I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. My books include "The Undersea Network" (on the social and cultural dimensions of undersea communications cables), "Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure," and "Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment".
This article describes thermal vision, the ways of seeing invisible thermal emissions and exchang... more This article describes thermal vision, the ways of seeing invisible thermal emissions and exchanges. While most studies of thermal vision have focused on the deployment of infrared imaging in military and police operations, the author articulates thermal vision as a perceptual mode that both extends beyond the infrared camera to a broader set of practices of seeing heat as well as beyond the militarized view to scientific, commercial, and cultural landscapes. Weaving through these practices and landscapes, she outlines four overlapping ways that thermal vision is oriented and in turn organizes the world: through thermal effects, hue, objects, and zones. Focusing on the latter form, and taking cases from early infrared photography in the 1930s and the expansion of building thermography in the 1970s, she argues that the thermal imagery used for visual surveillance, often as a means of objectification and targeting, is intimately connected to regimes of environmental monitoring and the creation and management of normative zones. A close attention to these cases draws out one of thermal vision's critical affordances and cultural uses, regardless of technological platform or orientation: entangled with practices of temperature control and synesthetic processing, it has been enlisted to alter architectures, environments, and bodily movements through them. Observing these uses expands visual culture studies' understanding of the sensory possibilities of the visible and helps scholars to track the affective and intimate dimensions of climate change.
This article tracks the history of the sweatbox as a racialized technology of thermal violence. T... more This article tracks the history of the sweatbox as a racialized technology of thermal violence. Through an analysis of the sweatbox’s use on the plantations and prisons of the American South, it argues that thermal violence is neither defined by a particular technology nor by exposure to extreme temperatures: it is the manipulation of a body’s capacity to mediate heat. As a means of working on the body as a medium, thermal violence reproduces and accentuates difference not only when it is intentionally used to injure particular racial, ethnic, and religious groups, but as it differentially affects bodies according to their social position. Thermal violence has also been a way to enact harm such that accountability is deflected from the perpetrators to the environment itself. The article reveals that while climate change will devastate environments, especially the environments of already marginalized people, it will also expand the human capacity and the available media for enacting thermal harm. To address the harm of sweatboxing, the article concludes that in addition to a politics of exposure, an orientation to thermal autonomy is needed to make these invisible coercions visible and to better account for the racial regimes of thermal violence.
This article documents how thermal manipulation is critical to the transformation of the earth's ... more This article documents how thermal manipulation is critical to the transformation of the earth's raw materials into media and to maintaining those materials as media. Through an examination of thermal practices, including mineral extraction, the use of airconditioning in media manufacturing and preservation, and thermal infrared imaging, thermal control is shown to be essential to the conversion of geological matter into circulations of media on a mass scale. In each of these cases, cultural assumptions and imperatives — the drive toward purity, the development of standardization, and the demand for homogeneity across elements and media objects — organize temperature management. The thermocultures of media inflect its composition, movements, and temporalities and embed it within existing regimes of capitalism, gender, race, and sexuality. The study of thermocultures offers an alternative to traditional infrastructural and geological analyses, one oriented less toward the excavation of elements from deep time and the depths of the earth and more toward the conditions in which geologic matter's potentials are actualized as media. It also opens up a new set of genealogies for investigation, including the historical role of thermal management in the differentiation of gendered bodies.
Media's archives are cold. Films are tucked away in cold storage vaults. Air conditioning stabili... more Media's archives are cold. Films are tucked away in cold storage vaults. Air conditioning stabilizes the temperature of photographs, cylinders, and magnetic tapes, limiting their expansion and contraction. Regardless of format, content, and material substrate, the life of most archival media is extended by thermal technologies. This short paper discusses the significance of cooling for physical and digital archives.
Abstract. Many mobile applications that lead tourists to landmarks and businesses ignore the educ... more Abstract. Many mobile applications that lead tourists to landmarks and businesses ignore the educational component of tourism. The systems that do satiate the tourist's desire for learning about visited places require so much costly custom content development that they can ...
Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, Jun 2014
This series of photographs tracks digital signals across nine nodes of our fiber-optic undersea c... more This series of photographs tracks digital signals across nine nodes of our fiber-optic undersea cable network – a system responsible for carrying 99% of all transoceanic internet traffic. The images document cable landings in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, sites where submarine systems come aground and become entangled in the existing movements of both humans and nonhumans. Rather than locating us in an urban landscape, “Signal Tracks” focuses on the cable system’s rural and aquatic environments, extending from breaking waves over Sydney’s beaches, to mountains where brush fires scour O‘ahu’s west shore, to the habitats of endangered mountain beavers in northern California. Although on the surface these images appear absent of industrial infrastructure, the accompanying textual annotations highlight how such “natural” ecologies have been folded into contemporary digital systems.
Networks have structured our social – and media – development long before the emergence of the “n... more Networks have structured our social – and media – development long before the emergence of the “network society.” From the letter-writing networks of the proto-Italian aristocracy to the electrical networks that facilitated industrialization; from the spread of woodcuts, pamphlets, and ballads that supported the Protestant
Reformation to the twentieth century emergence of broadcast radio and television networks, media have always been situated in the matrices of networks of circulation and distribution, facilitating historically specific modes of connection. These histories often remain disconnected from research on digital networks, the latest to re-shape our socio-technical environment into a mesh of interconnecting nodes. An archaeological approach, one that routes between contemporary and historical networks, Alan Liu argues, has the potential to regenerate a sense of history that would temper the presentism of digital culture, all too often experienced
as instantaneous and simultaneous.
This special issue of Amodern features original research, initially presented in 2012 at the Network Archaeology conference at Miami University of Ohio, on the histories of networks, the discrete connections that they articulate, and the circulatory forms of data, information, and socio-cultural resources that they enable.
Drawing from the field of media archaeology, we conceptualize network archaeology as a call to investigate networks past and present – using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry and drawing upon historical cases to inform our understanding of today’s networked culture. In this
introduction, we elaborate how network archaeology opens up promising areas for critical investigation, new objects of study, and prospective sites for collaboration within the productively discordant approach of media archaeology.
There is a lack of public awareness about the importance of submarine cable systems, even despite... more There is a lack of public awareness about the importance of submarine cable systems, even despite the recent increase in the circulation of visual and geographic information about them. This lack of awareness can inhibit policy, regulation, and investment. This paper discusses an opportunity to improve the “cable literacy” of the general public, including policy-makers and regulators. “Surfacing,” a digital map of submarine cables built using web technologies, is designed in game-like format in which the user becomes the signal, traverses the network, and learns about the challenges companies face in constructing and maintaining cable systems.
This essay charts the construction of power relations and cultural difference in “cinema under wa... more This essay charts the construction of power relations and cultural difference in “cinema under water” from the 1910s through the 1960s. While in early films the subaquatic was the domain of an ethnic Other, during the 1950s these environments became zones of territorial conflict and the ethnic Other was displaced to the shore. In the 1960s, cinema and television drew upon space-age discourse to depict the ocean as a place to colonize and domesticate. These discursive shifts not only pioneered the tropes of modern aquatic ecocinema but also mediated the United States’ ascendance as a dominant marine power.
This article highlights the visual traces of undersea cables, technologies that carry the majorit... more This article highlights the visual traces of undersea cables, technologies that carry the majority of transoceanic telecommunications traffic, in order to make visible the material systems that support an ‘immaterial’ internet. The author documents the cultural production of these traces, recording how infrastructural visibility must be negotiated at points where cables cross through public spaces, including beaches, highways, and state parks. By examining the cultural conflicts over cables in California and O‘ahu, the article shows how telecommunications companies reorganize visual space to protect the cable, using diverse media such as nautical charts and warning signs. The cultural specificity of these representations testifies to the ways in which global cable systems develop in relation to local spatial politics. The article seeks to broaden research on infrastructure’s invisibility, disruption, and sensationalization to include the ‘existing visibilities’ of undersea cables as they are constituted in everyday life and material environments.
