Text

E-book Records of Disaster : Media Infrastructures and Climate Change

---

Penilaian

---

In recent years, the emergent field of critical infrastructure studies has turned to interdisciplinary analysis of infrastruc-tures as complex worldmaking systems: They produce shared space and time, connect cultures and subjectivities, negotiate power relations, inequalities, or the mediation and circulation of material agency.1 Infrastructures often appear as networks of media technologies that structure social life and the mate-rial world, without much attention paid to them beyond ques-tions of maintenance and failure. We take up this tendency but shift the focus to the recording qualities of both material and media infrastructures in light of anthropogenic climate change. Records of Disaster aims to interrogate how environmental disasters manifest and inscribe themselves in infrastructures. In other words, we ask what possibilities and sensory registers of witnessing infrastructures propose and enable as media technologies. Infrastructures are commonly considered to be the stable material and logistical basis of modern mundane life, ranging from electricity grids and sewerage systems to traffic routes and communication networks. While being essential, they are nevertheless subordinated to other structures, social arrange-ments, and technologies (Star and Bowker 2002). These “life-supporting” subsystems, every-day standards, and reli-abilities have in common that they are only actively perceived by their users when they don’t work or when they collapse. t is “the breakdown of infrastructure that opens the tak-en-for-granted,” as sociologists Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker have argued (2002, 151).2 Repeated power outages, network failures, breakdowns of energy supply and communi-cation networks, as well as the collapse of transport routes, logistics, or buildings, due to malfunctioning, material porosity, “human-errors,” or military destruction, show that these sys-tems are in fact quite fragile.3 As architect Keller Easterling states, today infrastructure reaches beyond physical networks of transportation, supply, and communication including “pools of microwaves beaming from satellites and populations of atomized electronic devices that we hold in our hands” as well as “shared standards and ideas that control everything from technical objects to management styles” (2014, 11). This ubiq-uitous infrastructure is no longer invisible or subordinate—on the contrary, it becomes a medium of power or an “extrastate-craft,” (Easterling 2014, 15) in her terms.4 The collapses of infrastructures that provide people with water, heat, electricity, food, and information are, however, in-creasingly triggered by ecological dynamics, changing climatic conditions, and “sudden” events such as forest fires, floods, storms, tidal waves, or droughts. They cause severe damage and suffering at different scales and are classified as disasters when local infrastructural capacities for coping with the event are overwhelmed so that external help is required to overcome the consequences.5 Such catastrophic events occur because “any system has to cope with an environment that is, by defini-tion, exponentially more complex than the system itself” (Wolfe 2018, 178).

---

Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

-

No. Panggil

320.12 BEC r

Penerbit

Germany : meson press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

167 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783957962096

Klasifikasi

320.12

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Geopolitics

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

Komentar

---

Anda harus masuk sebelum memberikan komentar