Records of Disaster : Media Infrastructures and Climate Change

Abstract

Records of Disasters: Media Infrastructures and Climate Change explores how environmental disasters manifest and inscribe themselves in infrastructures. By turning to infrastructures, their logic and functioning, collapse and malfunction, the volume reveals their potential as fragile material witnesses to and of disasters. As climate change is unequally distributed across continuous dynamics and events, time scales and spatial registers, infrastructures can be understood as proxies or seismographs mediating different spatio-temporal layers that make these dynamics tangible. Disaster is made operational by negotiating what is defined as such, and under which geopolitical conditions. What connects melting glaciers and the knowledge from ice cores to the mapping of the ocean floor and the extraction of resources in the deep-sea? How can infrastructures be thought in time and “critical proximity”, and how do they bear witness to colonial pasts and presents? The volume proposes an analytical perspective on infrastructures as multi-layered witnesses to climate change, bringing together scientific and artistic approaches, students and scholars from different disciplines.