This essay delineates the cultural history of Guam’s undersea cables. It traces how broader socia... more This essay delineates the cultural history of Guam’s undersea cables. It traces how broader social forces interested in locating Guam at the center of transpacific traffic have kept the island a crucial node in the cable network. These forces include the U.S. military’s establishment of Guam as a strategic space; private telecommunications companies’ investment in Guam as an Asian hub; and the expansion of infrastructures that depend on and generate traffic for cables, including networks of sea transport, air transport, and migration. As the location where interconnection occurs, Guam has become a place of power in transpacific networks, and this power resides in part in the island’s physical geography. Due to the geographic concentration of communications resources, however, Guam is also a pressure point in the network. Here, local actions and environmental forces have disproportionate consequences for network operation, and must be continually negotiated in order to sustain the flow of electrical and political power. Describing these cultural geographies, I suggest that, rather than an anomaly, Guam should be considered as a critical node of transpacific systems; it is a geographic location critical to the system’s operation (and to U.S. national security), as well as a place from which a critique of the virtual nature of communication systems is possible—it is a point from which we can best perceive the material investments in the interconnection of America, Asia, and the Pacific.
Global communications infrastructure, including the wires, towers, and satellites that transmit i... more Global communications infrastructure, including the wires, towers, and satellites that transmit international signals, are increasingly private sites, inaccessible and unknown to the publics that they serve. They have been described as an “invisible city,” a space beyond the threshold of everyday observation. Fiber-optic undersea cables are perhaps the least perceptible of these technologies despite the fact they carry over 95% of transoceanic Internet traffic. Submerged along the seafloor, they are out of reach, disconnected from the social sphere above. As they reach the shore, these cables must be extended through inhabited and contested environments in order to interconnect with national systems. Here, they intersect public space and emerge into the visual landscape. Even when they are visual, however, these networks rarely become visible to the publics that they intersect, in part because we tend to believe that contemporary information traffic is transmitted wirelessly, through the air, rather than underground and under the sea. Network Environments (1-10) is a series of photographs taken between 2009 and 2010 documenting the material traces of communications cables in their natural environments and marking the threshold of network visibility.
This article surveys the history of environmental animation and charts the aesthetic possibilitie... more This article surveys the history of environmental animation and charts the aesthetic possibilities it offers for environmental representation, in order to prompt a reconsideration of indexical media’s dominant role in environmental communication. Given animation’s formal capabilities, it has the potential to depict imperceptible, indeterminate and interactive environments. Distinct representational practices have emerged in animated environmental films: the visualization of environmental mutability, the representation of environmental interaction and the revelation of the environment as a construct. This article defines three periods of environmental animation: the 1960s to early 1970s, the late 1980s to early 1990s, and 2005 to the present, and analyses how these practices transformed during each cycle. Early short films pioneered the depiction of a mutable environment. In the second period, mutability became less significant, but feature films expanded the possible modes of environmental interaction. Most recently, films have begun to reflect on the environment as a visual construct.
This article describes thermal vision, the ways of seeing invisible thermal emissions and exchang... more This article describes thermal vision, the ways of seeing invisible thermal emissions and exchanges. While most studies of thermal vision have focused on the deployment of infrared imaging in military and police operations, the author articulates thermal vision as a perceptual mode that both extends beyond the infrared camera to a broader set of practices of seeing heat as well as beyond the militarized view to scientific, commercial, and cultural landscapes. Weaving through these practices and landscapes, she outlines four overlapping ways that thermal vision is oriented and in turn organizes the world: through thermal effects, hue, objects, and zones. Focusing on the latter form, and taking cases from early infrared photography in the 1930s and the expansion of building thermography in the 1970s, she argues that the thermal imagery used for visual surveillance, often as a means of objectification and targeting, is intimately connected to regimes of environmental monitoring and the creation and management of normative zones. A close attention to these cases draws out one of thermal vision's critical affordances and cultural uses, regardless of technological platform or orientation: entangled with practices of temperature control and synesthetic processing, it has been enlisted to alter architectures, environments, and bodily movements through them. Observing these uses expands visual culture studies' understanding of the sensory possibilities of the visible and helps scholars to track the affective and intimate dimensions of climate change.
