Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Industrial Design
Department
Industrial Design
First Advisor
Ilona Gaynor
Second Advisor
Nicholas Larson
Third Advisor
Ingrid Burrington
Abstract
For over a century, conceptual, social, and legal frameworks have governed human relationships with technology by dematerializing data and personal information. From the early twentieth century, when human speech was converted into electrical pulses through telephone wires, to today’s pressure to integrate sensing, computation, and automation into every facet of contemporary life, electronic communications have become increasingly detached from the body and systematically defined as a weightless, immaterial asset.
This thesis refutes the industry-led myth of the “immaterial cloud” by revealing the presence and transmission of data to be a series of physical, tectonic, and spatial events that are woven into political, social, and economic systems. My thesis uncovers this complex entanglement and the technological design choices that drive it to illustrate their operation within institutions of power.
Wireless infrastructure functions as a state and corporate apparatus of extraction that is systematically marketed as a platform for connectivity and accessibility. Drawing on philosophy, policy, and technical experimentation, I map histories of clandestine state interception and the political economy of extraction to show how a century-long structural and conceptual trap has moved individuals from literate machine operators to passive, unaware users of the systems used to exploit and oppress them.
In response to this forfeiture of agency, I have designed, and fabricated experimental field instruments that register presence of hertzian machines across common digital communication protocols (specifically WiFi, BLE, Cellular). Through architectural drawings, technical diagrams, and experimental representation, I translate raw electromagnetic signal data into evidentiary images that offer partial glimpses into the reach of these pervasive systems. This thesis serves as a methodology for uncovering how such systems are designed to subtly shape bodies, behaviors, and dynamics of power.
Recommended Citation
Grail, Jeremy A., "Dead Reckoning" (2026). Masters Theses. 1556.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1556
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