infrastructures and networks

I am very pleased to share the news of the recent publication of a wonderful collection of essays on infrastructure, of which I am part of, with an essay on pneumatic tubes.

The book is called Historicizing Infrastructure and is edited by Andreas Marklund and Mogens Ruediger. Andreas and Mogens organised the history of infrastructure conference at the Post and Tele Museum in Copenhagen that I wrote about in July and then October 2014. The presentations were so interesting they felt they had to compile a book.

Here is a short description of the contents of what they produced:

How does one handle a concept like ‘infrastructure’, which seems, simultaneously, so vague and yet heavily technical? In this international research volume, nine historians and cultural researchers from different academic institutions delve into the historical dimensions of infrastructural development. The interplay of infrastructures with society and its dominant political ideas and cultural beliefs is at the core of the analyses. A wide range of topics and historical contexts are covered by the book, from nineteenth-century railroads and territorial identities, and the sonic features of pneumatic tube systems, to privacy and security issues in relation to modern telecommunications, and the materiality of satellite television at the end of the Cold War.

I am so happy to be sharing the pages with these fascinating contributions and contributors! And Andreas and Mogens made working on this such a pleasure. My chapter is called "Sounds like infrastructure: Examining the materiality of pneumatic tube systems through their sonic traces". Here is my abstract for the chapter:

In the last few decades infrastructures have become increasingly visible in the social sciences, following a much longer engagement by historians. Recent anthropological work on infrastructure often adopts a practice-orientated approach, which focuses on the ways in which they are shaped through entangled material and social relations. In this paper I argue that such an approach can be strengthened by attention to the sensory and imaginative dimensions of infrastructure, which helps to articulate the vibrancy and fragility of such sociomaterial assemblages. I do so in order to suggest new methodological directions for the history of infrastructure. In order to illustrate my argument I use the case study of an infrastructure which once existed through large technical systems under city streets, and now is constructed on much smaller scales in buildings such as hospitals; pneumatic tube systems. Pneumatic tube systems highlight the durability of infrastructures over time. They are used nowadays to move materials which cannot be uploaded, scanned or printed; materials which come with traces of the personal, whether this is a piece of human tissue or trash. Following the practices of pneumatic tube systems ethnographically highlights the multisensory nature of infrastructures, which refuse to stay buried and quiet. Focusing particularly on sound, I look at examples of how sounds and listening practices signal infrastructures working smoothly as well as moments of breakdown and blockage. Working with infrastructures entails sonic skills, which becomes part of professional practice. I suggest that as well as making infrastructures more visible in our historical and anthropological engagements, we should also make them more audible. Often we tend to attribute sensory qualities to nature rather than technologies. Attending to the sensory dimensions of infrastructure however helps to understand more about their temporality and affects, which forwards our understanding of the role of infrastructural technologies in the modernization of society. In making this methodological plea, I suggest that sensory methods have as much relevance for historical studies as for the social sciences where they are more commonly used, and that both anthropology and history can learn from working closely alongside each other in their studies of the infrastructural arrangements of social life.

I would highly encourage you to buy the book, but if you are not able to but want to read the chapter, write to me and I can send you a copy of my piece.

99% pneumatic

In the midst of sorting out which podcasts I want to listen to during my late summer holidays, I thought I would share a recent one from a great site, 99% invisible, on the incredible pneumatic fish cannon - enjoy!

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fish-cannon/

Image from treehugger.

coping with demand

Pneumatic tubes made news recently in Montreal, as the system at the McGill University Health Centre suffered from an extremely high workload. CBC News reported that the tubes broke down repeatedly over the summer but that the system had now been tuned to cope with the amount of traffic passing through. It is during moments of breakdown that these infrastructures are made more visible, not only to hospital staff, but the public too; those hidden little doors and pipes that many barely even notice.

My thanks to Robert DeDomenico for permission to use his photos of a hospital pneumatic tube system in Vineland, New Jersey, US. Robert is the inventor of the innovative transport network for small loads that has resemblance to pneumatic tubes, CargoFish Physical Internet.

other autumn odours

It was perhaps the most stunning week I have ever spent in Paris. Late summer spreading into early autumn, gentle light and every day blue skies and 20 degrees. It was buttery toast weather, crisp, decadent, soft and delicious.