This article tracks the history of the sweatbox as a racialized technology of thermal violence. T... more This article tracks the history of the sweatbox as a racialized technology of thermal violence. Through an analysis of the sweatbox’s use on the plantations and prisons of the American South, it argues that thermal violence is neither defined by a particular technology nor by exposure to extreme temperatures: it is the manipulation of a body’s capacity to mediate heat. As a means of working on the body as a medium, thermal violence reproduces and accentuates difference not only when it is intentionally used to injure particular racial, ethnic, and religious groups, but as it differentially affects bodies according to their social position. Thermal violence has also been a way to enact harm such that accountability is deflected from the perpetrators to the environment itself. The article reveals that while climate change will devastate environments, especially the environments of already marginalized people, it will also expand the human capacity and the available media for enacting thermal harm. To address the harm of sweatboxing, the article concludes that in addition to a politics of exposure, an orientation to thermal autonomy is needed to make these invisible coercions visible and to better account for the racial regimes of thermal violence.
This article documents how thermal manipulation is critical to the transformation of the earth's ... more This article documents how thermal manipulation is critical to the transformation of the earth's raw materials into media and to maintaining those materials as media. Through an examination of thermal practices, including mineral extraction, the use of airconditioning in media manufacturing and preservation, and thermal infrared imaging, thermal control is shown to be essential to the conversion of geological matter into circulations of media on a mass scale. In each of these cases, cultural assumptions and imperatives — the drive toward purity, the development of standardization, and the demand for homogeneity across elements and media objects — organize temperature management. The thermocultures of media inflect its composition, movements, and temporalities and embed it within existing regimes of capitalism, gender, race, and sexuality. The study of thermocultures offers an alternative to traditional infrastructural and geological analyses, one oriented less toward the excavation of elements from deep time and the depths of the earth and more toward the conditions in which geologic matter's potentials are actualized as media. It also opens up a new set of genealogies for investigation, including the historical role of thermal management in the differentiation of gendered bodies.
Media's archives are cold. Films are tucked away in cold storage vaults. Air conditioning stabili... more Media's archives are cold. Films are tucked away in cold storage vaults. Air conditioning stabilizes the temperature of photographs, cylinders, and magnetic tapes, limiting their expansion and contraction. Regardless of format, content, and material substrate, the life of most archival media is extended by thermal technologies. This short paper discusses the significance of cooling for physical and digital archives.
Abstract. Many mobile applications that lead tourists to landmarks and businesses ignore the educ... more Abstract. Many mobile applications that lead tourists to landmarks and businesses ignore the educational component of tourism. The systems that do satiate the tourist's desire for learning about visited places require so much costly custom content development that they can ...
Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, Jun 2014
This series of photographs tracks digital signals across nine nodes of our fiber-optic undersea c... more This series of photographs tracks digital signals across nine nodes of our fiber-optic undersea cable network – a system responsible for carrying 99% of all transoceanic internet traffic. The images document cable landings in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, sites where submarine systems come aground and become entangled in the existing movements of both humans and nonhumans. Rather than locating us in an urban landscape, “Signal Tracks” focuses on the cable system’s rural and aquatic environments, extending from breaking waves over Sydney’s beaches, to mountains where brush fires scour O‘ahu’s west shore, to the habitats of endangered mountain beavers in northern California. Although on the surface these images appear absent of industrial infrastructure, the accompanying textual annotations highlight how such “natural” ecologies have been folded into contemporary digital systems.
