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Short abstract:

In Pakistan, moral speculation and airborne phenomena come together in the concept of “mahaul” or atmosphere. This paper reads mahaul through the work of Inayat Khan, an early-twentieth century musicologist who understood atmospheres through the medium of signals, electricity, and radio waves.

Long abstract:

Taking up this panel’s invitation to redescribe and reimagine space as propagation, this paper examines the coming together of immersive concepts and airborne phenomena in urban Pakistan. Lahore's Hall Road is the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the center of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specializes in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road's traders, conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom large. To reconcile their trade with their responsibilities as devoted Muslims, these traders look to adjudicate the moral "atmosphere" (mahaul) that can cling to film and media. This Urdu term derived from Arabic lends itself to a hybrid concept that describes a wide variety of social and mediatic phenomena, from moral attitudes to performance, and from wireless communication to pollution and ambient noise.

To understand mahaul as a medium for expressing disquiet over the entangled trajectories of media and public morality, this paper engages with the work of Hazrat Inayat Khan, an early-twentieth century musicologist and Muslim sage who wrote widely on the philosophical import of the airborne. Khan theorized social, sonic, and moral atmospheres through the medium of signals, electricity, and radio waves, arguing that what holds signals together is the experience of containment rather than a perceptible container technology. This subtle shift in focus raises an important question about our environmental moment. What disparate moral and social forces do atmospheres, waves, and other airborne phenomena hold together?

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Short abstract:

This sound-paper listens to frequencies as they comes in and out of mattering across energetic forms of weather and sound, receding into imperceptibility and surfacing into detectibility, considering how frequency can serve as a meta-analytic for ways of drawing things together.

Long abstract:

A Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability is a rare and stunning cloud formation that resembles ocean waves in the sky – as if drawn in a highly stylized manner, one wave following another in a regular, arcing formation. It occurs when the upper layer of wind moves faster than the lower layer, drawing moisture upward into a visually stunning display. The nineteenth century physicists after which it is named investigated the pulsing dynamics of energy and physicality of atmospheric forms, addressing subjects spanning meteorology, thermodynamics and acoustics. “Frequency,” a property of energy waves, is one way in which these seemingly disparate domains are rendered commensurable. The generalizing quality of frequency puts pressure on disciplinary divisions, modes of classification, and singularity, amplifying the coextensiveness of heat and sound, or, following Deleuze and Guattari, the molecular and the molar. Though frequency is general, its variations and interactions lend it an instability that is at once epistemological and ontological. The paper approaches frequency as a meta-analytic for ways of making relations. As part of a book that draws things together around qualities of instability, resistance to classification, and disturbances of relied upon categories – terms that also come from the interaction of frequencies – it considers what we can learn from frequency as a way of working and thinking. By taking up historical and ethnographic moments in which the term frequency is used and grappling with its universalizing impulse, the sound-paper performs the work of drawing things together while reflecting on modes of analysis.

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Short abstract:

Learning from a diversity of actors, this talk seeks to enter into a world populated by beings of frequency. It will offer a series of possible connections with these beings and their mediators to understand their modes of existence, and how it offers another view of the city.

Long abstract:

The advent of 5G – the fifth generation of telecommunication technologies – has been heralded as the fourth industrial revolution, requiring an infrastructural overhaul and signalling potential innovations and wireless connection. At the same time, its critics have drawn attention to the absence of “weighted evidence” regarding its possible health effects, and to how this will thicken what Anthony Dunne (1999) has called the “complex soup of electromagnetic radiation” that fills its “hertzian spaces.” While often unnoticed, these spaces could be characterised as those of “possible connection,” whether of mobile phone and antenna, body and electromagnetic fields, or cause and effect; wireless experiences and felt sensations of change that Adrian Mackenzie (2010) has described as vaguely happening at the edges of perception. What I would like to offer in this talk is a series of “possible connections” with what a documentary on the electromagnetic world has called “beings of frequency” (electromagnetic waves, bodies, antennae, the radio spectrum) and how they are experienced. Learning from anti-5G activists, scientists, and other experts in the UK, whose knowledge and experiences bear witness to beings of frequency, this talk attempts to enter into this electromagnetic world, to understand their modes of existence, and what it means to detect them. Finally, the talk will, drawing from possible connections that process-oriented philosophies have with electromagnetic theories, explore how a focus on beings of frequency could contribute to another view of the city, as fields of interpenetrating “lines of force” rather than as aggregates of distinct things.

