Perhaps it is the fresh eyes of being somewhere new, but perhaps it is what I always feel on continental Europe, but one thing its hard not to notice the emphasis in the built environment on supporting living well out in the open. This might be the prevailance of trees, of manually built/scaled street infrastructure (steps, walls, pavements, built of hand-sized rock) and the low-managed edge spaces and greenery in this infrastructure. But it is also the adventure parks, the river swimming infrastructure (changing cabins), open access forest with foraging minutes from the city, the BBQs. True, other cities have […]

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. […]

Really basic draft of an art stack, a base layer for a workshop, and centring on the question of conditions for scalability for the exhibition: why it is required to be, and how it is kept in certain scalable forms — and how we might be begin to work on other scales, scalar patterns, and interrelations than those which determine repeatable, scalable forms such as the exhibition and art works. Addressing these questions are central to the ability of art to intervene on infrastructural imaginaries, and assemblages.  Required for context: – Anna Tsing’s work on scalability: the ability to expand […]

In this working diagram I attempt to explore how we might model (at a level of great of abstraction) the performative practicing of infrastructure. (It is developed in chapter 2.) This model is a departure from approaches to infrastructure that look to represent or describe anthropological effects, material/media conditions and consturctions for infrastructure, or to assemblages to abstract and describe infrastructure in ways that tie manifestation of infrastructure to specific conditions at the cost of a general model; looking to practice as a means of jointing these fields and opening up the knotty question of what it means to invent […]

In this series of posts I am publishing/sharing some working and research diagrams which are helpful in articulating some key problems and methodological questions when researching infrastructure. While they relate to general questions when studying infrastructure, I am especially interested in how they can be and indeed must be developed for the increasingly complex, systemic infrastructures of staging, publicising, meaning making and mediation as they interpenetrate with the cultural infrastructures of the field of art, design and architecture. These problems are familiar, if not fully discussed in the frame described above, and include: The problem of indicators and levels (Star, […]

An area for further research is the use and importance of the timeline as an aesthetic, conceptual and functional device in infrastructural aesthetics. That is where there is an attempt to represent connection, causation and perhaps correlation of infrastructural effects and fields. This might be seen in the construction of an imaginary as a defining or traumatic event unfolds, as with Group Material’s AIDS Timeline. To construct a narrative of events from within a field of information which is not yet assembled, or which is assembled to convey a particular version of events, as it is used by Forensic Architecture in […]