So where better to head than the damp, dark, pungent sewer system under Paris' pretty streets in search of pneumatic tubes?

As the last traces of light filtered behind us, my husband and I descended into the sewer museum of Paris, Musée des Égouts de Paris, where I had a sense we might find some traces of Paris' postal pneumatic network.

We were not the only ones seeking out Paris' infrastructural splendours that day - there was a father and his two daughters in front of us, father with clipboard in hand furiously taking notes, while the girls became increasingly bored; a young couple who sped through the museum at lightening speed; a group of Dutch tourists sleeves to their noses.



As we worked our way through the tunnels we found magnificent microbiological paintings, a gallery of living art. The cool limescale smell was gradually replaced by tendrils and whiffs of what one may expect from a working sewerage system and soon we encountered the flowing rivers under our feet, washing away the city's waste. But where were the tubes?

We looked everywhere, and in the dark, couldn't see them. But they were there all along, pointed out to us by the man selling postcards near the exit. We turned our flashes on and there was the sign, "Reseau Pneumatique: Pneumatic Network" modestly hung on a winding pipe.

We followed the pipes as far as we could, until we found their sawn-off ends. It was a little glimpse of that vast network that carried millions of petit bleus at its zenith. Just like 19th century tourists of the sewer system, we marvelled at these infrastructural wonders, now rusty and calcified. What will the tourists of the next generation visit - our underground fiber optical webs, another network hidden from view?

All images my own.

stock(holm) in the tubes

On Monday I had the pleasure of being a guest presenter at the Social Anthropology Department at Stockholm University, to talk about pneumatic tubes.

I was invited by Asta Vonderau who is doing exciting research on how "the cloud" is culturally imagined and socially negotiated and how it materialises in terms of environmental change. She does fieldwork in previously unexplored places such as the Facebook data centre.

Asta and I first met as fellow panelists of an infrastructure panel at last year's EASA conference in Tallinn. It was a great chance to talk about infrastructures again with her and to present my work on pneumatic tubes to her colleagues. There was an excellent discussion afterwards, about the materiality/immateriality of air, the status of engineers, the acoustic possibilities of considering the hospital as an instrument, the tubes as part of a body, how fiction plays out in engineers' practices, aesthetics and issues of contamination.

One researcher reminded me of Matt Novak's piece on the most Jetsonian of technologies. I reread it today and became intrigued by one of the images in the blog, of George arriving from a pneumatic tube journey:

I love how George's eyes trail behind him, a hint at some of the concerns of human pneumatic tube travel, that our bodies will change under the speed and pressure, that we will melt, coagulate, malform. Our bodies altered by technologies, as they always are.

Image from Matt Novak's blogpost.

from the point of view of a capsule

Some of you may have already seen a video doing the rounds this week through blogs, where a Go Pro video camera takes a ride through a Norwegian parliament pneumatic tube system:



It's not the first tube cam video, nor will I imagine it being the last. This video differs a little from the previously somewhat clunky smartphone videos which have been posted, giving some sense of not only the dizzying trip through the tubes, kind of like metallic endoscopy footage, but also the stops and starts, the turn arounds and switches. The fact that this is a tube system in parliament is interesting. More about that in upcoming posts. The video offers a glimpse of what we don't normally see: the inside of infrastructure, and the way the movement of objects is organised. We feel the pressure and effects of vacuum. And perhaps even a little about what life is like as a pneumatic tube capsule, whizzing from one station to the next.

For those readers interested in the possibilities of, and social consequences of Go Pro cameras, there is a great New Yorker article on the topic.

post-postal conference

I have been to interesting conference destinations before, but I think that the Post and Tele Museum in Copenhagen takes the cake. How often do you get to go down slides with your fellow delegates, in a room filled with giant postage stamps? Or see a pneumatic tube system in action!? (thanks Andreas)

I am speaking about the New Directions in the History of Infrastructure conference, that took place in the postal museum last month, hosted by Andreas Marklund and Mogens Rudiger. It was the kind of conference where your museum tour guide asks "who here collects stamps?" and a good proportion of the attendees raise their hands.

