This paper explores an informal acoustic method developed by a group of industrial geologists wor... more This paper explores an informal acoustic method developed by a group of industrial geologists working in geothermal energy landscapes in the southwest of Iceland. Through a series of ethnographic descriptions, this paper renders the work these geologists carry out in sonic terms, emphasizing how they use their bodies as sonic detectors in the production of geological evidence. Sound, the paper argues, is what allows geologists to make the intractable problem of volcanic cooling doable. It does this by differentiating two forms of evidence. Primary evidence, which ends up as data in geological reports, and secondary sonic evidence, which is what establishes that this primary evidence is, in fact, evidence. The paper introduces the concept data echoes as a way to think about how sound articulates between these evidential protocols. As echo, sound works as an outside, which, while remaining external to official protocols of knowledge production, nevertheless helps to constitute distinctions that are meaningful to the production of those categories. As data echoes through the various moments of data capture, analysis, and model building, sound's
This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where the extrac... more This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where the extraction of geothermal energy for the production of aluminum is triggering anthropogenic earthquakes. As the aluminum industry seeks to decarbonize their industrial infrastructure, they are increasingly looking to renewable energy havens, such as Iceland, to supply their expansive energy needs. While this paper is partly about understanding the forms of politics at stake in decarbonizing modernity's infrastructures, it is more specifically concerned with the temporal politics of anthropogenic earthquakes in the Hengill volcanic zone in the south west of the country. The paper takes up the perspective of geologists tasked with analysing the emergence of these new earthquake forms, as well as locals from a small town in the vicinity who are learning to live with them. While focusing on the conflict that has ensued in the wake of earthquake production, the article pays particular attention to the importance of acceleration-both economic and geologic-in their making. This leads to an analysis of how alternate temporal renderings of anthropogenic earthquakes invoke competing claims about the future. Anticipating the future, the paper argues, is a form of temporal politics through which the various actors either legitimise, or protest against, these volcanic interventions.
This paper takes its point of departure in the years leading up to, and
shortly after, the outbre... more This paper takes its point of departure in the years leading up to, and shortly after, the outbreak of World War One; a period that saw the emergence of Europe’s first aeroplanes. It argues that the production of new aerial objects required not just imaginative leaps in technology, but also the making of possible futures into which such technologies could fit. In order to elaborate this argument, the paper engages with the life and work of J.C.H Ellehammer, the Danish inventor-entrepreneur who claimed the honour of being the first man to fly in Europe in 1906. Through an examination of Ellehammer’s heterogeneous activities and practices, I argue that his initial aerial prototypes are ‘notquite- yet-flying machines.’ As technologies of anticipation they model, or rehearse, a version of the future through which such machines could become more acceptable to a sceptical public and find their place within a broader national discourse on flying. This is based upon a particular reading of the prototype as both an epistemic object and an epistemic culture, and upon a rendering of prototyping as an analytic that approaches the craft and agency of objects in particular ways.
Maguire, James, Murray, Declan and Wallsten, Björn. "Our Electric Metals." Theorizing the Contemp... more Maguire, James, Murray, Declan and Wallsten, Björn. "Our Electric Metals." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, December 19, 2017. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1271-our-electric-metals
This paper takes its point of departure in the years leading up to, and shortly after, the outbre... more This paper takes its point of departure in the years leading up to, and shortly after, the outbreak of World War One; a period that saw the emergence of Europe’s first aeroplanes. It argues that the production of new aerial objects required not just imaginative leaps in technology, but also the making of possible futures into which such technologies could fit. In order to elaborate this argument, the paper engages with the life and work of J.C.H Ellehammer, the Danish inventor-entrepreneur who claimed the honour of being the first man to fly in Europe in 1906. Through an examination of Ellehammer’s heterogeneous activities and practices, I argue that his initial aerial prototypes are ‘notquite-yet-flying machines.’ As technologies of anticipation they model, or rehearse, a version of the future through which such machines could become more acceptable to a sceptical public and find their place within a broader national discourse on flying. This is based upon a particular reading of t...
Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a long-standing interest in the nature, effects, and emb... more Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a long-standing interest in the nature, effects, and embedded politics of infrastructures. Recent infrastructure studies focus on how realities are made, relationally, and consider infrastructures as sites of experimentation. Of interest in this paper are the imaginative dimensions of infrastructures as they perform a techno-imaginative setup for people to pass through. Designing and installing The Energy Walk and four digital walking sticks in a small town on the Danish west coast illustrate the capacity of infrastructure to relate and juxtapose entities that were not related in exactly this way prior to the installation. The chapter describes how The Energy Walk emerged as an infrastructure for making relations within and between marine renewable energy, nature, landscape and the public as well as between researcher beliefs and new insights. Working through affect and spurring the visitors' imagination The Energy Walk brought into contact what was known and tangible and what was not immediately visible. Based on a discussion of technologies of the imagination we conclude that if there is a distinct role for the digital in STS it could be as an unruly research participant, which has the capacity to infrastructure that which is ephemeral or not quite seen.
Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 2020
This paper offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between resource landscapes and... more This paper offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between resource landscapes and the state in Iceland during a period of financial experimentation. In particular, it analyses a shift from the production of thermal water for local use to the production of electricity for the global aluminium market. This shift, the paper argues, is not merely a technocratic exercise in further resource extraction, it also indexes some of the tenuous connections between resource making and state making. The paper ends by offering a perspective on the recursive relationship between resource instabilities and instabilities within the state.
This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where the extrac... more This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where the extraction of geothermal energy for the production of aluminum is triggering anthropogenic earthquakes. As the aluminum industry seeks to decarbonize their industrial infrastructure, they are increasingly looking to renewable energy havens, such as Iceland, to supply their expansive energy needs. While this paper is partly about understanding the forms of politics at stake in decarbonizing modernity’s infrastructures, it is more specifically concerned with the temporal politics of anthropogenic earthquakes in the Hengill volcanic zone in the south west of the country. The paper takes up the perspective of geologists tasked with analyzing the emergence of these new earthquake forms, as well as locals from a small town in the vicinity who are learning to live with them. While focusing on the conflict that has ensued in the wake of earthquake production, the article pays particular attention to t...
Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy... more Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy infrastructures as experiments. Twenty authors have written collaborative chapters that examine energy politics and practices, from electricity cables and energy monitors to swamps and estuaries. Each chapter proposes a unique format to tell energy worlds differently and to stimulate energy imaginaries: thesis, propositions, interviews, stories, card games, and a graphic novel. The book offers practitioners, students, and scholars a range of new tools to help think, engage and critique energy politics, practices and infrastructures.
This article puts forward a bestiary of digital monsters. By bringing into dialogue scholarship i... more This article puts forward a bestiary of digital monsters. By bringing into dialogue scholarship in monster theory with that in science and technology studies, we develop the idea of the bestiary as a way of exploring sites where digital monsters are made. We discuss the role of bestiaries in narrating anxieties about the present. We proceed to populate our bestiary with various sociotechnical ‘beasts’ arising in collaborative research project on new data relations in Denmark. The paper argues for the place of the ever-incomplete bestiary in understanding digital monsters, for the bestiary’s role as gathering point within our project, and for its capacities to speak beyond a single research setting. Through the bestiary, we look toward the ways we already live with monsters and to the forms of analysis available for describing the beasts in our midst.
This paper explores an informal acoustic method developed by a group of industrial geologists wor... more This paper explores an informal acoustic method developed by a group of industrial geologists working in geothermal energy landscapes in the southwest of Iceland. Through a series of ethnographic descriptions, this paper renders the work these geologists carry out in sonic terms, emphasizing how they use their bodies as sonic detectors in the production of geological evidence. Sound, the paper argues, is what allows geologists to make the intractable problem of volcanic cooling doable. It does this by differentiating two forms of evidence. Primary evidence, which ends up as data in geological reports, and secondary sonic evidence, which is what establishes that this primary evidence is, in fact, evidence. The paper introduces the concept data echoes as a way to think about how sound articulates between these evidential protocols. As echo, sound works as an outside, which, while remaining external to official protocols of knowledge production, nevertheless helps to constitute distinctions that are meaningful to the production of those categories. As data echoes through the various moments of data capture, analysis, and model building, sound's
This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where the extrac... more This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where the extraction of geothermal energy for the production of aluminum is triggering anthropogenic earthquakes. As the aluminum industry seeks to decarbonize their industrial infrastructure, they are increasingly looking to renewable energy havens, such as Iceland, to supply their expansive energy needs. While this paper is partly about understanding the forms of politics at stake in decarbonizing modernity's infrastructures, it is more specifically concerned with the temporal politics of anthropogenic earthquakes in the Hengill volcanic zone in the south west of the country. The paper takes up the perspective of geologists tasked with analysing the emergence of these new earthquake forms, as well as locals from a small town in the vicinity who are learning to live with them. While focusing on the conflict that has ensued in the wake of earthquake production, the article pays particular attention to the importance of acceleration-both economic and geologic-in their making. This leads to an analysis of how alternate temporal renderings of anthropogenic earthquakes invoke competing claims about the future. Anticipating the future, the paper argues, is a form of temporal politics through which the various actors either legitimise, or protest against, these volcanic interventions.
