Touching with Light, or, How Texture Recasts the Sensing of Underground Water

Abstract

This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica’s aquifers using LandSat imagery and a specialized algorithm. The project aims to make subterranean formations accessible for public agencies mediating recent environmental conflicts over underground water, which have been diagnosed as the country’s first “water war.” I analyze the presentation to the public of this project and the technology it uses to show how vision and touch are conceptual resources that people use to describe the technicalities of satellite imagery. Attending to the semiotic and technical power of vision and touch requires a nonessentialist understanding of the senses. It requires moving away from a narrow understanding of sensing as embodied, phenomenological practice. Focusing on the role of texture as that which operates in the interstices of vision and touch, I propose going beyond panoptic imaginaries in order to grasp the diverse social lives that technologies such as satellite imaging have.