Forms of pressure: SMART cables, catastrophe and the deep sea

Abstract

Recent scholarship in elemental media studies has sought to develop frameworks of interpretation rooted in elemental substrates and qualities. ‘Forms of pressure’ traces pressure as one such framework through the ways pressure contributes to or is associated with various social and culture forms. The article makes this case through evaluating the emergence of Science Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications (SMART) subsea sensing cables, the discourse surrounding them, and their imagined purposes. Then, it considers the historical events that motivated their emergence, including the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, as well as the history of the subsea cable industry. Pressure is understood through its emergence in the deep sea as massively intense and producing significant forms of movement and environmental change. In particular, the article highlights this capacity of deep sea pressure to the social and temporal condition of catastrophe. SMART cables and the histories explored are responsive or reactive to the force of pressure. As a counterpoint, the article considers what it would mean to think through or with pressure and turns to an art piece, Inframundo (Underworld) as a demonstration of a phenomenology informed by deep sea pressure. In either case, pressure produces various forms, technological and historical forms or forms of being and experience, based on its capacity to transform environments and elemental arrangements as a force that facilitates movement, change and elemental mixing.