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Short abstract:

Residues have been posited as a key concept to theorise the uncontrolled proliferation and ubiquity of pollutants in sociomaterial ecologies. Drawing on ethnographic insights, we contrast this with the 'wave pollution' associated with noise, light or 5G, characterised by intensity and intermittency.

Long abstract:

The adverse effects of environmental stressors, such as particulate matter in the air, toxins in water and soil, urban heat or noise, are often difficult to assess and affect bodies and ecosystems in a 'slow' and 'invisible' way. Standard risk assessments address this challenge by following a protocol of hazard identification and characterisation, exposure assessment and resulting risk characterisation. STS has problematised such cause-and-effect approaches by highlighting the socio-material entanglements and historical and structural inequalities that produce and sustain environmental pollution. In particular, the concept of 'residues' has recently been proposed to theorise 'from chemical domains rather than simply applying theory to chemical cases' (Boudia et al. 2021, 20). Residues are thus understood not only as physical elements, but also as markers of political and cultural choices, objects of scientific inquiry and governmental regulation.

However, this conceptualisation of particle pollution misses key features of what we, the ERC WAVEMATTERS team, have come to call 'wave pollution'. Indeed, while residues emphasise the uncontrolled proliferation of pollution sources in time and space, as well as their permanent nature, wave pollution has an intermittent nature, as it disappears when the source of environmental stress ceases to emit. By exploring controversies about noise pollution and EMF as a potential health hazard, this presentation develops a theory of wave pollution as a distinct mode of environmental contamination.

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Short abstract:

The paper analyzes how satellites translate forests into data by transforming waves into pixels. I use concepts from Peirce and Latour to trace the trajectory of forest data. I show how the emergence of a digital membrane made of sensors became entangled with Swedish forest management in the 2000s.

Long abstract:

This paper interweaves C.S. Peirce’s semiotic theory with Bruno Latour's concept of circulating reference to analyze how satellites translate the forest through extended chains of reference. These chains transform electromagnetic waves into modulated radio waves and finally into pixels on a computer screen. Empirically, the paper takes as a starting point a 1998 case study of a Swedish forest remote sensing project. This project used machine learning to compute forest information from satellite data. The paper traces the material-semiotic trajectory along which reference was made to travel; from light rays in space to the offices of environmental agencies that consumed its final product. Using Peirce's concepts of indexical and iconical sign-types, I introduce the concept of the indexical envelope to describes the emergence of a digital skin made of sensors and devices. The indexical envelope is a membrane that translates different kind of waves in the environment by being affected by them, then pass those effects onward by translating them as indexical and iconical signs. By doing a material-semiotic interpretation of the four different stages that the chain of transformations passes through—from electromagnetic waves to electric current to radio waves to light in fiber-optic cables—the paper shows how the indexical envelope became incorporated into Sweden's management of forest areas trailing the increasing understanding of forests as carbon sinks in the 2000s. Furthermore, it shows how using sensors, computers, and algorithms to translate light in the environment has become tantamount to producing politically relevant knowledge about forest carbon stocks.

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Short abstract:

Wind turbine noise continues to be a controversial issue spurring local opposition to wind farms. This controversy is explored through disputes between experts and lay people on how to frame and contain the intangible waves that constitute wind turbine noise.

Long abstract:

When wind causes the blades of wind turbines to move, energy is extracted but other matters are set in motion as well. This paper turns to the sound waves which are emitted when the blades move through the air. In studies on the social acceptance of wind energy, noise is reported to be one of the most common reasons for local opposition to wind farms. Common explanations of why noise emerge as a main point of contention state that people find it annoying or fear its potential health effects. However, little effort has been made to consider if the controversial character of wind turbine noise also stems from its constitution as invisible waves.

Employing the vocabulary of Callon (1998), wind turbine noise is understood as problematic overflows that experts are trying to model and measure in order to frame and contain the issue. A series of connected attempts at containing wind turbine noise is explored: (1) Regulating wave intensity by setting limit values for wind turbine noise. (2) Demarcating problematic waves from tolerable ones through noise propagation maps. (3) Assessing effects of wave exposure through health studies. It is described how all these expert framings are rejected or reinterpreted by worried citizens who approach noise differently through bodily experiences. The paper calls for greater dialogue between the expert framings and lay people’s experiences of wind turbine noise.

