On the emergence of digital volumetric space: Geophysical prospecting and the American oilfield in the early 20th century

Abstract

Geographical scholarship of the ‘digital turn’ has refuted the suggestion that digital technologies produce a utopian ‘cyberspace’ capable of transcending its material attachments. The image of a frictionless ‘digital world,’ it is argued, merely masks the uneven social and material relationships conditioning that world’s possibility. While this is essential criticism, I offer in this paper some reasons for hesitation in collapsing digital space into material practices too quickly. Abstractions may always be attached to their social and material conditions of possibility, but this does not mean that these things are the same. I develop this insight further in the context of the ‘volumetric turn,’ which has analogously criticized geographers for remaining fixated on surficial formalism while neglecting consideration of the dynamic, material capacities of volumetric space. While again heeding this equally important warning, I question the limits of dynamism as a volumetric analytic insofar as, much like digital technology, this notion can easily be fetishized. In turn, I suggest that these dynamic capacities can be more productively theorized in relation, rather than opposed, to formalistic abstraction, as both are constituent elements of volumetric space. I explore these theoretical considerations through a historical geography of early 20th-century geophysical prospecting in American oilfields, where prospectors produced spatial knowledge that was simultaneously dynamic and formal, material and abstract. In turn, this case study serves to show how the relations between material practices and processes of abstraction can be a fruitful meeting point for theories of digital and volumetric space.