Over two and a half days, about 20 or so scholars interested in histories of infrastructure met to discuss their latest research. We heard about people smuggling, eavesdropping, sabotage, tinkering and past futures, in amongst talks on railways, the telegraph, metro systems, logistics, bicycle infrastructure and other large scale infrastructure projects. You can read the conference abstract here and see the program here.

It was one of those incredibly inspiring meetings where everyone was open to exchanging ideas during talks, lunches, dinners and coffees. I received good feedback from my talk and found out about even more wonderful uses of pneumatic tubes. As one of the only non-historians in the audience, I was warmly welcomed and loved learning more about the historical approach. I hope to keep in touch with many of the fascinating researchers I met during this workshop.

Images my own, from inside and on top of the Post and Tele Museum, Copenhagen.

cybernetic dreams and future archeologies

In July this year I will be joining other anthropologists in Tallinn, Estonia, to imagine infrastructures of the past, present and future. I am very excited that my paper on pneumatic tubes was accepted for the panel Infrastructure and imagination: Anthropocene landscapes, urban deep-ecology, cybernetic dreams and future-archeologies, at the 13th European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial Conference.

Juan Rojas Meyer and Roger Sansi, both in London, are organising the panel which will explore infrastructures as generative sites of ethnographic inquiry, and their potential to motivate the imagination. Topics of papers in the panel sound fascinating and include water supply in Africa and Nepal, waste treatment in Athens, the TransAdriatic Pipeline and clouds. Here is my abstract:

Pneumatic tubes: George Jetson used them to get to work, Antoine Doinel to send a love letter, and the Ministry of Truth to deliver history needing rewriting. These hidden labyrinths of pipes which transport matter by vacuum not only exist in the dreams of cartoonists, filmmakers and science fiction writers, but also engineers of the technological past, present and future. Once traversing the undergrounds of cities for postal delivery or depositing orders on the stock exchange, pneumatic tube networks are nowadays ever increasingly built into the walls, ceilings and basements of hospitals, banks and supermarkets. For despite digitisation, objects still need to be moved from one place to another. Counter intuitively, unlike many technologies of the past, pneumatic tube infrastructures have both changed very little over time and are being used in more contexts than ever before. With this paper I take session participants on a short subterranean tour of the intertwined past, present and future of pneumatic tubes. I examine the materials of this sociotechnical system; plastic capsules, brass buttons and air through which things pass. I look at bodily practices entailed in the manufacture, architectural design, everyday use and repair of the technology, including the adjustments which go to making it work. In Stoic philosophy, pneuma is "breath of life", the active and creative presence in matter. A study of pneuma-tic systems leads to bigger questions of how to consider the "pneumatic qualities" of infrastructures, the creativity that breathes life into the material world we live in.

Image of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Tallinn, Estonia from Wikipedia Commons.
See also: How to send Estonian vodka through the pneumatic internet, in Wired Magazine.

tubes: behind the scenes

Referencing the infamous Ted Stevens comment about the internet, Andrew Blum has written a book simply titled Tubes. 

The book may be of interest to some readers of this blog, not only for the title, but also because, according to the New York Times book review, it examines the materiality of technology. Here is a section from the book:

I have confirmed with my own eyes that the Internet is many things, in many places. But one thing it most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of tubes. There are tubes beneath the ocean that connect London and New York. Tubes that connect Google and Facebook. There are buildings filled with tubes, and hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and railroad tracks, beside which lie buried tubes. Everything you do online travels through a tube.

I haven't read the book but am intrigued, not only by Blum's pursuit of fibre cables, but also by another section of the book quoted in the book review, where Blum learns that the Internet in has a smell, "one he describes as 'an odd but distinctive mix of industrial strength air-conditioners and the ozone released by capacitors'". This reminds me of the smell of engine rooms I have visited to see the hub of pneumatic tube activity. So often the sensory dimensions of the internet are forgotten in the focus on the ephemeral and virtual, but this technology too, so this book promises to tell us, also has multisensory, material dimensions.

Thanks Andy for the link.