demilit

[demilit]

AAG 2015 Chicago: Bases, Bunkers and Ports

2015 Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois

Session Description: In two paper sessions, we bring together innovative scholarship on contemporary forms of militarization which foregrounds, analytically, the spatialities of securitization, surveillance, and violence. In particular, we hope to develop, as analytical lenses, several key spatial nodes in the process of militarization and the production of violence; thus: bases, bunkers and ports. Far from fixed categories or easily controlled spaces, we provisionally theorize "bases, bunkers, and ports" as dense sites through which militarization — as a contested process— takes material shape. These sessions also take place in conjunction with others centered on Policing, Racialization, Empire, and Militarization (or the acronym, PREM).

Sponsorship(s): Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group

Organizer(s): Lindsey Dillon - UC Berkeley Javier Arbona - UC Davis 

1539 PREM - Bases, Bunkers and Ports I: Technology and Publics Tuesday, 4/21/2015, 2:40 PM - 4:20 PM in Atlanta, Hyatt, West Tower, Gold Level Chair(s): Javier Arbona - UC Davis Abstract(s): 2:40 PM   Introduction: Lindsey Dillon - UC Berkeley & Javier Arbona - UC Davis 3:00 PM   Author(s): *Javier Arbona - UC Davis Abstract Title: The Oakland Security Cloud: A Public Imagination of Surveillance

3:20 PM   Author(s): *Ian Shaw - The University of Glasgow Abstract Title: The Homeland is the Battlefield

3:40 PM   Author(s): *Jason Dittmer - University College London Abstract Title: Transnational militarism: Everyday diplomacies of interoperability in NATO 1639 PREM - Bases, Bunkers and Ports II: Airpower Tuesday, 4/21/2015, 4:40 PM - 6:20 PM in Atlanta, Hyatt, West Tower, Gold Level

Chair(s): Lindsey Dillon - UC Berkeley 

Abstract(s): 4:40 PM   Author(s): *Jeremy Crampton - University of Kentucky *Susan M. Roberts - University Of Kentucky Abstract Title: Drone Economies: The Emergence of Drones from the Military 5:00 PM   Author(s): *Caren Kaplan - UC Davis Abstract Title: Air Power at Home: Continuities of Aerial Policing 5:20 PM   Author(s): *Hillary Mushkin - California Institute of Technology Abstract Title: Lines of Sight 5:40 PM   Author(s): *Katherine Chandler - Georgetown University Abstract Title: Unmanning Reconnaissance: Aerial Images, Global Surveillance and National Protection in the United States, 1945-1962

[demilit]

MAR 28 – Variable World: San Francisco Bay Model Tour

On March 28th AVANT.org will host a day-long program of critical history and analysis, tracing development and influence of simulation on our perception of the future. The program will begin with a ranger tour of the San Francisco Bay Model constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1957, followed by a salon and archival film screening at Headlands Center for the Arts where we will discuss unrealized futures and current research in the field of simulation. Curated by Chris Woebken (Extrapolation Factory) and Javier Arbona (Demilit) with accompanying essays to be published on AVANT.org. We also welcome guests to join us on a bike ride from the Bay Model in Sausalito to Headlands Center, though a car will be available to take a limited number from Sausalito if they decide to arrive by bus or ferry. Schedule: noon - b.y.o. picnic planned (weather permitting), more info soon. 1 pm - Bay Model Tour in Sausalito **Please arrive 15m early to start on time** 3 pm - Salon at the Headlands Center

https://www.facebook.com/events/740395329411618/741882219262929/

[demilit]

Ghost in the Wall

Join @soundscrapers/Nick at What Design Sounds Like — A Design Observer Symposium on Sound and Visual Culture, Saturday February 21, 2015 — School of Visual Arts Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, New York City. Admission is Free. 

Nick will be in conversation with Geoff Manaugh/@bldgblog, presenting recent installation "Ghost in the Wall," executed w/ compositions by @Subtopes. 

http://wdsl.designobserver.com/

http://www.soundscrapers.com/

http://subtopia.blogspot.com/

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

[demilit]

November 21st: on Surveillance and Space, at the Oakland Museum

Javier is giving a pop-up talk at the OMCA on the architecture of surveillance: 

http://museumca.org/2014/pop-talk-javier-arbona

http://aljavieera.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/november-21st-on-surveillance-and-space-at-the-oakland-museum/

Friday, November 21, 2014, 7–7:30 pm Join geographer and artist Javier Arbona for a brief talk in the Gallery of California History. Arbona will discuss infrastructure and surveillance in the port city of Oakland.

