THERMOSTATIC SUBJECTS

Nicole Starosielski is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on the relationships between media, infrastructures, and their environments. Her first book, The Undersea Network (2015), charted the development of the cable systems that carry almost all transoceanic internet traffic. She is also co-editor of Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), and the “Elements” book series at Duke University Press. A second project in progress, Media Hot and Cold, traces the connections between media technologies, embodied perception, and temperature.

Her GIDEST presentation draws from her longer project, "Media Hot and Cold," that investigates heat and cold as modes of communication, the calibration of the human sense of thermoception, and the thermal fractures that structure everyday life. This paper takes the thermostat--the interface to a vast infrastructure of heating and cooling--as the site where subjects of temperature are formed.