Circuit Training: Infrastructural Approaches to Cell Towers, (Dark) Fiber, and Data Centers

A panel with presentations by:

--Germaine Halegoua,  University of Michigan

--Nicole Starosielski, UC Berkeley

--Julia Velkova, Linköping University 

--Lisa Parks, UC Santa Barbara

Panel organized by the Digital Infrastructure & Society group of the GMTaC Lab. Dec 11, 3:30-5pm, SSMS 2135

Backyard Theory, Tues May 21, 4-5pm, 2132 Girvetz Hall.

We will read the Introduction and chapters one, two, and six of The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2017) by Edward Jones Imhotep. Professor Greg Siegel will facilitate the discussion.

“Infrastructural Encounters: Ethnographic perspectives on telecommunication in the Arctic”

Lecture by GMTaC Lab Visiting Scholar, Professor Mette Simonsen Abildgaard, Wed. May 8, 3:30-5pm, SSMS 2135

How do digital infrastructures shape the experiences of those positioned as living ‘on the margins’? This has been the central question guiding my research over the past five years, which has focused on sea-cables, wi-fi networks, mobile plans, satellites, and other infrastructures of telecommunication in Greenland. Another big question has been: How can we study these systems, which are both pervasive and deeply personal, using ethnographic methods?

In this talk, I will present some of my methodological and theoretical approaches in addressing these questions. Specifically, I’ll discuss the concept ‘infrastructural encounters’, which aims to capture those sites and moments where the everyday is made faster or is slowed down through infrastructure. Additionally, I’ll explore a method of phenomenologically ‘sensing’ situated, mundane data (as the kilobytes, megabytes, petabytes, and zettabytes circulating in digital infrastructures) during fieldwork.

Mette Simonsen AbildgaardMette Simonsen Abildgaard is associate professor of Arctic Technology Studies at Aalborg University, where she is part of the TANTlab (Techno-Anthropological Laboratory) research group and co-coordinator of the social science and humanities research platform Arctic Lab. Her current research focuses on the way telecommunication infrastructures intersect with everyday life in Arctic and Nordic countries. Her work takes place between science and technology studies, anthropology, and history of technology. Recent publications focus on marginality as produced and sustained in and with satellite telecommunication infrastructures in Qaanaaq, North Greenland (The Satellite at the End of the World, 2023), and the way ice and snow has shaped communication infrastructures in the Arctic (The Question of Icebergs, 2022).

In this Carsey Wolf Center event presented in collaboration with UC Press journal Film Quarterly, Professors France Winddance Twine (Sociology, UCSB) and Lisa Parks (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) discuss the ways Big Tech TV shows such as WeCrashed (starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway) and Super Pumped (starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Uma Thurman) represent power dynamics in Silicon Valley workplaces.

This event will build upon an article that Parks and Twine published in the spring 2023 Film Quarterly. Parks and Twine will join Marc Francis, the journal’s Assistant Editor, to discuss topics including structural inequalities in the workplace, the myth of corporate self-regulation, and the culture of CEO worship in Silicon Valley.

“Media of Extraction and Abstraction”

“Media of Extraction and Abstraction” begins with a discussion of the medium of clothing, more specifically of textile waste; its industrial reprocessing shaped forms of meaning and me­­dia making in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. The talk then turns to the nexus of industrial mining and solar astrophysics, excavating the space – literal and figurative, aesthetic and technological – of the so-called Climax High Altitude Observatory. Built on the Continental Divide at 11,500 feet above sea level, on and with the support of the Climax Molybdenum Company, then the world’s largest and deepest underground mining operation in 1940, Climax housed a massive instrument that simulated a solar eclipse, as well as a darkroom for developing solar films and photographs. Both the information abstracted from the solar imagery, and the metals extracted from the tunnels beneath, had profound strategic importance to a World War fought thousands of miles away. Close analysis of the site provides the aesthetic, philosophical and creative center for a multi-modal exploration of extraction and abstraction at the limits of human sight, and of foresight.

A book talk & conversation with Lisa Nakamura, Hanah Stiverson, & Kyle Lindsey of the Digital Inequality Lab at the University of Michigan. This is a visit to the Reinventing Zoom seminar (187RZ) in the department of Film and Media Studies. You are welcome to attend. Zoom link below:

https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82137279236?pwd=Z0lnVG16UXh2YUlPTWpXVFhOQzdOZz09

Meeting ID: 821 3727 9236

Passcode: 248612