Sonar: Empire, Media, and the Politics of Underwater Sound

Abstract

This article traces the development of acoustic navigation media, or "sonar, " Down into sound" [T]here is more to modernity than meets the eye," writes Emily Thompson (2002, p. 19). No one perhaps knew this better than the operators of underwater listening systems, which were developed in the early twentieth century and which are today known as "sonar." In this article, I suggest that the development of underwater media for ocean navigation and surveillance was motivated and shaped by efforts to control movement across the ocean by military fleets and shipping cartels. These nautical organizations became interested and invested in the use of underwater sound to over-

Introduction: Modeling the Pacific Ocean

“…In addition to our interest in current advances in oceanography, climate science, and environmental policy, we are also following current discourses in the humanities-especially in media and culture studies-by asking in what way oceans can be paradigmatically (and paradoxically) conceptualized as both the greatest medium and the limit point of any possible media (see Peters 2015): oceans are mediums in the sense of both "substance" and "environment," and it is their materiality and spatiality that pose a particular challenge to media in the sense of modern communication and measuring systems, whose cables, sensors, and electromagnetic communication systems often don't work for long or not at all in a salty water body full of living microorganisms. In recent years, a number of approaches from the perspective of anthropology, social sciences, history and history of science, critical infrastructure studies, and environmental media studies, among others, have suggested various possibilities of thinking through the ocean (e.g., Helmreich 2009Helmreich , 2011bHelmreich , 2011aHelmreich , 2016Höhler 2014;Jue 2020;Rozwadowski 2005Rozwadowski , 2018Shiga 2013Shiga , 2016Starosielski 2015). Thus, in addition to a long tradition of thematizing oceans as eminent geopolitical factors, as emancipatory postcolonial study objects, or as cultural-theoretical metaphor machines, novel research initiatives put a high emphasis on the (deep) blue seas in order to assess the repercussions between the materialities of emerging (media) technologies and networks, their impact on the fabric and distribution of global sociopolitical and economic power, changing conditions of possibility of past and current oceanographic knowledge production, and resulting transformations in the means of (re)presenting the oceans and other largescale natural phenomena.…”

Looking for the Horizon: A Conversation between John Durham Peters and Chris Russill

“…CR: I like that he breaks himself into pieces to place these cameras there and then the cameras can't inhabit the environment either, and so they have to go back to fit them to the environment. A good lesson on how the biases of our usual surroundings are internalized into our default approach to environmental media, as you, Melody Jue (2014Jue ( , 2015, and John Shiga (2013) are so good at illustrating. Nicole Starosielski (2016), too.…”

Stent with Piezoelectric Transducers for High Spatial Resolution Ultrasound Neuromodulation- a Finite Element Analysis

“…In 1912 following the tragic sinking of the Titanic, great effort was placed into the development of underwater structure visualization [5]. In the following years during the first world war, the French government commissioned Paul Langevin and his colleagues to develop a system to find German submarines.…”