the geography of the rings of Saturn

From W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn:

The small propeller plane that services the route from Amsterdam to Norwich first climbed toward the sun before turning west. Spread out beneath us lay one of the most densely-populated regions in Europe, with endless terraces, sprawling satellite towns, business parks and shining glass houses which looked like large quadrangular ice floes drifting across this corner of the continent where not a patch is left to its own devices. Over the centuries the land had been regulated, cultivated, and built on until the whole region was transformed into a geometrical pattern. The roads, water channels and railway tracks ran in straight lines and gentle curves past fields and plantations, basins and reservoirs. Like beads on an abacus designed to calculate infinity, cars glided along the lanes of the motorways, while the ships moving up and down river appeared as if they had been halted for ever. Embedded in this even fabric lay a manor surrounded by its park, the relic of an earlier age. I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals. Along a line that seemed to have been drawn with a ruler a tractor crawled through a field of stubble, dividing it into one lighter and one darker half. Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea. (pages 90-92)

Since the spring semester let out last week, I have been re-reading my favorite of Sebald's works, for the first time since 2004. Returning to this unique novel-travelogue-plus-plus with the geographic perspectives brought on by spending the last five years spent studying geography in graduate school, I wonder if all I am doing in my own work is attempting to take apart this long quote I typed out above. We have multiple, interconnected human and natural landscapes seen or imagined from a perspective of aerality, transportation infrastructures, networked ecologies, information flows, commodities, all tied together in space, in the absence of the human inhabitants.

fiber along the road

Automobiles turning, the fiber optic cable runs parallel to the road. Marlton Pike West, in the Garden State. That little white and orange marker in front of the "SO Cornell Ave -->" and "ALL TURNS -->" signs indicates the Internet and other forms of digital communication are flowing alongside the automotive and pedestrian traffic on this route.

pelton wheels

Sierra foothills. December 2010. The one in the foreground is around three feet wide and maybe twenty five feet in diameter.

Invisible Infrastructure: Hertzian Space and Digital Flows of Philadelphia

AT&T Communication's Building at 500 South 27th St., from the South Street Bridge.

For those of you in or nearby Philadelphia, the Grid/Flow conference at Temple University takes place this Thursday and Friday, April 7 and 8 (schedule here). Admission is free; the organizers have culled a diverse group of scholars together for conference and it will be an interesting, worthwhile event. I feel it is also important to support these sort of interdisciplinary conferences at Temple University--they bring a dynamism to the campus that is not often present. I will be giving a talk in the 2:30 to 5:00 session on Friday on the infrastructure of mobile communication; below is the abstract I submitted, Invisible Infrastructure: Hertzian Space and Digital Flows of Philadelphia:

The transformation of nature into culture that is continuously producing the contemporary urban landscape occurs through infrastructure.  Modern infrastructural networks—water, electricity, transportation, and communication—course below and above the street-level grid of a city such as Philadelphia, providing the support structures for urban life.  A conceptualization of Philadelphia is not complete without considering these metabolic systems that transform the natural environment into the urban.  While not as vital to everyday urban life as water or electricity networks, telecommunication systems are a vital component of the urban environment. As telecommunication has become untethered to place via mobile, digital technologies such as the cellular phone and the Internet, a new layer of privatized infrastructure has spread throughout the city. These globally networked infrastructural systems of the information society are engaged with via the devices that the end-user holds, such as a mobile phone, while the physical infrastructure remains in the background, effectively invisible.  Bringing these digital communication infrastructures forward, and situating them within the larger, networked urban infrastructure systems of Philadelphia, is a way to ground the material and immaterial flows of digitized information that are central to our networked society.  This presentation will utilize photography and mapping techniques to illustrate the place of digital communication infrastructure within the larger context of Philadelphia's urban environment.  It will highlight the connection this digital communication infrastructure has with earlier forms of transportation infrastructure, seen in, for instance the running of fiber-optic cables along railroad track right-of-ways, putting the digital flows of the information economy in the same location as the material flows of the industrial city.  These digital flows create a hertzian space that effectively commodifies the ether surrounding the air we breathe, transforming a basic component of urban nature into a vessel for a privatized telecommunication network.

AT&T's building at 500 S. 27th St. through an iPhone on the AT&T network. The Grid/Flow presentation will include a case study on this facility.

homeless camp, broadband fiber optic lines

Underneath Chestnut Street, on Schuylkill Banks. Philadelphia.

Long-haul, interurban broadband fiber-optic lines are often buried alongside railroad tracks; their presence is typically indicated with a white plastic post with a orange or black top that will say "Do not dig here" and "Property of ___ Corp."  We as the end user on a computer or smartphone do not have or need to know what places the data is traveling through to get between our screens and the servers that house the website we are using, but the digital data is moving through space, buried under these markers. In the photo above that I took on late morning Tuesday, there is a small homeless dwelling situated alongside one of these fiber cable markers. Does the inhabitant know what he or she is sleeping on top of? Do they have a mobile phone to access the digital infrastructure that is passing directly beneath them? In this space of motion--information, railroad, and automotive above on Chestnut Street, this temporary camp was situated. This becomes an urban juxtapositions of life in the network society.

reinforced riverbank

The Seine's channelized riverbank. Winter 2008.

exposed

Lower Manhattan.

the remains of some digital infrastructure

A stack of discarded servers sitting on the loading dock of 500 South 27th St. in Philadelphia, a large, regional AT&T telecommunications facility. This loading dock sits directly below the sidewalk approach onto the new South Street Bridge. This equipment, waiting to be discarded, indicates that something goes on here, even if very little activity is visible. Rarely are workers to be seen inside the building or outside on the grounds. This building is very interesting in its brick, bunkered anonymity. It has no entrance visible from the street, few windows, and no signage other than an AT&T sign on the roof, visible from the South Street Bridge but not the sidewalk. At the same time, this site is a regional connection point for AT&T's mobile phone networks. Connecting people, in this instance, occurs in a space disconnected from its neighbors, a walled off fortress that is integral in producing and maintaining mobile connectivity.

a channelized riverbank on the Seine, Paris.

"quai quai" Winter 2008.

redirecting the water supply onto the streets

38th and Woodlands Walk. UPenn, just east of West PHL.

What happens when water infrastructures fail? In this case, late this morning, 38th St turns into a small river, traffic stops flowing, and everyone stops to watch. Apparently a 20 inch water main broke. All this water diverted out of the Schuylkill River to supply Philadelphia with drinking water, filtered for potability, now returning to the Schuylkill. Note in the foreground of both pictures all the gravel--the water flowing out of the broken main has effectively formed a small, curbside beach for the time being.