Spillcam
Leaks have the ability to ‘make visible’. The day 22 April 2010 saw the culmination of many leaks into a seemingly singular catastrophe. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico resulted in an oil leak that flowed for eighty-seven days. After concerns that BP was withholding data on the status of the well, the company was compelled to livestream a video feed of the leak. Visual evidences of leaks become opportunities to witness dynamics that often elude us – the ecological toll of capitalism, the banality of disaster in late modernity and the lack of accountability of private enterprise. Here, we can recognize how leaks are not always isolated occurrences, but also means through which we can trace certain flows. Sprung leaks are often indications of poorly functioning systems – they can call into question an entire network of pipelines, flows and currents. But just as often leaks function as part of ‘business as usual’. In the contemporary moment, we are inundated with leaks: whether information leaks or material leaks. These leaks can turn our attention towards the political implications of negligence and the maintenance of conditions of disrepair. This chapter contemplates how leaks are implicated in flows of capital, power and people, and asserts that visualizations of leaking can make evident an imperial logic that, while sometimes operating covertly, always leaks out of the cracks, joints and seams of the power-maintaining structures.
Leak Morphologies
A leak is an emission of contents through a barrier intended to contain–it could imply a disruption to a given flow, a rupture through, a breaking free of contents from form. The potential of leaks can be traced through biological processes, metaphors of leaky vessels, slips of the tongue, and leaked direct messages, to name just a few. These leaks are certainly not the same, their meanings and value shift along with their contents, their boundaries, and their modes of escape. In spite of this ambivalence, leaks seem knowable through their documented definitions and conventional use. Until the nineteenth century the leak was typically wet (at least in English word use). As new incontinences developed, and leakiness threatened a whole host of forms, somehow leaks remained wet…
REVIEW: Nature’s Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis
Building on his longstanding engagement with the cultural politics of time, Paul Huebener’s Nature’s Broken Clocks posits temporality as a profound lens for engaging ecocritical thought. In advocating for cross-disciplinary ecocritical time studies, Huebener asserts that environmentalist thinking demands engagement with numerous temporalities that entangle nature and culture in complex and dynamic ways. To these ends, Nature’s Broken Clocks refutes static concep- tions of time and rather contends that varying measures and experiences of time are implicated across ecologies.
Leaks appear within and in between disciplines. While the vernacular implications of leaking tend to connote either the release of texts or, in a more literal sense, the escape of a fluid, the leak also embodies more poetic tendencies: rupture, release, and disclosure. Through the contours of mediation, materiality, and politics this dissertation traces the notion of “the leak” as both material and figurative actor. The leak is a difficult subject to account for—it eludes a specific discipline, its meaning is fluid, and its significance, always circumstantial, ranges from the entirely banal to matters of life and death. Considering the prevalence of leakiness in late modernity, I assert that the leak is a dynamic agent that allows us to trace the ways that actors are entangled. To these ends, I explore several instantiations of “leaking” in the realms of media, ecology, and politics to draw connections between seemingly disparate subjects. Despite leaks’ threatening consequences, they always mark a change, a transformation, a revelation. The leak becomes a means through which we can challenge ourselves to reconsider the (non)functionality of boundaries—an opening through which new possibilities occur, and imposed divisions are contested. However, the leak operates simultaneously as opportunity and threat—it is always a virtual agent, at once stagnant and free flowing. Belying its figurative possibilities, the materiality of the leak is central to this project. Material in both philosophical and Marxist senses, leaking imbricates matter and actors in constellations of relations that bear potential in helping us comprehend a wide range of concerns. It is to these ends that I argue leaks provide both effective and affective means for performing interdisciplinarity. This project insists that whether they take form as data, images, crude oil, bodily fluids, or slips of the tongue, leaks share the same origin in logics of containment. In interrogating these logics of containment, I assert the potential in letting leak, a mode through which difference is not collapsed, but rather no longer policed.
The Potential of Leaks: Mediation, Materiality and Incontinent Domains
PhD Dissertation
Light and the Aesthetics of Abandonment: HDR Imaging and the Illumination of Ruins
The online circulation of photographs of abandoned places has been considerably influential on the contemporary visual culture of ruins. At the hands of online content-editors and users, images of ruins have become the subject of listicles, click-bait posts, image aggregators, and image hosting sites (sites such as, Buzzfeed, Imgur, and Distractify). Considering the high volume and frequency in the circulation of images of ruins as components of visual lists of the top abandoned places, this paper contemplates the relationship between the ruinous and the abandoned. When Svetlana Boym asserts, “ruins give us a shock of vanishing materiality” (Boym 58), we must consider that this shock is most commonly conveyed through images. In the case of contemporary images, this sense of “shock” is often visually achieved through distorting the tonal range of photographs of decay and abandonment. Images that are tone mapped to display a high dynamic range of luminosity (commonly, “HDR photographs”) appear surreal – a disturbed reality distinct from that which we encounter day-to-day. The paper considers how light, in the manipulated tonal range of the photograph, problematises the ruin’s signification of meaning
Keywords: ruins; abandoned places; photography; HDR; light
Super-Material Culture: Thinking Through a New Discourse of Ruins
The discourse on ruins, like ruins themselves, is fragmented and dispersed. Representing both decay and what remains, the ruins’ relationship to temporality is complicated—they can be construed as means for both looking back, as well as looking towards the future. The recent resurgence of literature and theory on the subject matter is consolidating existing work and defining new lines of inquiry. This article investigates the current discourse on ruins through three recent texts. Significant to them all is the dialectical nature of the ruin as both the absence of, and endurance of, material form. All three texts consider ruins through the lens of the built environment and problematize classic conceptions of ruination in consideration of the contemporary moment. Looking at ruination through architecture theory provides a contrast to the romantic accounts of ruins that originally defined the discourse. Through these texts we can see certain limitations of the discourse of ruins, but also visible are nuanced approaches that redefine the ruin as more than just a site or object, but also a set of processes that reflect our relationships to material culture and the built environment. To this I assert a necessity to reconfigure the way we de ne ruins in light of the contemporary moment. The discourse of ruins, while still speaking through earlier tropes of a fragmented ruin studies, is no longer just a survey of the subject of the ruin—it is becoming a mode through which we evaluate the changing nature of our relationship to material culture.
Keywords: ruins, ruination, architecture, super-materiality, waste
Non-Commemoration and the Nation: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in the Former Yugoslavia
The concepts of monumentality and collective memory have not been neglected by discourses concerning national identity. However, insights favouring forgetting and counter-memory are considerably new approaches to reconstructing identities and redressing tragedy after pronounced violence. Erecting monuments is often a strategy towards building and inciting public memory and defining the nation, but they can also be used as a means of masking histories and manipulating national narratives – this is seemingly the case in a number of post-war monuments throughout the former Yugoslavia. The interplay between cultural heritage, memory, and space is a huge component of national identity; the installation of monuments memorializing non-Yugoslav celebrities throughout the newly defined states serve as a means to reconstitute identity, redefine heritage and avoid the celebration of a painful past. This paper will examine the potential consequences of manipulating public space through the erection of structures that function to disguise. By discussing the way in which identities can strive to strategically avoid the state in the ‘non-commemoration’ of the nation and its inflicted traumas, I hope to demonstrate that the state is always present: That even through neglecting it – it is always referenced, that the academic conceptions of the state can operate, not just by identifying and treating the state as an actor, but also by simply acknowledging the state as spectre. By comparing these contemporary structures to the numerous national monuments dedicated to victims of fascism built after the Second World War, I will show how the relationship between the state and memory has shifted in some regards and stayed the same in others.