Paper short abstract:

Sensors and streams of data reveal compositions of water flows under the streets of Jerusalem. They also reveal how safety intertwines with surveillance. What follows carries stories of transformed relations with water, where justice intervenes in the intimate spaces of imagination, affect, care.

Paper long abstract:

When water flows through the pipes underneath the city of Jerusalem, chemical traces are detected by sensors placed along the lines. Algorithms developed within the water quality team of the Jerusalem water utility monitor where chemical parameters cross standardised thresholds, alert to changes in water quality along the urban network. For a utility which claims to have the most sophisticated digital systems in its field, real-time water quality monitoring signals not just the potential to rapidly detect biochemical contamination, but the vanguard of a future for water management and public health in a time of ecological uncertainty. At the core of these efforts is a preoccupation with safety. Their consequences take on particular meaning in a city located in the wider context of occupation, where the surveillance of water – and its transformation into streams of data – connects with broader regimes of control. Through these links, water surveillance ricochets with trajectories of trauma which span pasts and present, global and hyper-local, and which conceal other less visible ways of keeping water safe, invoking realms beyond our world. Changing relations with water here reflect questions of justice on the hidden planes of the imagination, affect, and care. Attending to them exposes environmental urban politics that are otherwise eclipsed. Safety and surveillance intertwine in the informatics of urban water, cutting to the heart of what it takes to remain a resident of Jerusalem.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation explores how new ways of “seeing” are emerging at the interface of root science and computer vision, where artificial neural networks promise open software and faster image segmentation.

Paper long abstract:

An increasing interest in soil matters stems from growing anxiety related to food production, destruction of the soils, and the threat imposed by climate change (Puig de la Bellacasa 2019; Counihan et al. 2020). An emerging line of literature in the social sciences is dedicated to the development of new conceptualizations of soil (Krzywoszynska and Marchesi, 2020), as well as fostering alternative approaches to human-soil relationships. These attempts are often positioned as overcoming prevailing technoscientific visions, which are seen as a continuation of extractive and abusive relationships between humans and soil. Yet in soil ecology and related disciplines, the shift in understanding soil as a process opens up new combinations and relations, challenging not only existing ways of knowledge production but turning soils into a ground for testing and contesting relations yet to be established. Drawing on ethnographic material from an EU Marie-Curie international training network experiment based in Iceland, my case study examines how novel digital representation and analysis of plant roots are not only creating potentiality for emerging infrastructures but also clash with existing epistemes of "seeing" and knowing soils stabilized within the community of root ecologists, reconfiguring expectations towards big data approaches and machine analysis of images.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores 'industrial excess' through the convergence of two infrastructures: a district heating network and a Facebook datacenter. It points to how the use of server hot air to phase out of coal as fuel in a Danish city positions datacenters as industrial solution in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

In the city of Odense, Denmark, a hyperscale data center is converged with the local heating infrastructure that supports all kinds of buildings with hot water flowing into radiators and floors. The servers operating in the datacenter get hot while storing and processing messages, posts and images, and this hot air, also referred to as excess heat, is through pipes transported into the facilities of the publicly owned heating infrastructure. The server hot air is by the heating engineers turned to as a substitute to the coal that for a century has been a key fuel within the energy plant that supplies the heating network.

This paper draws on fieldwork with the heating engineers planning for and building the pipes, calculations and measurements to make the convergence work. It pays particular attention to the ways in which excess heat is engineered as usable waste from various industries, including Facebook. The convergence with the datacenter and its servers is used as a tool in meeting pollution targets that is motivated through Danish energy policy.

Industrial excess heat has been used for district heating for decades but one of the emerging changes for these infrastructures is how Big Tech corporations are trying to make their material excess useful. This is a moment of the datacenter industry shifting from not only being (extreme) energy consumers but also encroaching on public energy infrastructures in order to count as environmental solutions.