Networks have structured our social – and media – development long before the emergence of the “n... more Networks have structured our social – and media – development long before the emergence of the “network society.” From the letter-writing networks of the proto-Italian aristocracy to the electrical networks that facilitated industrialization; from the spread of woodcuts, pamphlets, and ballads that supported the Protestant
Reformation to the twentieth century emergence of broadcast radio and television networks, media have always been situated in the matrices of networks of circulation and distribution, facilitating historically specific modes of connection. These histories often remain disconnected from research on digital networks, the latest to re-shape our socio-technical environment into a mesh of interconnecting nodes. An archaeological approach, one that routes between contemporary and historical networks, Alan Liu argues, has the potential to regenerate a sense of history that would temper the presentism of digital culture, all too often experienced
as instantaneous and simultaneous.
This special issue of Amodern features original research, initially presented in 2012 at the Network Archaeology conference at Miami University of Ohio, on the histories of networks, the discrete connections that they articulate, and the circulatory forms of data, information, and socio-cultural resources that they enable.
Drawing from the field of media archaeology, we conceptualize network archaeology as a call to investigate networks past and present – using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry and drawing upon historical cases to inform our understanding of today’s networked culture. In this
introduction, we elaborate how network archaeology opens up promising areas for critical investigation, new objects of study, and prospective sites for collaboration within the productively discordant approach of media archaeology.
There is a lack of public awareness about the importance of submarine cable systems, even despite... more There is a lack of public awareness about the importance of submarine cable systems, even despite the recent increase in the circulation of visual and geographic information about them. This lack of awareness can inhibit policy, regulation, and investment. This paper discusses an opportunity to improve the “cable literacy” of the general public, including policy-makers and regulators. “Surfacing,” a digital map of submarine cables built using web technologies, is designed in game-like format in which the user becomes the signal, traverses the network, and learns about the challenges companies face in constructing and maintaining cable systems.
This essay charts the construction of power relations and cultural difference in “cinema under wa... more This essay charts the construction of power relations and cultural difference in “cinema under water” from the 1910s through the 1960s. While in early films the subaquatic was the domain of an ethnic Other, during the 1950s these environments became zones of territorial conflict and the ethnic Other was displaced to the shore. In the 1960s, cinema and television drew upon space-age discourse to depict the ocean as a place to colonize and domesticate. These discursive shifts not only pioneered the tropes of modern aquatic ecocinema but also mediated the United States’ ascendance as a dominant marine power.
This article highlights the visual traces of undersea cables, technologies that carry the majorit... more This article highlights the visual traces of undersea cables, technologies that carry the majority of transoceanic telecommunications traffic, in order to make visible the material systems that support an ‘immaterial’ internet. The author documents the cultural production of these traces, recording how infrastructural visibility must be negotiated at points where cables cross through public spaces, including beaches, highways, and state parks. By examining the cultural conflicts over cables in California and O‘ahu, the article shows how telecommunications companies reorganize visual space to protect the cable, using diverse media such as nautical charts and warning signs. The cultural specificity of these representations testifies to the ways in which global cable systems develop in relation to local spatial politics. The article seeks to broaden research on infrastructure’s invisibility, disruption, and sensationalization to include the ‘existing visibilities’ of undersea cables as they are constituted in everyday life and material environments.
This essay delineates the cultural history of Guam’s undersea cables. It traces how broader socia... more This essay delineates the cultural history of Guam’s undersea cables. It traces how broader social forces interested in locating Guam at the center of transpacific traffic have kept the island a crucial node in the cable network. These forces include the U.S. military’s establishment of Guam as a strategic space; private telecommunications companies’ investment in Guam as an Asian hub; and the expansion of infrastructures that depend on and generate traffic for cables, including networks of sea transport, air transport, and migration. As the location where interconnection occurs, Guam has become a place of power in transpacific networks, and this power resides in part in the island’s physical geography. Due to the geographic concentration of communications resources, however, Guam is also a pressure point in the network. Here, local actions and environmental forces have disproportionate consequences for network operation, and must be continually negotiated in order to sustain the flow of electrical and political power. Describing these cultural geographies, I suggest that, rather than an anomaly, Guam should be considered as a critical node of transpacific systems; it is a geographic location critical to the system’s operation (and to U.S. national security), as well as a place from which a critique of the virtual nature of communication systems is possible—it is a point from which we can best perceive the material investments in the interconnection of America, Asia, and the Pacific.
