Images of Infrastructure

Abstract

"There are few concepts that have accrued the contemporary integrative capacity of “infrastructures” (Star & Bowker, Dourish, Bratton). Although arising in engineering cultures, studies of infrastructures are taking shape to characterise the broad, complex systems that are accreted by networks, mediated by interfaces, constituted only by relations and practices, and that shape conditions for the possibility of technological, artistic and designerly thought and practice. We image-in infrastructures as rational diagrams involving ‘blocks’, ‘cycles’, ‘trees’, ‘bubbles’ and lines. Likewise, evidential photographic perspectives of infrastructural ‘realities’ purport always an essential ‘revealing’ (e.g.: “Where the internet lives,” Jones, Guardian.com, 4 February 2015). In different ways, diagrammatic and photographic images of infrastructures betray their obverse — the noisy un-systematicity that negates infrastructural potentials, creativities and failures. Such images elicit particular technological sublimities, mythologies and reifications — at opposing limits reductively simple or pathologically over-descriptive. Comparing the temporal and spatial relations evoked in images of infrastructure reveals this ‘dark infrastructure’, accounting for what cannot be depicted, that which is always metaphorical and never captured diagrammatically or photographically. Images of infrastructure are examples of the epistemological rifts that present themselves whenever images are deployed as systematically rational or realist in a world of materiality that is perfidious, messy (Law) and itinerant. This paper will describe theories of infrastructure and characterise its contemporary import; its presentation will sampling historical and current representations of infrastructures as a comparative analysis of representations of infrastructure and the techno-aesthetics these project"