Lisa Parks

"Spotting the Satellite Dish: Populist Approaches to Infrastructure"

This essay posits the satellite dish as a populist portal into the world of satellite technologies and infrastructures. Building on the work of Fiske, in particular his interest in uses of low-tech apparatus (i.e. pirate radio, amateur video) to contest dominant power formations, I discuss the manufacturing, use and positioning of satellite dishes in various cities (such as Berlin, Los Angeles, Istanbul and Doha) in relation to issues of class, taste, ethnicity, diasporas, displacements and national cultures. As Charlotte Brundson has shown, when satellite dishes were first installed in London and Tokyo during the late 1980s controversies over various issues ranging from property rights to architectural aesthetics surfaced, making the dish integral to the production of new “landscapes of taste.”

Using semiotic approaches that resonate with those of Fiske and Brunsdon, I describe how the satellite dish functions not only as a sign of cultural taste and class, but also of ethnic identity, (trans)national belonging, and global media integration. Drawing on an archive of satellite dish photographs that I have developed over the past ten years, I also suggest that the satellite dish functions as a key consumer-citizen interface with a highly dispersed and complex satellite infrastructure. Much more than an eyesore on a building’s rooftop or facade, the satellite dish can be used to intimate the presence of a broader satellite system that is imperceptible in its entirety. It can also infer the vertical fields (the uplinking and downlinking) of global culture, and help direct us to imagine the routes and densities of world signal traffic. The satellite dish is a vital part of satellite infrastructure that is both popularly accessible and physically tangible, and as such serves as a useful platform for thinking through the technology’s relation to the politics of culture and territory.