ABSTRACT
To be obscure is to be faintly perceptible so as to lack clear denition, to be hidden, out of sight, not readily noticed or seen, inconspicuous, far from centres of the human population. The satellite has been a relatively obscure object of media studies, but it is not alone. As Amelie Hastie points out, many objects – from the ticket stub to the powder puff, from the videocassette case to the antenna tree – that are overlooked in media studies could be used to expand the eld in productive ways. As Hastie explains, ‘… An emphasis on objects and material forms in relation to representational and time-based media might enable a delineation of the social and economic circuits of exchange in which we – and visual culture, in its various forms – participate’ (Hastie 2006). Here, rather than adopt an object-oriented disciplinary approach and insist that there should be a eld of satellite studies just as we have cinema, radio, television, and cyber-studies, I’ll follow the suggestion of Siegfried Zielinski – that media not only have complex relational histories, but can be understood as entr’actes or intervals in a much deeper history of audiovisions. Like lm and television, the satellite could be treated as part of an integrated history of media, as a dispositif – an arrangement of audio-visions interwoven with other media, architecture, transportation, science and technology, the organization of work and time, philosophical propositions and so on (Zielinski 1999, 18).
