Bluetooth extractions: geomagnetism & metallurgy
Bluetooth extractions: geomagnetism & metallurgy
Beginning from the position that no media are neutral, I have devoted my work, over 15 years or more, to enquiring into the ideologies embedded in technics. Working inside an audio apparatus was a means of revealing, or more often revoking, its unspoken rules of usership. Break to remake. Like many of my generation whose youth witnessed the gradual distillation of multiple media formats into the universalising interface of online, this work took something of a media archaeological bent, scrutinising materialities of sound reproduction. But now, following this convergence into computation, the concurrent globalisation of industrial manufacture, and what Isabelle Stengers refers to as the intrusion of Gaia, other aspects of media materiality have asserted themselves with urgency: namely their reliance on extractive industrial practices. Here, I follow this thread through a singular comparison between the metallurgy of portable Bluetooth speakers and the magnetism of our planetary commons.
Bluetooth, geomagnetism, metallurgy, sound studies, extractivism
Cornford, Stephen
04c8ea15-dcab-4676-91aa-8291485b39d0
16 January 2025
Cornford, Stephen
04c8ea15-dcab-4676-91aa-8291485b39d0
Cornford, Stephen
(2025)
Bluetooth extractions: geomagnetism & metallurgy.
Tékhne, 1 (2).
Abstract
Beginning from the position that no media are neutral, I have devoted my work, over 15 years or more, to enquiring into the ideologies embedded in technics. Working inside an audio apparatus was a means of revealing, or more often revoking, its unspoken rules of usership. Break to remake. Like many of my generation whose youth witnessed the gradual distillation of multiple media formats into the universalising interface of online, this work took something of a media archaeological bent, scrutinising materialities of sound reproduction. But now, following this convergence into computation, the concurrent globalisation of industrial manufacture, and what Isabelle Stengers refers to as the intrusion of Gaia, other aspects of media materiality have asserted themselves with urgency: namely their reliance on extractive industrial practices. Here, I follow this thread through a singular comparison between the metallurgy of portable Bluetooth speakers and the magnetism of our planetary commons.
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Published date: 16 January 2025
Keywords:
Bluetooth, geomagnetism, metallurgy, sound studies, extractivism
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Local EPrints ID: 497517
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/497517
PURE UUID: ab3a3280-e0e2-4809-8a66-4884f5378338
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Date deposited: 24 Jan 2025 17:41
Last modified: 25 Jan 2025 03:14
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Author:
Stephen Cornford
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