Global communications infrastructure, including the wires, towers, and satellites that transmit i... more Global communications infrastructure, including the wires, towers, and satellites that transmit international signals, are increasingly private sites, inaccessible and unknown to the publics that they serve. They have been described as an “invisible city,” a space beyond the threshold of everyday observation. Fiber-optic undersea cables are perhaps the least perceptible of these technologies despite the fact they carry over 95% of transoceanic Internet traffic. Submerged along the seafloor, they are out of reach, disconnected from the social sphere above. As they reach the shore, these cables must be extended through inhabited and contested environments in order to interconnect with national systems. Here, they intersect public space and emerge into the visual landscape. Even when they are visual, however, these networks rarely become visible to the publics that they intersect, in part because we tend to believe that contemporary information traffic is transmitted wirelessly, through the air, rather than underground and under the sea. Network Environments (1-10) is a series of photographs taken between 2009 and 2010 documenting the material traces of communications cables in their natural environments and marking the threshold of network visibility.
This article surveys the history of environmental animation and charts the aesthetic possibilitie... more This article surveys the history of environmental animation and charts the aesthetic possibilities it offers for environmental representation, in order to prompt a reconsideration of indexical media’s dominant role in environmental communication. Given animation’s formal capabilities, it has the potential to depict imperceptible, indeterminate and interactive environments. Distinct representational practices have emerged in animated environmental films: the visualization of environmental mutability, the representation of environmental interaction and the revelation of the environment as a construct. This article defines three periods of environmental animation: the 1960s to early 1970s, the late 1980s to early 1990s, and 2005 to the present, and analyses how these practices transformed during each cycle. Early short films pioneered the depiction of a mutable environment. In the second period, mutability became less significant, but feature films expanded the possible modes of environmental interaction. Most recently, films have begun to reflect on the environment as a visual construct.
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Papers by Nicole Starosielski
Reformation to the twentieth century emergence of broadcast radio and television networks, media have always been situated in the matrices of networks of circulation and distribution, facilitating historically specific modes of connection. These histories often remain disconnected from research on digital networks, the latest to re-shape our socio-technical environment into a mesh of interconnecting nodes. An archaeological approach, one that routes between contemporary and historical networks, Alan Liu argues, has the potential to regenerate a sense of history that would temper the presentism of digital culture, all too often experienced
as instantaneous and simultaneous.
This special issue of Amodern features original research, initially presented in 2012 at the Network Archaeology conference at Miami University of Ohio, on the histories of networks, the discrete connections that they articulate, and the circulatory forms of data, information, and socio-cultural resources that they enable.
Drawing from the field of media archaeology, we conceptualize network archaeology as a call to investigate networks past and present – using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry and drawing upon historical cases to inform our understanding of today’s networked culture. In this
introduction, we elaborate how network archaeology opens up promising areas for critical investigation, new objects of study, and prospective sites for collaboration within the productively discordant approach of media archaeology.
Reformation to the twentieth century emergence of broadcast radio and television networks, media have always been situated in the matrices of networks of circulation and distribution, facilitating historically specific modes of connection. These histories often remain disconnected from research on digital networks, the latest to re-shape our socio-technical environment into a mesh of interconnecting nodes. An archaeological approach, one that routes between contemporary and historical networks, Alan Liu argues, has the potential to regenerate a sense of history that would temper the presentism of digital culture, all too often experienced
as instantaneous and simultaneous.
This special issue of Amodern features original research, initially presented in 2012 at the Network Archaeology conference at Miami University of Ohio, on the histories of networks, the discrete connections that they articulate, and the circulatory forms of data, information, and socio-cultural resources that they enable.
Drawing from the field of media archaeology, we conceptualize network archaeology as a call to investigate networks past and present – using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry and drawing upon historical cases to inform our understanding of today’s networked culture. In this
introduction, we elaborate how network archaeology opens up promising areas for critical investigation, new objects of study, and prospective sites for collaboration within the productively discordant approach of media archaeology.