Paper 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.

Paper 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.