My thesis posits the necessary changes to the field of art if it is to support, articulate and pattern interventions into the operations, conditions and imaginaries of infrastructure. It uses the work of architects Assemble, research agency Forensic Architecture and curatorial project Primer as case studies in a wider field of practices that engage art as a productive part of such interventions. However, where existing discourse in art do not adequately account for how art is used, focuses power, as well as normative models as part of making infrastructure, and where infrastructure studies are limited with respect to the meaning created by art, the thesis develops a new discursive and conceptual framework to bridge these gaps and problematise the links established by an infrastructural framing.

 

Rejecting a split between the materiality of infrastructure and the discursive activities or forms of transition it concerns, through a focus on the shift to thinking of infrastructure not just as substrate but also as a mode of information, the thesis mobilises Lauren Berlant’s concept of infrastructure as an active patterning. Pattern helps to explore how art can come to be one part of configuring systemic and complex assemblages, organisational principles and performative practices of use to condition the terms and expectations of social life within infrastructural assemblages. Using this framework, I establish a series of terms and models through which art contributes to the creation of what can be called infrastructural meaning.

 

While the meaning in infrastructure offers a potentially critical entry point into the conditions of infrastructure, it also highlights the potential for intensifying infrastructural norms as well as closing down the ways infrastructure might be used transformatively. Drawing on theories and critiques of the social imaginary and infrastructure (Castoriadis, 1994, 2005; Thrift, 1996; Berlant, 2016; Hayles, 2017) I develop a model for changing practices of infrastructural meaning making, and draw together a theoretical and methodological framework through which art can break with existing material, symbolic, and political conditions of infrastructure and institute new imaginaries or ‘worlds’.

 

Accordingly, a primary task of this thesis is to identify the possibility of scalable and interoperable forms of infrastructural creation, using artistic, design and curatorial practices to intersect and intervene in the unfolding of broader infrastructural contexts, narratives and imaginaries. More exactly, these interventions are situated by the intersection of informational and technological infrastructures with forms of infrastructural dis-investment and re-distribution driven by neoliberal austerity politics factors which — pulling in different directions, though grounding these practices in a European context — produce tensions that both prompt and prove productive for infrastructural practices.

 

Ultimately, and at its most zoomed out, this written study slots into a broader practical and critical question that prompted this research. That question concerns whether there is a curatorial framework through which these infrastructural interventions can be addressed as part of a critical-infrastructural practice; or, how would this approach be figured, formed, used?