November 5, 𝟲𝗽𝗺 (CET), Via Zoom, no registration needed (see link below)
We are delighted to invite you to the tenth session of the Tele-Visions seminar for the 2024-2025 academic year! Join us as we hear from two distinguished speakers: Rahul Mukherjee (University of Pennsylvania), who will present a talk titled ‘Sensitive Mediations,’ and Matt Parker (University of Pennsylvania), who will share his insights in ‘En/counters with Quiet Zones.’ We look forward to an engaging session!
𝗝𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 – https://pantheonsorbonne.zoom.us/j/92052165070?pwd=JNb9K6XvayI3mKqdfEuaSZoy1hZ5gS.1
Rahul Mukherjee, Sensitive Mediations
In late 19th century, the biophysicist JC Bose devised instruments (such as the crescograph) that emitted and detected wireless signals (in the milli-meter wave range), and then recorded plant sensitivity to such electro-magnetic rays. Consider a historical leap of 125 years. Today, telecom company Reliance Jio’s agricultural technology sector has rolled out 5G IoT (Internet of Things) millimeter wave operating devices to measure plant responses including crop growth and soil moisture. Plant neurobiologists interested in understanding the complex sensorium of plants have revisited Bose’s work, as his particular emphasis on electrical signaling within plants has become key to contemporary neurobiology’s efforts to draw relations between information processing networks in plants and neuronal systems in animals. Taking this research one step further, some neurobiologists advocate for plants as optimum sensors and stress the value of understanding plant sensing for developing an efficient Internet of Things.
The recent move towards precision agriculture and smart forestry/smart agriculture, whether by Microsoft or by Jio is about collection of a lot of data through communication between plants and digital systems, which at one level, involves signals. Electromagnetic signals exceed (being merely) data, acquiring forms of energy and intensity that can cause bodily irritation and interference. These concerns about varied perceptions and differential bodily sensitivities to electromagnetic signals are integral to understanding environments created by the sensors and yet are often eschewed from (or co-opted into) the techno-optimistic discourses of efficiency and optimization that dominate discussions about sensor society.
Sensitive mediations involves figuring out the bio/electromagnetic terrain, which would need to attend to the entanglements of media, body, and environment multiplying sites of sensing and experiencing. Reframing Bose’s theories of plant sensitivity through Katherine Hayles’ ideas about “nonconscious cognition” allows for a continuum across human and nonhuman life-forms based on acts of interpretation and selection. While in some cases, sensitivity is equated to increased responsiveness and intelligence, ability to empathize and an openness to be transformed, in other cases, (hyper)sensitivity becomes pathological, a condition marked by irritability and frustration. Hayles’s ideas are often invoked to study the dimension of information processing within computational media—that is, how human cognitive capacities can be plugged into wider distributed cognitive networks. By bringing Hayles’s work in conversation with Bose’s theories, I am suggesting that electromagnetic signals help us consider infra-information, which refuses to be only data.
Rahul Mukherjee is Associate Professor of TV and New Media and Graduate Chair in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the logistical and environmental dimensions of digital infrastructures and platforms. Rahul is the author of Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (DUP, 2020). He is presently completing his second book Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (to be published with MIT Press, Fall 2025). His essays have been published in journals like Critical Inquiry, Science, Technology & Human Values, and Journal of Visual Culture, and in edited collections such as Saturation: An Elemental Politics, Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global, and Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations. Rahul is currently working on two projects: the use of “alternative data” in fintech (loan app decision-making) and discourses around IoT-based agriculture monitoring systems.
Matt Parker, En/counters with Quiet Zones
A triple revolution of the internet, mobile media, and social network sites has brought the world to an unprecedented technological and social state of ‘superconnection’ argues sociologist Mary Chayko. What are the liminal spaces on the edges of superconnection? How might we encounter the thresholds of data stream saturation? When Low Earth Orbit satellite systems such as Starlink promise the remote regions of the Amazon Rainforest access to high-speed internet, what space is left for countering the litany of electromagnetic signals that make up the digital technical and wireless world? Are there any quiet zones left?
The “zones of silence” concept encompasses literal and metaphorical spaces where voices, experiences, or phenomena are suppressed or disregarded. Paying attention to these zones is essential because they often conceal power dynamics, inequality, and neglect. These are spaces where marginalized voices, natural processes, or imperceptible phenomena such as electromagnetic waves may remain unnoticed, leading to distorted understandings of technology, the environment, and landscapes. This presentation advocates for an attentive approach to “quiet zones,” environments existing at the threshold of silence and noise, particularly within the context of radiant infrastructures and other electromagnetic technologies. By amplifying the quiet, I argue, we can uncover underlying structures that influence our world.
When thinking critically about the relationship between technology, landscape, and the environment, practices of sound and listening afford several engaging perspectives. As a sound studies scholar and practicing artist, I work with vibration as a critical medium. I am interested in thresholds, liminality, and practices of transduction between one form of energy and another. I am interested in how we might think about listening to the material affects of superconnection, and where we might find its blurry edges.
This presentation will provide an overview of my work as a sound artist exploring electromagnetic thresholds and quiet zones. It will define quiet zones and explain how sound studies can offer unique perspectives on the intersection of electromagnetic space. Additionally, it will discuss how communities of resistance counter these phenomena. I will also explore the work of other artists who have engaged in critical research on encounters with and counters to radiant infrastructures in the world.
Matt Parker is a critical sound explorer; an artist researching the resonances between things. His multimedia works are influenced by the practice of listening; to unsound vibratory ecologies and the economies of noise. His research engages with sound studies, media ecology, field recording, and environmental humanities through a spectral art practice. His current book project, En/Counters with Wavefields: How Landscapes Become Stories of Technology, is nearly finished, but he’s been saying that for over a year now. Matt is currently the Gilbert Seldes Multimodal Postdoctoral Fellow in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the director of the media infrastructural investigative collective The People’s Cloud.
𝗩𝗶𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹: BT North Sea (Iceni) Cable Landing – Winterton on Sea, UK (2017). Image Credit: Carol Parker