This article examines whole body imaging technologies in contemporary airport security contexts. Situating these technologies more broadly within histories of aviation and theories of mobility, we examine how discourses of technological efficiency and freedom of movement work to obscure the ever-expanding surveillance practices of the state. While whole body imaging technologies are marketed as objective and neutral, we investigate how they draw upon, and reinscribe, existing social inequalities. Using Angela Davis' theory of the strip search as a form of state-sponsored sexual assault, we assess contemporary uses of whole body scanners by the state and allied corporate interests not only as alleged privacy violations, but also as potential acts of violence by the state on marginalized subjects. By demonstrating the disproportionate impact of whole body imaging technologies on particular communities, including the intersections of transgendered travelers, travelers with disabilities, and racialized and religious communities, we show that whole body imaging technologies continue and expand upon the tradition of stratified mobilities that has always been a component of air travel. We also argue that the alleged non-invasiveness and efficiency of the "virtual strip search" marks a troubling trend in which the state consolidates power through increasingly concealed surveillance practices.

Most scholars writing on the use of samplers express anxiety over the dissolution of boundaries between human-generated and automated musical expression, and focus on the copyright infringement issues surrounding sampling practices without adequately exploring samplists' musical and political goals. Drawing on musical examples from various underground electronic music genres and on interviews with electronic musicians, this essay addresses such questions as: What is a sampler, and how does the sampling process resonate with or diverge from other traditions of instrument-playing? How do electronic musicians use the ‘automated’ mechanisms of digital instruments to achieve nuanced musical expression and cultural commentary? What are some political implications of presenting sampled and processed sounds in a reconfigured compositional environment? By exploring these issues, I hope to counter the over-simplified, uninformed critical claims that sampling is a process of ‘theft’ and ‘automation’, and instead offer insight into the myriad and complex musical and political dimensions of sampling in electronic music production.

The common metaphor of electronic sounds as lively and differentiated individuals emerged alongside developments in scientific modernism and industrial capitalism. Through widespread applications of graphical methods by scientists in the nineteenth century, sounds and living bodies became similarly legible through waveform representations: characterized by extensions into space, fluctuations over time, part-whole relations, and associated aesthetic variations. This knowledge was advanced by the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, whose work was central to the emerging fields of acoustics and electronic music in the United States by the early twentieth century. During a period of American history in which industrialization and urbanization engendered new patterns of encounter, audio-technical practitioners learned to distinguish individual sounds by aesthetic signifiers, like purity and deviation, that marked such social differences as race, class, and gender. I frame this history with a feminist theory of technological worlding, proposing that the “worlds of sound” made in audio-technical discourse are spaces of encounter and contestable realms of cultural politics.

Signal processing is one of the most important and understudied dimensions of contemporary sound cultures and of electronic media more broadly. In the sonic register, it inflects everything from music production, wired or wireless transmission, and radio broadcast to everyday conversation and listening. Because it is embedded in all stages of contemporary sound production, reproduction, and reception, it has remained an elusive subject for critique. This essay considers the poetics of audio signal processing—the figural dimensions of the technical process and the representations of this process in audio-technical discourse. The article focuses on two metaphorical frames commonly applied to signal processing in the everyday language of musicians and audio technologists: cooking and travel. Through a reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss, it suggests that metaphors of rawness and cooking elevate signal processing to a kind of culturing process by which sound is readied for consumption by listeners through specialized technologies and techniques. The argument situates the spatialization of signal flow and the design of circuit topology within long-standing ideas about travel and voyage that inflect Western epistemologies of sound. As metaphors for signal processing, cooking and travel mark cultural locations (e.g., gendered, classed, able-bodied positionalities) much as they do in broader social contexts. Not only is signal processing subject to the critique of representation, it is, more than any other technical register, directly linked to the contemporary cultural politics of perception and reception. Although this article focuses on sound technologies, a full cultural critique of signal processing would consider its central role in every sense register.

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