16.12.2020
User imaginaries — sketching a method for seeing infrastructure in action in the figure.
As ethnographer of infrastructure Susan Leigh Star describes, the relationality of infrastructure makes for particular difficulties when the boring and mundane traces of its everyday use and operation scale up into the working, socially-interoperational and embedded infrastructures at issue (1999).[1] To consider the quickly-scaling and complexifying relations that make up, not only infrastructural design and assemblage work, but also its maintenance, use and promise,[2] infrastructural study quickly becomes not only difficult, but physically and conceptually overwhelming. Could one really visit every part and permutation of an infrastructure one is looking at? How does one study action at a distance? What […]
12.02.2019
Function
Searching for a stable definition of infrastructure the UK Office For National Statistics describes one attempt which temporarily separates the object from what it does: One approach to measurement proposed in the literature is to set out either the characteristics or functions of infrastructure and assets that exhibit some or all of these are then included as infrastructure. Characteristics can be physical (how an asset looks or operates) or economic (how an asset behaves in an economic context, especially in relation to market structure or externalities).… The drawback of using economic characteristics is that they often encompass a larger set […]
Infra Cultures
*Thoughts in formation* Here, I'm exploring the cultural patterns, imaginaries and practices of infrastructures; what can be called infrastructural cultures, and which might be posed as infrastructure as culture. Part of a wider research into the problems and possibilities for critical, civic and cultural intervention into broader infrastructural contexts, design, policy and 'publics'. Initiated as part of my AHRC CHASE-funded PhD research at Goldsmiths, University of London: "Changing what infrastructure means" (2024).