Images of Infrastructure
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2016
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06 - Presentation
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Plymouth
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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"
Keywords
infrastructure, photography, diagram
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The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference at the Intersection between Art, Science and Culture
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English
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Yes
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Allen, J. (2016). Images of Infrastructure. The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference at the Intersection between Art, Science and Culture. https://irf.fhnw.ch/handle/11654/34417