This paper takes its point of departure in the years leading up to, and
shortly after, the outbre... more This paper takes its point of departure in the years leading up to, and shortly after, the outbreak of World War One; a period that saw the emergence of Europe’s first aeroplanes. It argues that the production of new aerial objects required not just imaginative leaps in technology, but also the making of possible futures into which such technologies could fit. In order to elaborate this argument, the paper engages with the life and work of J.C.H Ellehammer, the Danish inventor-entrepreneur who claimed the honour of being the first man to fly in Europe in 1906. Through an examination of Ellehammer’s heterogeneous activities and practices, I argue that his initial aerial prototypes are ‘notquite- yet-flying machines.’ As technologies of anticipation they model, or rehearse, a version of the future through which such machines could become more acceptable to a sceptical public and find their place within a broader national discourse on flying. This is based upon a particular reading of the prototype as both an epistemic object and an epistemic culture, and upon a rendering of prototyping as an analytic that approaches the craft and agency of objects in particular ways.
Maguire, James, Murray, Declan and Wallsten, Björn. "Our Electric Metals." Theorizing the Contemp... more Maguire, James, Murray, Declan and Wallsten, Björn. "Our Electric Metals." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, December 19, 2017. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1271-our-electric-metals
This paper takes its point of departure in the years leading up to, and shortly after, the outbre... more This paper takes its point of departure in the years leading up to, and shortly after, the outbreak of World War One; a period that saw the emergence of Europe’s first aeroplanes. It argues that the production of new aerial objects required not just imaginative leaps in technology, but also the making of possible futures into which such technologies could fit. In order to elaborate this argument, the paper engages with the life and work of J.C.H Ellehammer, the Danish inventor-entrepreneur who claimed the honour of being the first man to fly in Europe in 1906. Through an examination of Ellehammer’s heterogeneous activities and practices, I argue that his initial aerial prototypes are ‘notquite-yet-flying machines.’ As technologies of anticipation they model, or rehearse, a version of the future through which such machines could become more acceptable to a sceptical public and find their place within a broader national discourse on flying. This is based upon a particular reading of t...
Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a long-standing interest in the nature, effects, and emb... more Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a long-standing interest in the nature, effects, and embedded politics of infrastructures. Recent infrastructure studies focus on how realities are made, relationally, and consider infrastructures as sites of experimentation. Of interest in this paper are the imaginative dimensions of infrastructures as they perform a techno-imaginative setup for people to pass through. Designing and installing The Energy Walk and four digital walking sticks in a small town on the Danish west coast illustrate the capacity of infrastructure to relate and juxtapose entities that were not related in exactly this way prior to the installation. The chapter describes how The Energy Walk emerged as an infrastructure for making relations within and between marine renewable energy, nature, landscape and the public as well as between researcher beliefs and new insights. Working through affect and spurring the visitors' imagination The Energy Walk brought into contact what was known and tangible and what was not immediately visible. Based on a discussion of technologies of the imagination we conclude that if there is a distinct role for the digital in STS it could be as an unruly research participant, which has the capacity to infrastructure that which is ephemeral or not quite seen.
Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 2020
This paper offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between resource landscapes and... more This paper offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between resource landscapes and the state in Iceland during a period of financial experimentation. In particular, it analyses a shift from the production of thermal water for local use to the production of electricity for the global aluminium market. This shift, the paper argues, is not merely a technocratic exercise in further resource extraction, it also indexes some of the tenuous connections between resource making and state making. The paper ends by offering a perspective on the recursive relationship between resource instabilities and instabilities within the state.
