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Aerial Captures: Extractivism and the Logistical Media of Air

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Aerial Captures: Extractivism and the Logistical Media of Air AERIAL CAPTURES: EXTRACTIVISM AND THE LOGISTICAL MEDIA OF AIR TRAVEL IN POSTWAR CANADA by Sydney Alexandre Hart A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (March, 2021) Copyright © Sydney Alexandre Hart, 2021 Abstract The rapid development of technologies for air travel since the Second World War has contributed to significant changes in how space is perceived, conceived and imagined in Canada. From the extensive mapping conducted by Canadian air survey companies across the world between the late 1940s to the 1970s, to the networks for air travel that carved commercial corridors between urban centres and remote parts of Canada, air travel helped standardize emergent ways of seeing land as transparent, quantifiable and ready for resource extraction. The distanced and calculative view afforded by air travel has helped a small sector of the population to measure, standardize and reify relationships on land, thereby integrating representations of natural resources into transnational systems of circulation. In this portfolio thesis, I examine the media produced through and for air travel in Canada, including air surveys, maps, surveillance systems, and artworks. Postwar developments in air travel, combined with changing border control policies and technologies, also meant the proliferation of extractive ways of seeing the body through biometrics and other imaging technologies in the security theatre of airports. I therefore examine Canada’s three busiest airports, examining their cultural displays and security apparatuses, in order to critically consider visual regimes of governmentality. In this thesis, I outline how extractivism entails the negation of place-based relationality, and its replacement with the relationality of logistics and the world-system. This portfolio thesis takes the form of standalone chapters framed by an introduction and a conclusion, and accompanied by a web- based research-creation project (miningmaps.net). This project includes artistic data visualizations examining the widespread use of “fly-in/fly-out” operations in Canada’s gold mining industry, and their wide-ranging environmental, social and cultural implications. ii Acknowledgements The support of many administrators, faculty and students in Cultural Studies has proved invaluable for completing the PhD programme. Cultural Studies’ winning formula of student involvement in programme administration, guaranteed funding and openness to artistic practice has created the necessary framework to pursue unconventional avenues of research, offering conditions that I and many peers were hard-pressed to find elsewhere. Thank you to Danielle Gugler and Carrie Miles for their incredible support in navigating institutional questions. My supervisor Susan Lord has helped guide me through this project’s many changes. I am especially appreciative of Susan’s openness to experimentation, providing encouragement to pursue the more artistic avenues of this portfolio thesis even as I doubted the merits of pursuing a research- creation project in a university context. Susan equally supported the critical writing even as I was weary that characteristics of writing by artists—e.g. touching on diverging subjects idiosyncratically and without clear methods—could undermine my arguments. Members of my committee include Laura Cameron, whose expansive critical understanding of “the field” has effectively reinvigorated my interest in understanding art and media geographically. I am likewise grateful for Laura’s initiative to pursue a “deep topography” of our Kingston campus as a course assignment, since it encouraged my critical awareness of our geographical situation and more informally, my interest in hanging out on campus. Scott Rutherford has helped me understand how to position my work in relation to the many currents of cultural studies, and his Cultural Studies Historiography course has opened important avenues for research in that regard. His incisive questions in class and committee meetings has reminded me of the central role that well-timed questions should play in discussing cultural studies. I am also very thankful that iii David Murakami Wood and Imre Szeman have agreed to join the committee at a later stage. Their critiques and suggestions have greatly helped to address theoretical blind spots and reconsider the academic outcome of the writing and research-creation holistically as a portfolio thesis. The technical issues posed by my research-creation project have seemed insurmountable on more than a few occasions. In the early stages of pandemic self-isolation, I decided to reach out to peers in Cultural Studies, and I was happy to receive their feedback for draft versions of the project. Those who supported the project with comments and suggestions include fellow CS students Hiba Ali and Elvira Hufschmidt, as well as Noah Brehmer, Frank Hangler (Plot + Scatter) and Bopha Chhay. Finally, I extend my gratitude to Bopha, Bill Hart and Catherine Poupeney-Hart, who have supported me in different ways through the long paths I have taken to get here. iv Table of Contents Abstract .....................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................................v List of Figures ............................................................................................................viii List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................x Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Situation ..................................................................................................1 1.2 Postwar Air Travel ...................................................................................3 1.3 Research Question ....................................................................................7 1.4 On Extractivism and Technology .............................................................8 1.5 Methodologies ..........................................................................................22 1.6 Overview of the Literature .......................................................................31 Chapter 2: Airborne Media 2.1 Airports and Empire .................................................................................40 2.2 Air Surveys and Cold War Geographies ..................................................42 2.3 Survey Techniques ...................................................................................47 2.4 Aerial Surveys in the Americas ................................................................50 2.5 The Colombo Plan ....................................................................................52 2.6 The Canada Geographical Information System .......................................61 2.7 The Extractive View .................................................................................63 Chapter 3: Aerial Logistics 3.1 Pudlo’s Planes ..........................................................................................71 v 3.2 Introducing Logistics ................................................................................78 3.3 Global “Hops” ..........................................................................................81 3.4 Aerial Logistics ........................................................................................89 3.5 Pudlo’s Travels .........................................................................................91 3.6 Logistical Traces ......................................................................................93 3.7 Visible Traces ...........................................................................................103 3.8 Grounded Normativity .............................................................................105 Chapter 4: Navigational Media 4.1 Introduction ..............................................................................................108 4.2 Surveillance ..............................................................................................110 4.3 Managing Flows .......................................................................................116 4.4 Differential Mobilities ..............................................................................120 4.5 The Art of Navigation ..............................................................................122 4.6 Place and Non-place .................................................................................126 4.7 Senses of Place .........................................................................................128 4.8 Educational Spaces ...................................................................................135 Chapter 5: Flight Network Case Study 5.1 Introduction ..............................................................................................141 5.2 Mining Interfaces .....................................................................................142 5.3 Gold in the Air ..........................................................................................146 5.4 Art and Cognitive Mapping ......................................................................152
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