A Genealogy of Open Air: Gaza as a Prototyping Space
The article examines the events of October 7th and the events that followed through the concept of “open-air prison,” which represents the Gazan living space and serves as a metaphor for a life of freedom under conditions of confinement. Using the theoretical framework of prototyping, which describes experimental technological development through trial and error, the article shows how Gaza became a laboratory in which Israeli military technology and local counter-hegemonic technologies were tested and refined. While offering an observation of Gaza as an experimental technological space, a genealogy of open air is outlined in three parts: The first part unfolds a brief political history of air, with its inherent elusiveness or the impossibility of transforming it into a medium and space completely controlled by the sovereign. “Open Air” is seen here as a real, invisible space and as an analytical concept necessary to understand an event that Israelis experienced as incomprehensible. The second part traces the kite as a paradigmatic object in the Gaza space, and the process of its transformation from a cultural artifact and symbol of freedom and liberation to a technological prototype that served as a weapon against the army and settlers. The third and concluding part looks back at the hubris of Israel’s technological superiority, which saw itself as the exclusive sovereign that controls from the air. From this genealogy of air in Gaza, it emerges that Israeli technological superiority could not help but be blind to the realization of an event of extraordinary proportions, as we saw on October 7th, and that this blindness is deeply intertwined with the lack of recognition of a structural epistemic problem – patterns of ignoring the exception, the mistake, the disruption, the accident and the outlier, and the potential for knowledge stored in all of these.
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