Using a foreboding downtown telecommunications building as jumping-off point, he will make connections between the long history of the telegraph in Oakland and state surveillance in our midst today.

This in-Gallery pop-up talk takes place during Friday Nights @ OMCA, featuring Off the Grid food trucks, live music, and more.

Included with Museum admission. During Friday Nights @ OMCA, from 5 to 9 pm, admission is half-price for adults, free for ages 18 and under. Admission for OMCA Members is always free.

[demilit]

Bases, Bunkers, and Ports: Shifting Geographies of Militarization

[CFP link]

[please circulate widely!] AAG 2015 CFP:

Bases, Bunkers, and Ports: Shifting Geographies of Militarization

In her article, “Making War at Home in the United States,” Catherine Lutz defines the term "militarization" as "the simultaneously material and discursive nature of military dominance" (Lutz 2002). She further argues that militarization describes a tense process through which societies organize the production of violence. Yet rather than straight-forward or uncontested, as the exercise of military power is often depicted, this process is often contradictory, unstable, and actively challenged.

As events in Ferguson, Missouri, during the past year demonstrated, painfully, militarization is also “intrinsic to the political and economic operations of modern nation-states” (Kaplan 2011). Ongoing forms of surveillance and the securitization of ports, urban spaces, and other sites/sights in the U.S. and throughout the world reveal further instances of the militarized foundations of everyday life. Upon closer scrutiny, projections of security against abstract, foreign enemies elsewhere often turn out to be precisely focused on up-close dissent. Furthermore, the militarization of information (biometrics, big data, and such) constitutes another way in which everyday life is increasingly structured by (while also structuring) projects of “security”. These emergent geographies of militarization and their histories call for sustained scholarly investigation.

  This paper session seeks to bring together innovative scholarship on contemporary forms of militarization, at the material and discursive registers, and which foreground, analytically, the spatialities of securitization, surveillance, and violence. In particular, we hope to develop, as analytical lenses, several key spatial nodes in the process of militarization and the production of violence; thus: bases, bunkers and ports. Far from fixed categories or easily controlled spaces, we provisionally theorize “bases, bunkers, and ports” as dense sites through which militarization — as a contested process— takes material shape.

  In addition to more traditional scholarly methods and analysis, the paper session also seeks artists, activists, journalists, and authors; modes of art, research, and creative critique which, along with the discipline of geography, has worked to expose the everydayness of militaritarization. Along these lines, this session encourages scholarship that examines aesthetics, visuality, and in particular, contestations of militarization. For example, what representations have “bases, bunkers, and ports” elicited and what sorts of temporal ruptures, countermeasures, or social transformations do they propose?

  Possible paper topics for this session include:

- The spatialities of new surveillance technologies (e.g. data servers, fusion centers, air/space/coastal port surveillance, etc.)

- Race, biometrics, and “digital epidermalization” (Browne 2010)

- The militarization of U.S. law enforcement, and biopolitics of cities

- Geographies of detention, incarceration, migration, and rights

- Militarized environments, toxic cleanup sites, and the “weaponization of nature” (Hamblin 2013)

- Military humanitarianism, human terrain systems, and the role of academia in military knowledge and optics

- Modes of representing and visualizing militarization in art and literature

- Visual cultures of militarization; scopic regimes and visibility/visuality under militarization

- Spaces of (il-)legality, protests, and gazes of security

- Cartographic or counter-cartographic practices

- Monuments and military memorialization; the spatial politics of memory and forgetting

  Note: This paper session takes place in conjunction with a speaker series on militarization through the American Studies Program and the Militarization Studies Group at UC Davis in the Spring Quarter of 2014. We are particularly interested in working with scholars hoping to develop their paper as a journal article or book, as part of a collected, broader publication on these themes.

