Science Fiction in the Present: Military Technology and Contemporary Culture
10.30-5.30pm 26th May 2011 - Research Beehive
Mark Dorrian (Newcastle University)
Mark Dorrian is Professor of Architecture Research at Newcastle University and Co-Director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis. His books include (with Adrian Hawker) Metis: Urban Cartographies (2002), (with Gillian Rose) Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics (2003), (with Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill and Murray Fraser) Critical Architecture (2007), Warszawa: Projects for the Post-Socialist City (2009), and (forthcoming, with Frédéric Pousin) Vues Aériennes: Seize Études Pour Une Histoire Culturelle (2011 [to be pubished in English as The Aerial View: Episodes for a Cultural History by IB Tauris in 2012]). He is presently working on the history of the aerial view, and is a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where he is organizing a research theme on ‘Atmospheres and Atmospherics’: www.iash.ed.ac.uk/themes.atmospheres.html In addition, he is currently collaborating with the post-colonial scholar and environmental artist Paul Carter on a project concerning liquidity and flux and as part of this is organizing a NIReS-supported symposium on conceptualising turbulence, which will take place at Culture Lab, Newcastle University on Thursday 23 June 2011.
Weather Control
Weather control is a familiar object of pre-modern ritual and magical practices, but it also appears in what is often described as one of the earliest works of science-fiction, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Here, however, rather than being directed toward renewal, it has become turned toward habitat destruction. The relevant section tells of the airborne island of Laputa, which levitates free of the terrestrial surface thanks to the effects of large magnetic lodestone at its core. In a parody of Francis Bacon’s scientific utopia, The New Atlantis, Laputa is populated by a society of scientists who live by exactions received from the unfortunate subject peoples over whose lands the island floats. If these tributes are withheld, Laputa can hover above the offenders, depriving their region of light and rain and thus plunging it into drought and famine. This paper will reflect on contemporary technologies of – and aspirations for – weather control in relation to this long history. It will focus in particular on the ever-increasing militarization of weather foreshadowed in Swift’s tale, discussing it with reference to contemporary geo-engineering proposals that aim to manipulate the global climate at a planetary scale.