This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where the extrac... more This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where the extraction of geothermal energy for the production of aluminum is triggering anthropogenic earthquakes. As the aluminum industry seeks to decarbonize their industrial infrastructure, they are increasingly looking to renewable energy havens, such as Iceland, to supply their expansive energy needs. While this paper is partly about understanding the forms of politics at stake in decarbonizing modernity’s infrastructures, it is more specifically concerned with the temporal politics of anthropogenic earthquakes in the Hengill volcanic zone in the south west of the country. The paper takes up the perspective of geologists tasked with analyzing the emergence of these new earthquake forms, as well as locals from a small town in the vicinity who are learning to live with them. While focusing on the conflict that has ensued in the wake of earthquake production, the article pays particular attention to t...
Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy... more Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy infrastructures as experiments. Twenty authors have written collaborative chapters that examine energy politics and practices, from electricity cables and energy monitors to swamps and estuaries. Each chapter proposes a unique format to tell energy worlds differently and to stimulate energy imaginaries: thesis, propositions, interviews, stories, card games, and a graphic novel. The book offers practitioners, students, and scholars a range of new tools to help think, engage and critique energy politics, practices and infrastructures.
This article puts forward a bestiary of digital monsters. By bringing into dialogue scholarship i... more This article puts forward a bestiary of digital monsters. By bringing into dialogue scholarship in monster theory with that in science and technology studies, we develop the idea of the bestiary as a way of exploring sites where digital monsters are made. We discuss the role of bestiaries in narrating anxieties about the present. We proceed to populate our bestiary with various sociotechnical ‘beasts’ arising in collaborative research project on new data relations in Denmark. The paper argues for the place of the ever-incomplete bestiary in understanding digital monsters, for the bestiary’s role as gathering point within our project, and for its capacities to speak beyond a single research setting. Through the bestiary, we look toward the ways we already live with monsters and to the forms of analysis available for describing the beasts in our midst.
Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a long-standing interest in the nature, effects, and emb... more Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a long-standing interest in the nature, effects, and embedded politics of infrastructures. Recent infrastructure studies focus on how realities are made, relationally, and consider infrastructures as sites of experimentation. Of interest in this paper are the imaginative dimensions of infrastructures as they perform a techno-imaginative setup for people to pass through. Designing and installing The Energy Walk and four digital walking sticks in a small town on the Danish west coast illustrate the capacity of infrastructure to relate and juxtapose entities that were not related in exactly this way prior to the installation. The chapter describes how The Energy Walk emerged as an infrastructure for making relations within and between marine renewable energy, nature, landscape and the public as well as between researcher beliefs and new insights. Working through affect and spurring the visitors' imagination The Energy Walk brought into conta...
Big-Tech’s data centres have recently emerged as important socio-political figures in the ongoing... more Big-Tech’s data centres have recently emerged as important socio-political figures in the ongoing digitalisation of the Danish state. Locating vast swathes of data in a country renowned for its renewable energy has prompted a series of questions about the nature of the relationship between these two actors. Our ethnographic interest resides in analysing how, and why, Denmark is rapidly becoming Europe’s primary US data centre location, and in exploring the transformative processes through which the Danish state is being reconfigured as digital. In doing so, we emphasise the role of infrastructures in digital state-making and draw upon a particular reading of anthropological exchange theory to conceptualise how the state is being reconstituted through exchange practices with data centre actors. We argue that as Big-Tech territorialises state land and resources, the state in turn reterritorializes the promising digital futures that come with Big-Tech, making visible its new digital frontier.
James Maguire, Laura Watts and Brit Ross Winthereik (eds.) Energy Worlds in Experiment, Manchester: Mattering Press, 2021
A central promise of democratic politics has been that all issues, matters of concern, or problem... more A central promise of democratic politics has been that all issues, matters of concern, or problems relevant for a political community, can be dealt with in a standardised way. If climate change can be conceptualised as an issue at all, it is an issue that radically challenges this promise. As varying groups, communities and nations around the globe attempt to respond, each in their own particular way, we suggest – based on the ethnographic examples assembled here – that their modes of engagement offer us some important insights. These insights shed light on how people are attempting to make their worlds more liveable in tumultuous times – commonly, yet contentiously, referred to as the anthropocene – and, more particularly, how their responses to the predicaments they face outline an emergent form of thinking and doing politics. This form, we claim, is propositional.