  Please email an abstract and short (2-page CV) to Javier Arbona (jarbona@ucdavis.edu) and Lindsey Dillon (lldillon@ucdavis.edu) by Friday, October 10th (the deadline for AAG abstracts is November 10th). Thank you!

  Please email an abstract and short (2-page CV) to Javier Arbona (jarbona@ucdavis.edu) and Lindsey Dillon (lldillon@ucdavis.edu) by Friday, October 10th (the deadline for AAG abstracts is November 10th). Thank you!

  Citations

  Browne, Simone. "Digital epidermalization: race, identity and biometrics."Critical Sociology 36, no. 1 (2010): 131-150.

  Hamblin, Jacob Darwin. Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Oxford University Press, 2013.

  Kaplan, Caren. "The Balloon Prospect: Aerostatic Observation and the Emergence of Militarized Aeromobility." In From Above: War, Violence, and Verticality. Adey, Peter, Mark Whitehead, and Alison Williams, eds. London: Hurst, 2013: 19-40.

Lutz, Catherine. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 723–35. 

[CFP link]

[demilit]

We got TouchOSC working nicely with the Sonodek last night from our phones, tweaked and toggled some very noirish audio-visual loops, a new narrative emerged... 

[demilit]

On a recent afternoon meandering through Oakland's security industrial cloud, Bryan Finoki discusses the OPD's range of secretive surveillance devices that keeps all notions of "public" contained within the shadow of the Sheriff's badge.

(Photo by Ben Valentine, Exposing Our Infrastructure: MacroCity Conference Reveals the Secret Machinery of Cities - Core77) 

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DEMILIT's tour made the relationships between all of these systems of power, infrastructure, and urban design blatantly obvious. The most visible aspects of our country's surveillance ecosystem, the security cameras and police cars, are merely one small aspect of a much larger ecology of which we can barely see. While in the Rotunda Building housing the DHS offices, we were not allowed to photograph anything. The security apparatus is designed to be opaque, and while I'd argue the Snowden revelations have shown the level of secrecy has gone much too far, the invisibility of other infrastructures is equally alarming.

Ben Valentine, Exposing Our Infrastructure: MacroCity Conference Reveals the Secret Machinery of Cities - Core77

[demilit]

Oakland Security Cloud bibliography

Thanks everyone who came to our MacroCity walk in Oakland! We'll continue charting and investigation this geography, but for now, here is a selected bibliography that helped prepare this tour, as a PDF...

And our final walk map, left in Oakland for other people to explore...

See you soon!

[demilit]

Podcast — A Weaponized Urbanity: Morning Drift in Militarized Downtown Oakland

On an average, sunny day in Oakland, we took a walk to discuss the commonplace securitization of the downtown environment. "We observe objects and spaces that are produced by securitarian logic that often attempt to dissimulate their function by an aesthetic of the ordinary."

Thanks to Léopold Lambert for having us as guests on Archipelago: The Funambulist podcast. We're in great company! And congrats on the new Graham grant for more extensive travels and interviews!

The embedded audio is above, but best to enjoy with the whole collection of photos and maps here. itunes link here.

[demilit]

Ice Curtain: The End of Victory

A Proposal for a Monument to Cold War Victory by DM³, 2012-2014.

The Cold War’s victory lies in its ghostly perpetuity throughout society. Its revanchism emerges in paranoid bodies, furtive double takes on crevasses of public space, and fears of fallout burning one’s insides. Augmenting these feelings of uncertainty, a clandestine monument to Cold War victory sprouts from the north pole ice sheet as if seeded by atomic dust blowing in an Arctic wind—a new border wall that divides safety and danger, known and unknown.

Ice Curtain is a terrestrial telescope through which to peer at the many faces of the prohibited. Rare visitors who actually find this monument stare through the thin veils of dry ice, deep past the murky sheets of the Cold War's walls, to look upon a terrain of classified intelligence. Beyond these numb distortions what one might get is a fleeting breath of a secret history. Ice Curtain is a meditative encounter with the truths and non-truths buried in the Cold War’s marbled obscurity. This icebound barricade is a symbolic looking glass into the refractory clandestine afar—meant to ponder the spatial opacity of the Cold War's political wake, still unfurling its infrastructure of smoke and mirrors today, still haunting from its historic precipice.