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Short abstract:

This paper foregrounds the role of energy over matter in considering embodied experiences of heat stress. It draws on new materialism, theories of social practice, rhythmanalysis, biometeorology and thermal physiology. Multiple western and alternative knowledges of heat shows its multiplicity.

Long abstract:

This paper seeks to foreground the role of energy rather than matter in considering embodied experiences of heat stress and heat strain. It takes as its starting point new materialist framings of energy as enabling the liveliness of matter. However, it goes beyond this to critique the focus on matter/states/entities in new materialism and social practice theory, drawing on recent contributions via rhythmanalysis (Walker, 2021), Starosielski’s concept of heat rendering media dynamic (2021) and engagement with biometeorology and thermal physiology. The paper uses this critique to demonstrate the inherent role that thermal energy plays in the experience of heat stress and heat strain. In doing so it will experiment with ways of ‘speaking of’ and ‘staying with’ energetic flows rather than only rendering visible the changes to matter that they cause. In this way, it hopes to a develop a lexicon for engaging with energetic presence, change, absence and work, in ways that are productive for thinking. Having done this however, the paper will then move to considering the particularity of the western, techno-scientific bias of such an account, noting the different ontologies and epistemologies of heat that are present in, for example, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic traditions. As such, the paper closes with a discussion of whether thermal energy is multiple and what this means not only for the study of heat and heat stress but for its governance.

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Short abstract:

With global warming, life-providing sun radiation turns into excessive heat. While skating, walking, and riding buses in Las Vegas, a physicist and an ethnographer engage waves as physical models and metaphors for overflow to grasp modes of how to be affected by heat in starkly uneven conditions.

Long abstract:

The sun is a particular star, the closest one to Earth and its radiation provides all life on the planet. As an electromagnetic wave, solar radiation symbolizes something steady and rhythmic, like night and day, winter and summer. However, capitalogenic global warming transforms Earth’s relation to the sunlight. Earth’s spin around the sun comes more and more with excessive heat. Amplified by atmospheric leaks and the shape and materials of built formations, the life-providing solar radiation turns into life-threatening and killing heat waves, heat islands, and heat domes.

This paper stems from an ethnographic joint venture between a physicist and an ethnographer about moving one’s body through the heat of Las Vegas (NV). Skating, walking, and riding buses of the public transport infrastructure, we exchange strategies to balance a body’s metabolism with the radiant heat from above and below.

By thinking together about the exposure to heat with the wave as a physical figure of modeling radiation and a metaphorical figure of an overflow, the wave becomes a tool to draw the invisible, elusive, and yet perceivable energy of heat near(er) and to pin down the modes of a body’s metabolism of learning how to be affected by environmental heat in its starkly uneven conditions. We speculate about how a city in the future of global warming could be arranged around a more climate-just infrastructure of public transport.

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Short abstract:

Scientists dive in the Baltic Sea to study the environmental repercussions of marine heatwaves with an innovative underwater experiment. In this experiment, marine heatwaves are enacted as a spatial, temporal, and techno-material objects where different oceanic futures become engaged simultaneously.

Long abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic observations conducted at a marine zoological station in Southern Finland to detail how marine researchers scuba dive to study the effects of marine heatwaves in the Baltic Sea. With its low biodiversity and salinity levels, high pollution, relatively shallow average depth, and the numerous stagnating bays and coves, scientists claim, the Baltic Sea is a “time-machine,” a likely image of what the rest of the oceans will look like in the future. Based on a 100-year-old time series of seawater temperatures, researchers identified increasingly frequent marine heatwaves in the sea near their research station. Crucially, however, the time series did not provide any insights on potential ecological repercussions. The scientist-divers had to negotiate work underwater to setup a very innovative – yet quite precarious – in-situ experiment: They designed incubation chambers to be placed at the seafloor. Thanks to common household floor-heating technology, they simulated heatwaves inside the chambers and monitored bio-chemical processes through regular water sampling. The skills of scientific diving became entangled with the challenges of building underwater incubation chambers (Muka 2023) and maintaining them functional-while-submerged (Jue, 2020). Studying and making marine heatwaves apparent emerges as a temporal and techno-material problem, and as a spatial one too: The peculiar morphology of the Baltic generates micro-climates where water temperatures are regularly in excess of those reached during the heatwaves and of those simulated in the chambers. The experiment becomes a moment and a place where different oceanic futures become engaged simultaneously.