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 […]

My feelings on the 2019 Turner prize and the nominees’ (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani) request to be recognised collectively move between its challenging of artistic individualism and its acceptance. The artists did accept the terms of the prize — both nomination, and now all winning and taking that forward. True, they will split the prize, but they did not jeopardise the possibility that their nomination would not be converted in to the cachet. True, they leveraged this position to challenge the terms of the prize, forming an alliance or platform against which the judges […]

What does infrastructure institute? One thing that can be said today is that it is possible to believe in anything, to trust nothing (but what one believes), and that Politics is increasingly seen as impotent in the face of large infrastructural issues (Fake news, social media, Brexit, Climate change, etc.). I’d suggest that this has to do with the specifically neoliberal variant of global infrastructural development that has accompanied the post-War and post-colonial period. With its fantasies of “seamless interoperability,” (Rossiter, 2017, xvii) at the conceptual level and — at a structural level — the structural results of the realisation […]

For a while now I have been thinking through the question of how one might experience or attempt to perform agency in an infrastructural setting. That is how can we think through a similar negotiation to that of the inside / outside of the institution in infrastructural terms, when infrastructure presents itself as a theoretically total object? (To begin with, this ideal of totality is easily dispelled: either scaling back to include whomever does not get counted as a proper user as far as an infrastructure is concerned (such as the border); or by simply considering the way that infrastructures […]

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 […]

How to think beyond the rationalised / rationalising frame of infrastructures as they are generally characterised from systems perspectives? Speaking on the Talking Politics podcast (28 November 2018) about fear, faith, hope and religion, US philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes an important case for the importance of the non-rational when considering how institutions might structure the political and its boundaries, especially when considering forms of rationalisation such as policy. Discussing the question of faith in the future in situations where the widespread practicing of religion has become absent, particularly in Europe, the host David Runciman points out a view “from inside […]

This one is a little more self-reflective. It’s all I have time for and is an attempt to find a way out a problem. The problem is how to make writing move with my subject, which itself is unclear, and which is moving and thin: infrastructure and art.