All of the contributions to this special issue are occupied with how
to engage data otherwise. Th... more All of the contributions to this special issue are occupied with how to engage data otherwise. This otherwise indexes the rich variety of approaches to data beyond what we are currently witnessing. Whether through the development of politically and ethically relevant forms of data experiments, or the construction of alternative visions of the much-critiqued data infrastructures of powerful platform providers, all the articles reflect upon how we––as scholars and citizens––can live and work with data in ways amenable to diverse, critical, and ethical forms of social existence. This introduction intervenes in this debate in its own particular way, principally by considering what it means to characterise the contemporary as a data moment. The term data moment, we argue, works as a conceptual device calling for more ethical-political engagement with data practices. At the same time, it also retains a temporal inflection. Moments, we claim, are not sequential steps in a linear process, but are themselves productive of, and products of, temporal orders. Moments are also saturated in affect, we argue, and it is such affects that contribute to how particular forms of meaning emerge with/as data. By embracing the compelling empirical, theoretical and ethical challenges of this data moment our ambition with this special issue is to make a modest contribution to how scholars can engage data in the present, while also shaping a future where data are treated critically, ethically, and reflexively.
Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy... more Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy infrastructures as experiments. Twenty authors have written collaborative chapters that examine energy politics and practices, from electricity cables and energy monitors to swamps and estuaries. Each chapter proposes a unique format to tell energy worlds differently and to stimulate energy imaginaries: thesis, propositions, interviews, stories, card games, and a graphic novel. The book offers practitioners, students, and scholars a range of new tools to help think, engage and critique energy politics, practices and infrastructures.
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shortly after, the outbreak of World War One; a period that saw the
emergence of Europe’s first aeroplanes. It argues that the production of
new aerial objects required not just imaginative leaps in technology,
but also the making of possible futures into which such technologies
could fit. In order to elaborate this argument, the paper engages with
the life and work of J.C.H Ellehammer, the Danish inventor-entrepreneur
who claimed the honour of being the first man to fly in Europe in
1906. Through an examination of Ellehammer’s heterogeneous activities
and practices, I argue that his initial aerial prototypes are ‘notquite-
yet-flying machines.’ As technologies of anticipation they model,
or rehearse, a version of the future through which such machines could
become more acceptable to a sceptical public and find their place within
a broader national discourse on flying. This is based upon a particular
reading of the prototype as both an epistemic object and an epistemic
culture, and upon a rendering of prototyping as an analytic that approaches
the craft and agency of objects in particular ways.
shortly after, the outbreak of World War One; a period that saw the
emergence of Europe’s first aeroplanes. It argues that the production of
new aerial objects required not just imaginative leaps in technology,
but also the making of possible futures into which such technologies
could fit. In order to elaborate this argument, the paper engages with
the life and work of J.C.H Ellehammer, the Danish inventor-entrepreneur
who claimed the honour of being the first man to fly in Europe in
1906. Through an examination of Ellehammer’s heterogeneous activities
and practices, I argue that his initial aerial prototypes are ‘notquite-
yet-flying machines.’ As technologies of anticipation they model,
or rehearse, a version of the future through which such machines could
become more acceptable to a sceptical public and find their place within
a broader national discourse on flying. This is based upon a particular
reading of the prototype as both an epistemic object and an epistemic
culture, and upon a rendering of prototyping as an analytic that approaches
the craft and agency of objects in particular ways.
to engage data otherwise. This otherwise indexes the rich variety of
approaches to data beyond what we are currently witnessing. Whether
through the development of politically and ethically relevant forms
of data experiments, or the construction of alternative visions of the
much-critiqued data infrastructures of powerful platform providers,
all the articles reflect upon how we––as scholars and citizens––can
live and work with data in ways amenable to diverse, critical, and
ethical forms of social existence. This introduction intervenes in this
debate in its own particular way, principally by considering what
it means to characterise the contemporary as a data moment. The
term data moment, we argue, works as a conceptual device calling for
more ethical-political engagement with data practices. At the same
time, it also retains a temporal inflection. Moments, we claim, are not
sequential steps in a linear process, but are themselves productive
of, and products of, temporal orders. Moments are also saturated in
affect, we argue, and it is such affects that contribute to how particular
forms of meaning emerge with/as data. By embracing the compelling
empirical, theoretical and ethical challenges of this data moment our
ambition with this special issue is to make a modest contribution to
how scholars can engage data in the present, while also shaping a future
where data are treated critically, ethically, and reflexively.
Each chapter proposes a unique format to tell energy worlds differently and to stimulate energy imaginaries: thesis, propositions, interviews, stories, card games, and a graphic novel. The book offers practitioners, students, and scholars a range of new tools to help think, engage and critique energy politics, practices and infrastructures.