Sonar and the Channelization of the Ocean

Shiga, John

doi:10.5040/9781501309090.ch-003

Cited by 4 publications

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“…It should be noted in advance that SS is an academic desideratum, of interest for the history of acoustics and the history of technology, as well as from the perspectives of (geo)media, communication, sound, and cultural studies. The leading academic in the field of underwater acoustics mentions SS only briefly in reconstructing the prehistory of sonar (Hackmann, 1979(Hackmann, , 1984(Hackmann, , 1986 as do Elizabeth Bruton and Paul Coleman (2016) in their history of submarine audio technologies during the First World War, as do Gary Frost (2001) and John Shiga (2013Shiga ( , 2015Shiga ( , 2016 in their work in this respect. However, besides a short presentation (Howarth, 2015), no researcher has focused on SS exclusively.…”

Section: Introduction: Sounding (Out) Geomediamentioning

confidence: 99%

An interlude in navigation: Submarine signaling as a sonic geomedia infrastructure

Borbach

2022

New Media & Society

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A closer look into the history of maritime geomedia reveals a historical intermezzo in which navigation in cases of unstable sight was realized with “Submarine Signaling” (SS). This infrastructure for the purpose of safe wayfinding along coasts operated from around 1900 to the early 1920s, relying upon submarine bells in the global oceans, and hydrophones and telephonic user interfaces in vessels. SS can be regarded as a starting point to the era of electrotechnological navigation, and is of media-historical interest insofar as its operability was based on undersea acoustics: shifting its epistemic focus from sight to sound, SS thus lay beyond the “visual regime” that characterizes our current digital geomedia cultures. Herein, I will reconstruct the genesis and history of SS, use it as a contrasting foil to our postmodern geomedia practices, and finally argue for an understanding of geomedia as historically variable phenomena.

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Section: Introduction: Sounding (Out) Geomediamentioning

confidence: 99%

An interlude in navigation: Submarine signaling as a sonic geomedia infrastructure

Borbach

2022

New Media & Society

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The Nuclear Sensorium: Cold War Nuclear Imperialism and Sensory Violence

Shiga¹

2019

Can. j. law soc.

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This paper traces the sensory dimensions of nuclear imperialism focusing on the Cold War nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. Key to the formation of the “nuclear sensorium” were the interfaces between vibration, sound, and radioactive contamination, which were mobilized by scientists such as oceanographer Walter Munk as part of the US Nuclear Testing Program. While scientists occupied privileged points in technoscientific networks to sense the effects of nuclear weapons, a series of lawsuits filed by communities affected by the tests drew attention to military-scientific use of inhabitants’ bodies as repositories of data concerning the ecological impact of the bomb and the manner in which sensing practices used to extract this data extended the violence and trauma of nuclear weapons. Nuclear imperialism projected its power not only through weapons tests, the vaporization of land and the erosion of the rights of people who lived there, but also through the production of a “nuclear sensorium”—the differentiation of modes of sensing the bomb through legal, military, and scientific discourses and the attribution of varying degrees of epistemological value and legal weight to these sensory modes.

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Sound and the city: rethinking spatial epistemologies with urban sound maps

Levy-Landesberg

2021

Sound Studies

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Sonar and the Channelization of the Ocean

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

An interlude in navigation: Submarine signaling as a sonic geomedia infrastructure

An interlude in navigation: Submarine signaling as a sonic geomedia infrastructure

The Nuclear Sensorium: Cold War Nuclear Imperialism and Sensory Violence

Sound and the city: rethinking spatial epistemologies with urban sound maps

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