Spectral topographies
In 2016, denied entrance to the UK, around 7,000 people took shelter in makeshift camps on the outskirts of the French port city of Calais. The camp formed in the “microwave shadow” of the high-frequency trading relays which connect London to financial exchanges in continental Europe. One relay, owned by the Dutch firm, Custom Connect, cut directly across the tarpaulin-covered tents.
Spectral Topographies is a collaborative investigation by the Norwegian photographer, Eline Benjaminsen, and began as an exercise in shifting focus from the familiar structures and bodies that populate space, to their electromagnetic radiation and its infrastructural traces. The work is driven by an urge to understand our increasingly “dense, politicised and codified” electromagnetic milieu.
Text and photo story first published in Migrant Journal in May 2017 and reprinted in February 2018.
-
Migrant Journal: Wired Capital (2017) -
Thinking with the historian, Gabriel Hecht, I ask can radio waves be "interscalar vehicles"? Can I ride from photon to financial trading relay to cosmos? Image: Photographs taken from a camera mounted on a kite flown in the line-of-sight of Custom Connect -
Choke points and check points. The High Frequency Trading microwave relays pass over the migrant camps at Calais (left) and Dunkerque (right). KMZ file of HFT relays courtesy of Alexandre Laumonier. (2016)
