Satellite, Border, Footprint

Invited workshop leader, collaborative satellite media art projects | “Spotting the Satelite Dish: Populist Approaches to Infrastructure" at HMKV | Dortmund, Germany | 2010

EXCERPT: Most of us are socialized to know very little about the infrastructures that surround us in everyday life, whether electrical systems, sewer pipes, or broadcast networks. Not only are we socialized to be unaware of such systems, these infrastructures are often designed purposefully to be invisible, to be integrated with the built environment, whether submerged underground, covered by ceilings and walls, or camouflaged as “nature.” Further, since infrastructures stretch across vast territories they are impossible to perceive in their entirety and are often difficult to describe. they are most frequently represented as flowcharts. Much has been written about the social history of transportation and communication infrastructures. Studies by Wolfgang Schivelbush, Harold Innis, James Carey, and others, have helped us to understand the railway, telegraph, and broadcasting in relation to structures of industrialization and modernity. While this work remains vital, I want to pursue a more partial, node or object-centered, knowledge-oriented approach to the study of infrastructure, one that engages with such systems from a more populist perspective. Here we might access the work of cultural studies scholar John Fiske and consider what it might mean to study infrastructure from a perspective of “popular knowledges” and “techno-struggles.” As Fiske reminds us, “the multiplication of communication and information technologies extends the terrains of struggle, modifies the forms struggle can take, and makes it even more imperative that people grasp the opportunities for struggle that the multiplying of technologies offers.”