Saturation

Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater, also published by Duke University Press.Rafico Ruiz is currently the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier, also published by Duke University Press.

• Acknowledgments  ixThinking With Saturation Beyond Water: Thresholds, Phase Change, and the Precipitate / Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz  1Water1. The Colors of Saturated Seas / Stefan Helmreich  292. Hydromedia: From Water Literacy to the Ethics of Saturation / Joanna Zylinska  453. Fossil Fuels, Fossil Waters: Aquifers, Pipelines, and Indigenous Water Rights / Avery Slater  70Thresholds4. Sonic Saturation and Militarized Subjectivity in Cold War Submarine Films / John Shiga  1055. Wireless Saturation / Rahul Mukherjee  1236. Saturation as a Logic of Enclosure? / Max Ritts  144Phase Change7. Becoming Undetectable in the Chthulucene / Bishnupriya Ghosh  1618. The Media of Seaweeds: Between Kelp Forest and Archive / Melody Jue  1859. Drought Conditions: Desalination and Deep Climate Change in Southern California / Rafico Ruiz  205Precipitate10. Precipitates of the Deep Sea: Seismic Surveys and Sonic Saturation / Lisa Yin Han  22311. Media Saturation and Southern Agencies / Bhaskar Sarkar  24312. Oil Barrels: The Aesthetics of Saturation and the Blockage of Politics / Mariji Cetinić and Jeff Diamanti  26413. The Data Center Industrial Complex / MÉl Hogan  283Afterword: Climate Change as Matter Out of Phase / Janet Walker  306Contributors  313Index  317

“How do elements accumulate and transform? Saturation assembles a fluid compendium for navigating the phase changes of materiality. Tracking kelp and oil, seismic surveys and submarine films, drought and floods, smart oceans and data centers, the chapters in this collection teem with ideas for how to work within the fluctuating conditions of environments, media, culture, and politics.” - Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture, and Environment, University of Cambridge “This volume is a tour de force of media theory: the contributors posit saturation not just as one thing that happens in or through or by various media, but as an original and urgent way to understand what media are and do. As a heuristic, saturation draws new lines of relation between issues such as climate change, extraction, militarism, energy, security, biopolitics, and Indigenous sovereignty, among others, in surprising ways. In short, thinking with saturation helps us to see our contemporary condition anew.” - Astrida Neimanis, author of (Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology)