Unsettled Earth: In Defense of Darkness: A History of Palestinian Technology in Words and Numbers

The electric grid was a powerful tool that shaped the future Israeli state’s technologies of land grab and apartheid, a development facilitated by the British Mandate for Palestine. It was also an early instance of turning Palestinians into numbers—kilowatts consumed, later calories allowed, body counts, AI generated kill targets, etc. While more complex forms of machinic vision have come to govern Palestinian lives, the electrical grid remains key in Israel’s death distribution infrastructures, which decimated the Palestinian night and imposed a techno-capitalist chokehold of hyper-visibility on them.

In response, Palestinians have developed, and continue to develop, an alternative conception of technology to the planetary computational canon. They have invented networks of strategic darkness and crafted a form of writing with illocutionary capacities that shapes the material world through discourse. This lecture posits the history of the electrification of Palestine as the origin story of the deadly blackouts in Gaza today. It is a text about the kinds of machines we can build through writing ‘Palestine’ to one another. It is a performative text, in that it calls for us to experiment with language and modes of collectivity, to contribute to a culture of resistance that strives to snuff out the unbearable brightness of occupation, and to breathe past its suffocating darkness.

Haig Aivazian is an artist whose practice grapples with the metamorphic nature of three technologies: artificial light, computation and law.