Local Date
29 August 2024Local Time
10:31Location
Hackney Downs, LondonCountry or Territory
United KingdomName
Sasha EngelmannSatellite
NOAA-19Radio Callsign
Archive ID
Today I am presenting in a panel on 'Open Geographies' at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference. I plan to speak briefly about the 'openness' in open-weather. For me, in addition to 'un black-boxing technology' or 'visceralising data' (d'Ignazio and Klein, 2020), the openness in open-weather may be about different dimensions of the ‘commons’. The late queer theorist Lauren Berlant describes a world that is, “intimately touching from near and far and therefore changing what proximity does” (Berlant, 2022: 99). I want to suggest that ‘the common of contact’ between a ground station operator and a satellite is both ‘intimate’ and ‘changing what proximity does’. Figuring this ‘common of contact’ leads to alternative and perhaps more thoroughly open readings of environment-sensing infrastructures and commons. It demonstrates how the effort of holding an antenna to the sky is built on a form of sociality and even desire, manifested in the collecting and caring-for of images otherwise considered faulty. Yet, lest I create a romantic picture of desiring bodies and machines - there is ample boredom, frustration and ambivalence too. Through repeated, modest, noisy contact with the technologies of earth observation, open-weather helps me envision a progressive politics of openness, one built on, in the words of Berlant, “affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire and the work of ambivalence as tactics of communing” (Berlant, 2022: 116).