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Signals and oil Satellite footprints and post-communist territories in Central Asia
Abstract
This article examines the strategies of two satellite operators working across post-communist territories of Central Asia: Eutelsat and Kazsat. To do so it develops a critical approach called footprint analysis, which involves investigating the variety of practices that occur within range of a given satellite's service. Satellites have been used in post-communist territories to circulate broadcast and telecommunication signals, facilitate flows of capital and reshape geographic imaginaries. In addition, satellites have become orbital platforms for the Caspian's booming oil industry. Satellites are used to support everything from surveying oil fields to monitoring drilling operations, from construction of oil rigs to the maintenance of pipelines. The article sets out to develop a model of analysis which can account for the more 'cultural' uses of satellites (i.e. for broadcasting) in relation to their more 'extractive' uses (i.e. for natural resource development).
... Such writings point to an emerging interest in understanding imperceptible, invisible infrastructures from satellite footprints to undersea fibre optic cables that are critical to the global network society (see Starosielski 2015). These wireless and wired networks are resolutely material and represent infrastructural and geopolitical interests (see Parks 2009). Satellite-based valuations of both territory and resources in any given country highlight the power of these institutions and it is therefore unsurprising that a country like India with its own geospatial ambitions has taken umbrage at mapping and imagery generated by google and other platforms. ...
... A singular case of mapping infrastructures, the central role of the cart-module highlights a significant dimension of the agriculture put into play: agriculture was being broadcast over these extensions. Following the work of Lisa Parks (2005;2009;, broadcasting can be understood as a technologized practice that results in the establishment of signal territories; that is, territories that are both culturally and materially transformed by the presence of specific signals. Within this inner colonisation, the design of the cart-modules abstracted the daily flows of farmers and water streams as periodic signals whose extent was calculated beforehand. ...
Recent studies of creative labor have stirred up a discussion about the most appropriate theoretical framework for studying it: is creative labor a brute form of oppression? Or does it rather generate new and multiple subjectivities? Does creative labor subject the workers to a regime of self-discipline and governmentality? Or does it have purely positive features that cannot be reduced to compensatory mechanisms? Discussion of the accuracy of the different approaches still needs to be better grounded in empirical research. In particular, what is missing in the emergent work on creative labor is insight into non-Western creative workers’ identities and working conditions. This paper addresses both the good and bad aspects of creative labor in a post-socialist audiovisual industry. Based on twenty-four in-depth interviews with Czech television reporters and screenwriters, I aim to address the following questions: What kind of experiences do creative jobs in a post-socialist audiovisual industry offer their workers? What makes these workers’ labor good and bad? How and to what extent are the good and bad aspects of creative labor narratively linked to the post-socialist context? The findings suggest that while screenwriters’ and TV reporters’ forms of precarity vary, their
work is still marked both by a post-1989 sense of rupture in funding and professional ideologies and through continuity in modes of production. In the audiovisual professionals’ narratives, the post-socialist context appears as an idealization of the West and of liberalism, yet also features discontent about the state’s deficiencies, great uncertainty, the fragmentization and instrumentalization of media industries, a specific sense of humour, and also, provincialism. Importantly, I argue that both the types of audiovisual professionals perform extensive emotional labor which resides in the carefully measured immersion in (as well as detachment from) their work. By illustrating that and how the audiovisual workers’ professional identities are inherently ambivalent and by bringing in the concept of emotions, this paper seeks to further de-Westernize the research of creative labor and broaden the debate on the good and bad work in creative industries.
In this paper, the coupled performance of both visual apparatus and infrastructures on the ground will be considered from what Eva Horn has called a ‘medial a priori’: the “assemblages or constellations of certain technologies, fields of knowledge, and social institutions” (Horn 8) that become the conditions of possibility of processes, transformations or events. A medial a priori consisting of “discourse networks, cultural techniques and formations of knowledge” (Siegert The map is the territory 15) that, in the broadest sense, goes even beyond the technical assemblages, to deal with the flows of energy and matter that give rise to them. In this vein, the interweaving of operations of light that gives rise to the seeded and the seen steps into what Jussi Parikka has framed as an alternative deep time of media, where “any consideration of media should start not from media but outside it” (Earth Volumes 124).
After the euphoria of gaining independence settles down, the elites of each new sovereign country inevitably stumble upon the challenges of building a viable state. The inexperienced governments soon venture into unfamiliar territory when they have to formulate foreign policy or when they try to forge beneficial economic ties with foreign investors. What often proves especially difficult is the process of redefining the new country’s relationship with its old colonial ruler or federation partners.
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"Splintering Urbanism offers a path-breaking analysis of the nature of the urban condition at the start of the new millennium. Adopting a global and interdisciplinary perspective, it reveals how new technologies and increasingly privatised systems of infrastructure provision - telecommunications, highways, urban streets, energy, and water - are supporting the splintering of metropolitan areas across the world. The result is a new 'socio-technical' way of understanding contemporary urban change, which brings together discussions about:
* globalisation and the city
* the urban and social effects of new technology
* urban, architectural and social theory
* social polarisation, marginalisation and democratisation
* infrastructure, architecture and the built environment
* developed, developing and post-communist cities."
The metaphor of trade routes - used from time to time to think about the distribution of ideas and imagery - ought to nourish our conception of transnational paths of delivery of electronic communications. Our minds are full of Rupert Murdoch and Disney, CNN and the BBC as traders in information, great shippers of data, distributors of sitcoms and news and advertisements. In the common reading of the world of electronic signals, the media is considered "global," and the general impression is of a constant and ever-present net that can deposit information everywhere, disregarding boundaries. Our common and most recent experiences with the Internet seem, at first blush, to confirm and underscore a belief that data careers around the world from server to server, in patterns that seem virtually impervious to purposive planning or political and legal intervention (Volokh, 1995). Sender and receiver are linked in ways that appear indifferent to the route or mode by which they are connected. The obsolescence of boundaries is reinforced. So, too, has been the effect of the seamlessness of telephony in the developed world, obliterating distance and time. In telephony, transmission pathways seem invisible, or at least irrelevant, to the substantive decisions of most users. Although users are almost never conscious of it, all these modes of communication (postal service, telegrams and telephones) required the construction of international systems of regulation. Assurance of adherence to worldwide standards was a condition for their instantaneous nature and compatibility. The predominance of the West in terms of development and control of access to technology dictated the change in structure of international communication, putting pressure on non-Western members to Westernize, in order to comply with the prevailing system's bureaucratic rules.
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