12.06.2024
Residency post 1 – Harraway – Funny Stories
This is the first post written while on Residency at Rupert in Lithuania, June 2024. Hopefully, this can be a space for the thinking that happens, but which is outside of the specific things I want to try and get done / written. They can be read as thoughts in formation or as notes towards later texts. — Perhaps to my own shame, I hadn’t known how funny Donna Harraway is. Last night, I went to a screening of Fabrizio Terranova’s 2016 film-length interview, DONNA HARAWAY: STORY TELLING FOR EARTHLY SURVIVAL at Alt Labs / Sodas 2123 in Vilnius, Lithuania. […]
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 […]
27.03.2019
The exclusion of people by infrastructure?
The work of Judith Butler on the structuring of social performativity around the question of ‘the people’ in Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), raises important questions for the role of infrastructure. In particular, regarding this passage on page 6: Paradoxically, as certain forms of recognition are extended, the region of the unrecognizable is preserved and expanded accordingly… The problem of demarcation introduces another dimension to the problem, since not all of the related discursive actions that into recognizing and misreconizing the people are explicit. The operation of their power is to some extent performative. That is, they enact certain […]
12.02.2019
Distance and Proximity
Reading “Histories,” in Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, (2017), I am reminded of the sense of proximity at a distance with which Ned Rossiter describes the experience of infrastructure. While he is discussing the experience and perhaps politics of the data center, as necessarily detached from its users in order that it is seen as an infrastructure for an activity, rather than that activity’s object, this could also be used as a frame for thinking about the imaginaries and politics of the colonial and post-colonial infrastructure of Britain. Specifically this is to ask […]
27.07.2018
Consistency (or indexicality)
How to put Forensic Architecture into context? While Forensic Architecture’s engagement within institutional settings such as art puts pressure on the distinctions between aesthetic possibility and instrumental functionality, it is also possible to contextualise the experiential potential of their work through the infrastructural requirement for consistent and stabile designation of actors in its dynamic systems. I will attempt to develop this way of contextualising an infrastructural practice of art in the case of Forensic Architecture by sketching out how they remodel the ways in which the terms of infrastructural use are determined by indexing consistent and stable users.
29.06.2018
How to think around infrastructural practices: Boundaries, Infrastructure and Figures
In setting out to map the set of conceptual and concrete boundaries or boundary conditions that feature in my proposed study of infrastructure, immediately the problem is how to delimit and define what boundaries this means. Before seeing how these boundary notions might have congruence or dissonance, it’s necessary to find a more precise articulation of the boundary and its function in relation to infrastructure. Even just temporarily. So towards a sketch: if I understand infrastructure as concerned with repeatability (Marina Vishmidt, 2016) and scalability and interoperation (Easterling, 2016), boundaries are to do with the fixity and movability of the […]
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).