Energetic Mediation at Marconi’s Connemara Station
BY PATRICK BRESNIHAN & PATRICK BRODIE
Reports and descriptions of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi’s early 20th century facility in Derrygimlagh, Ireland, conjure a science fiction scenario, entangling the traditional landscapes and cultures of Ireland’s western regions with an infrastructural modernity that supposedly never fully “reached” rural Ireland. In the blustery, dark, rainy west of Connemara, shrouded by nighttime fog and faintly swaying in the wind, residents of nearby Clifden could see sparks flying from 210-foot-high masts in the distance. The small train that brought peat briquettes cut from the surrounding bogland chugged its way across tracks built into the wetlands to deposit its haul at the generating station, as fuel for the fires that powered trans-Atlantic communication. Steam from the engines and the turf-fired turbines puffed out and dissipated in the night sky. The noise of the condenser station eventually meant that signal operators were banished across the bog to a quieter place to work. The surrounding landscape, much of which would not be serviced with electricity until the mid-1900s (and the town of Clifden not even until 1927, years after the Marconi Company), remained shrouded in darkness, the lights of the station buildings stark against the dimly illuminated landscape.
Today, a different science fiction landscape, although equally tied to the immense energy required for distanced communication, arises from the bogs that rise from the midlands and blanket the western regions of the country. In the high-contrast technologized landscapes emerging and under construction in rural Ireland – from wind farms built on post-extractive bogs, to battery storage facilities, to data and logistics sheds and warehouses – you may think that a smart, green tech future has already arrived for rural dwellers, post-industrial and carbon neutral.
Author Mike McCormack, in his futuristic scenarios set in imagined, overdeveloped Irelands since the 1990s, claims to pursue a vision of the west of Ireland as a science fiction landscape. Emphasizing the contradictions and juxtapositions between the real and the imagined, McCormack seems to conjure a rural Ireland of simultaneity and co-existence, of over- and under-development, of rupture and surprising entanglements. Ireland’s economy and spatial development, today centered on foreign direct investment in high-tech industries and their expanding infrastructures in the form of data centers and renewable energy facilities, means that the landscape is potted with the ongoing contradictions of capital and energy-intensive, experimental, networked landscapes and the realities of a tenuous and uneven integration into global systems of wealth accumulation that generate immense wealth for some while remaining chimeric for most.
But to keep sight of the contradictions and ambivalences embedded in such industrial and infrastructural landscapes, it’s useful to pay close attention to who they materially affect and benefit, the supply chains required to keep them running, and the natural and global histories these entail. As tantalizing as McCormack’s provocation about the specific character of Irish hypermodernity is, as media and geography scholars we are tasked with unraveling how such ruptures and discontinuities exist, what they represent in terms of the historical legacies of the present, and why they are so persistent and confounding. Machinery runs on fossil fuels, wind farms require vast infrastructural assemblages, finance comes from shady climate initiatives and massive corporations (including big tech), and of course rare earth and other minerals and elements are taken from far afield to power and manufacture all these myriad components of green, digital capitalism. Many of Ireland’s rural areas remain fuel poor and lack reliable access to internet and other utilities. Apart from their construction across pre-existing colonial and postcolonial routes and geographies, the infrastructures that populate these spaces have inherited a logic of global connectivity built on the uneven supply lines of imperial capitalism.
Wireless telegraphy was sold by the Marconi Company on a vision of global connectivity that was not tethered to messy material infrastructures, resources, or geography. This ideal was in turn premised on the properties of “ether,” an ambient force that was planetary and all-pervading, everywhere and nowhere at once. Marconi’s wireless technology was developed to shore up imperial networks of trade and communication, not just by circulating messages crucial for commerce, military operations, and finance, but through flattening space and time.
At the site of the now ruined Marconi station lie the by now long decomposed bodies of hundreds of victims of the mid-19th century famine, or Great Hunger, that hit this part of Ireland hardest. There is no monument to these dead, though ruins of their small stone cottages are dotted around. This famine-induced “wasteland” as the bogs were referred to by colonial administrators subsequently became the pleasingly gothic backdrop for wealthy British industrialists holidaying in “big houses,” snapped up from bankrupt landlords. When Marconi arrived at the turn of the century, his private investment and employment were widely seen as an unexpected boon. Locals were largely employed in hand-cutting the turf to power the massive generators that propelled the transmissions across the Atlantic. At a time when the surrounding landscape wouldn’t be electrified for decades, Marconi built a 300 kw power station, with four generators connected to a 15,000 volt battery in the condenser station, powered by local labour and peat energy. Here we see the dynamic of location (as “greenfield” or space for development/ extractive activity) and place (somewhere with culture, history, society) - the projection of “location” as enacting a profound, ambivalent transformation and upheaval upon “place.”
The Derrigimlagh Marconi station returns us to a place from which to confront the violent histories of colonialism and energy extraction/combustion that enable “immaterial” communicative capitalism to function, and how these relationships of power continue to radiate out and mark the present in highly material and place-specific ways. To this end, we propose the concept of energetic mediation as a relation that made possible the forms of circulatory capitalism embedded within coming financial and logistical systems at a global level. Connection, speed, modernity, all continue to require vast amounts of energy and increasingly dispersed, hodge-podge, material apparatuses of production and distribution. As many scholars of the “infrastructural turn” in media studies have taken pains to emphasize, there is nothing “immaterial” about signals, clouds, ether. These technologies and their infrastructures contain at their base the extractive, carbon-intensive energetic functions of global capitalism, and continue to hum with the rhythms of the colonial networks that built them. While this site’s short-lived operation from 1907-1925 perhaps predicted the tendency of communications technologies towards obsolescence (because of commodity cycles etc.), as Tyler Morgenstern notes at another fleeting Marconi site in Hawaii, “while the facilities themselves were ultimately fleeting, the models of scale and connectivity they had helped to cultivate would prove far more durable” (2021, 22). Marconi’s rural site in Connemara offers a space to reflect upon these endurances, and a ruin through which to wander and understand how imperial pasts persist not only into our present, but can perhaps be disrupted into the future.
Works Cited
Morgenstern, Tyler. 2021. "Etherealization in a Racial Regime of Ownership: Marconi in O‘ahu, circa 1900." Media + Environment, vol. 3, no. 2. https://mediaenviron.org/article/23515-etherealization-in-a-racial-regime-of-ownership-marconi-in-o-ahu-circa-1900
Patrick Bresnihan is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University. He works across the interdisciplinary fields of political ecology, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities. His research has looked at different but related concerns around water, land, and energy in Ireland and how these speak to broader questions of colonial and postcolonial development, environmental politics and the green transition. His forthcoming book with Naomi Millner is entitled All We Want is the Earth. Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism (Bristol University Press, 2023).
Patrick Brodie is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the environmental politics of digital media infrastructures, with a particular interest in energy systems, extractivism, and rural politics. His writing has recently appeared in New Media and Society, Information, Communication and Society, Canadian Journal of Communication, Amazon: At the Intersection of Culture and Capital (Rowman Littlefield, 2022), and Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation, and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict (Bristol UP, 2023), among other venues. He is the co-PI, with Darin Barney, on the SSHRC-funded Media Rurality project.
