long been flattened by a paradoxical reliance on flat maps—and, 
more recently, aerial and satellite images—projected or imaged from the 
disembodied bird’s or God’s eye view from high above (Stephen Graham, 
2016). This symposium therefore directs particular attention to recent 
calls across spatial disciplines to expand space and its mapping from 
horizontal, plane surface to vertical dimensionality and volume. The 
one-day symposium “Technologies of Space: Verticality, Volume, 
Infrastructure” aims to interrogate these entanglements by foregrounding 
its material infrastructures, be it of code or cables, and their 
experiential, territorial and geopolitical repercussions. In what ways 
do space and media technologies intersect today to produce new real and 
imaginative geographies and (thus) new configurations of power? And how 
could specific issues related to the contemporary productions of space 
best be approached? How could the different research perspectives and 
approaches inherent in the major spatial sciences of architecture, 
geography and infrastructure be combined in an effort to address such 
complex issues?

Information about enrollment:

The symposium is open to all interested, but requires registration.

For questions and registration, please contact (a.s.johnson /at/ media.uio.no)

Participation fee of NOK 100,- / EUR 12 covers lunch and refreshments.


Registration deadline: Thursday, February 22, 2017.

Program:


09:45Coffee and registration

10:00Welcome

10:15–11.50Chair: Susanne Ø. Sæther
10:20Stuart Elden (University of Warwick): "Terrains Volume"

11.20Q&A
11:50 Lunch

13:00–14:35Chair: Eivind Røssaak

13:05Lisa Parks (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Orbital 
Platforms and Vertical Mediation"

14:05 Q&A

14:35 Coffee Break

15:00–16:35Chair: Timotheus Vermeulen

15:05Mark Dorrian (University of Edinburgh): "Archaeologies of the 
Future: On Crypts, Capsules and Catastrophe"

16.05 Q&A

The symposium will end before 17:00.




Abstracts:

Stuart Elden "Terrains Volume"


If we think about territory’s relation to volume, it is essential to 
fully account for its materiality. This lecture suggests that terrain is 
a useful concept to think about the materiality of territory in three 
dimensions. Terrain combines geophysical issues alongside strategic 
ones, and shows how we need to go beyond narrow understandings of 
territory. All attempts at fixing territorial boundaries and shaping 
territories, and the legal regimes in, above and beyond them are 
complicated by dynamic features of the Earth. These would include such 
physical features as rivers, oceans, polar-regions, glaciers, airspace 
and the sub-surface – both the sub-soil and the sub-marine. Terrain 
encompasses the built infrastructure, the physical landscape and their 
interrelation. Terrain makes possible, or constrains, various political, 
military and strategic projects. It is where the geopolitical and the 
geophysical meet. How should political-legal understandings of territory 
and its volume better account for the complexities of the geophysical?


Lisa Parks “Orbital Platforms and Vertical Mediation”


During the 1960s, US leaders celebrated the satellite as a global 
communication technology that would unify people and countries across 
the planet and accelerate modernization. By the 1970s, leaders from 
non-aligned countries perceived these twin dreams of unification and 
modernization as specious because they had been largely excluded from 
orbital projects and had yet to reap the benefits of satellite 
technology. Orbit had become yet another domain of haves and have-nots. 
Within the historical conjuncture of the war on terror, the politics of 
orbital control have shifted again. In this talk, I explore US efforts 
to reassert vertical hegemony after the 9/11 attacks—attacks that 
spectacularly ruptured US control of aerial, spectral, and orbital 
domains. Drawing on US military and satellite industry documents, launch 
records, and international press reports, I discuss a series of 
high-powered satellites by the National Reconnaissance Office, the 
refinement and expansion of global positioning satellite systems, and 
military-corporate partnerships in the satellite sector. I demonstrate 
that US expansion of orbital platforms has been an integral yet often 
neglected dimension of the war on terror, which has enabled a new 
logistics of surveillance defined as vertical mediation.


Mark Dorrian "Archaeologies of the Future: On Crypts, Capsules and 
Catastrophe"

My talk will examine a specific kind of 'technology of verticality' – 
that of the time capsule.  More particularly, it will focus on the 
capsules that were buried alongside one another in Flushing Meadows, 
Queens, where the two mid-century New York World's Fairs were held. 
Interred respectively in 1939 and 1964, the time capsule idea was 
developed and promoted by the science-fiction author, rocketeer and 
publicist G. Edward Pendray, who was employed by the Westinghouse 
Electric and Manufacturing Company.  Taking his cue from contemporary 
thanatological projects, most notably Thornwell Jacobs's 'Crypt of 
Civilisation' at Oglethorpe University, Pendray swept away their dusty 
necrological associations and in effect reconstituted them for the 
rocket age in the form of a sleek and shining missile launched through 
time.  In his study of the 19th and early-20th c. 'Century Chests', Nick 
Yablon has suggested that the 'microscosmic' time capsule emerges within 
a cultural horizon of catastrophe, and I will explore this theme in 
relation to the World's Fair capsules.  Symptomatically, the 
contemporary accounts and ceremonies associated with the Westinghouse 
capsules oscillate between celebrations of endurance and intimations of 
mortality and collapse.  In this regard, the time capsules look like a 
form of Derridean 'survivance', whereby a civilisation mourns itself in 
advance – symbolically buries itself through its cultural artifacts – 
while at the same time laying a claim upon the world-to-come by 
projecting itself toward a far-future target date.

Biographies:

Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of 
Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the art, architecture and urbanism 
atelier Metis. His work spans topics in architecture and urbanism, art 
history and theory, and media studies. Recent books include Writing on 
the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation and 
Seeing From Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture.


Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the 
University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of seven books, including 
works on territory, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Henri 
Lefebvre. He is currently working on aspects of territory in 
Shakespeare’s plays; on the concept of terrain; on Lefebvre’s writings 
on rural issues; and the very early Foucault.


Lisa Parks is Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Director of the 
Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at MIT. Her research is 
focused on three areas: satellite technologies and media cultures; 
critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization and 
surveillance. Before joining the CMS faculty at MIT, Parks was Professor 
and former Department Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa 
Barbara, where she also served as Director of the Center for Information 
Technology and Society. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: 
Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005), Coverage: Vertical 
Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, forthcoming), and Mixed 
Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies (in progress). 
She is co-editor of: Life in the Age of Drones (Duke UP, forthcoming 
2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of 
Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and 
Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), and Planet TV: A 
Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003).


The symposium is organized by Media Aesthetics, Department of Media and 
Communication, University of Oslo


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