Field operations: necessary transgressions

Standing on the bridge of an enormous container ship, watching Hong Kong harbour emerge blinking out of a South China Sea pregnant with ships and into the radar screen dawn as we approach nearby Chinese port of Yantian … barrelling along a dirt road tracing oil pipes through the Ecuadorean Amazon atop the roof rack of a minivan, the gas flares of oil refineries visible over jungle canopy … passing a bar of solid metal more valuable than a London house and less useful than a brick between eager hands in the Gold Room of an Australian Outback mine … Standing in a chilled and humming room with the supercomputer ‘Pac-man’ as it crunches climate change data … Feeling the bass wave rumble from a rocket launch at a space city in the Kazakh Steppe … Breathless at 5,000m as a radio array turns gracefully to face the beginnings of the universe … We are in the field. These are sites built from stories. Unfamiliar landscapes forged from familiar wants and needs. They are landscapes and infrastructures as cultural artefacts. Each ripe with its own absurdities and contradictions, and each born of a critical mass of habits, beliefs, and desires.