Somewhere on a tenuously-determined continental edge, quietly in danger from the legacies of global climate change, cast in the sights of private satellites monitoring ongoing border conflicts where the Cold War, in fact, is still fought, a longitudinal sinew unravels as a walkable panoramic looking glass to gaze at the Cold War’s persistent black-sited history, framed in the architecture of a classic separation barrier.  Upon this surface, solid yet unstable—obstinate but in constant motion—pale imaginaries of these secret histories are conjured in a new scopic regime forged within this glass wall's frozen gaze. The monument acts as both mirror and archive where all covertness of the Cold War will be melted down into a single pool of memory, once climate change and geopolitical conflict drags the Ice Curtain down.

Water and ice here symbolize the veils of secrecy and the liquidity of truth that we must wade through to find clarity in this spectral past, to capture traces of the unseen as they can be reduced to a new surface, and brought to light over the glacial purity of the whitest landscape. Ice Curtain glimpses and traces the government’s shadowy covert landscape frozen in time, where the Cold War’s victory remains lodged as a neverending wager over a black and white world.  

The melting of the wall dissolves the nature of this secrecy, unmoors its trapped truths, and returns the border to lucid amorphousness. Somewhere squirming towards a level surface, sonic ice worms of the clandestine’s echo resound in a warning siren played from an apex where no one can hear, until all is made water again.

-DM

download, share or remix: https://archive.org/details/ICEWALLARCHIVE

[demilit]

Military Abstractions: The Hidden Architecture of State Secrecy

Geographer and urban theorist Javier Arbona will give a public talk entitled “Military Abstractions: The Hidden Architecture of State Secrecy” at 6:30 pm on Tuesday, March 25, in room 101 of the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Reno. This event is sponsored by the Gender, Race, and Identity Program and the Departments of English, Geography, and History.

Arbona’s talk will address the visual appearance of the state in everyday life, focusing on the visual signatures of state secrecy. The architecture of state secrecy, he argues, often hides in plain sight. He will discuss techniques for capturing the movement of the state in a historical moment marked both by the ubiquity of imaging technologies and increasing disquiet and skepticism about their reach. [read more]

Details:

Date: Tuesday, March 25

Time: 6:30PM 

Location: Reynolds School of Journalism, room 101, 

University of Nevada, Reno

[Google calendar link]

**Thanks to the sponsorship from the Gender, Race, and Identity Program and the Departments of English, Geography, and History. Special thanks to Gautam Premnath for the invitation and opportunity to discuss ideas in his seminar.

[demilit]

...presenting at Timing is Everything, University Art Gallery, UCSD, 2014. Photo by John Hanacek.

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(Ex-?) Pentagon DARPA in-house hacker Mudge paraphernalia.

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Round Two for DARPAHigh?

DARPA is back with part two of MENTOR, the program that brings makerspaces —and the Pentagon— into high schools. In their own words:

"DARPA's Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach Two (MENTOR2) program aims to improve defense readiness by improving the secondary school and post-secondary school education of those who will be called on to utilize, maintain, and adapt high technology systems in low technology environments. MENTOR2 will achieve this goal by developing and demonstrating new teaching tools and materials in the fields of electromechanical design and manufacturing. It is envisioned that project based curricula employing MENTOR2 design and prototyping tools can teach a deeper understanding of high technology systems, and better enable future competence in the maintenance and adaptation of such systems through the manufacture of as-designed components or the design and manufacture of new components."

No word yet on how the first round of MENTOR went. The past iteration of "DARPA High" created waves in the hacker world, perhaps most famously with Mitch Altman's vocal opposition to military funding for hackers. At the time, Tim O'Reilly (whose organization Make Magazine and Makerfaire received funding) wrote that 

@snifty the kids neither know nor care where the funding is coming from. Besides, DARPA is a force for good in the world.

— Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) February 19, 2012

No word at all about the children's personal records that the Pentagon would presumably be able to scope. No clue if any of the students did ask questions about the funding or what the military does. One to keep a close eye on...

Previously: http://demilit.tumblr.com/search/darpa

[demilit]

thenewcityreader: Issue 03—Puzzles

[demilit]

MIX: Sismografo Series Vol 12 by Acoustic Mirror