Operational Media, Extraction and Environmental Control

Abstract

Current energy politics, despite their characteristic rhetorics of paradigmatic shifts and transitions, are often grounded on the continuation of traditional extractive politics. Environmental control and extraction of resources encompass various techniques for measuring land and governing terrain (Elden 2013), but also technologies of calculation, visualization and manipulation around volume (Bridge 2013) that are oriented towards future revenue and a continuous flow of capital. In this context, maps, models, satellite images, data visualizations, algorithms, and derivatives have to be understood as operational media, which embody specific aesthetics that are emblematic of an alternative sense of cognition and the political formulation of issues of territory and futurity (Parikka, Geocinema, 2020). While extractive practices and infrastructural operations are employed to drive, and accelerate energy transitions they turn entire regions into mere sources of data. Life on the ground is in this process typically obscured, especially if it threatens to obstruct the infrastructural transformations of idle land into resources of sustainable development.
Papers in this panel address the social, political, economic, and environmental impact of such transformations, historically and in the present. We will discuss the manifold media operations that serve the transformation of territories at land and at sea into assets (Birch & Muniesa 2020). Presenters will attend to the architectures, labor, processes and infrastructures through which specific media operations unfold, and elaborate on computational, financial, legal and political technologies in the infrastructuralization of territories.

Birch, Kean, and Fabian Muniesa, eds. 2020. Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism. The MIT Press.
Bridge, Gavin. 2013. Territory, now in 3D! Political Geography 34: 55-57.
Elden, Stuart. 2013. Secure the Volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power. Political Geography 34: 35-51.
Parikka, Jussi, and Geocinema. 2020. “Art from Large-Scale Systems: Operational Images and Geocinema”. Lecture, University of the Arts Berlin, February 2020.

Individual Presentations

• From Military Base to Solar Park - The Role of Conversion Sites for Renewable Energy Futures - Michaela Büsse, Humboldt University Berlin

• Scaling Sovereignty: the ‘Energy Island’ as Past and Future Political Territory - May Ee Wong, Aarhus University

• Datified Earths - Solveig Qu Suess, FHNW Academy of Art and Design; Asia Bazdyrieva, independent scholar

• Lithium Mining and Bathing Grounds: Operational Media in the Ore Mountains - Anastasia Kubrak, FHNW Academy of Art and Design

• Ground Operations - Paolo Patelli, Aarhus University

Discussant

• Johannes Bruder, FHNW Academy of Art and Design

Chair

• Johannes Bruder, FHNW Academy of Art and Design

Session Organizer

• Michaela Büsse, Humboldt University Berlin