Infrastructure

Following the gravestone of a young Jewish woman used as the ballast for a ship, political scientist Laleh Khalili follows the geography of ports and trade routes, mapping the infrastructure of imperialism and its relation to logistics to create an image of the technosphere as it expands geographically along its many ports.

As a result of inaccessible or unreliable power grids, petrol generators are an essential part of the energy supply in Nigeria. Ethnographer Brian Larkin explores the consequences of these generators and their parasitical relationship to more formal infrastructures through the presence of noise and pollution, demonstrating how their ubiquity creates a type of ambient space.

In this lecture, Africanist Keith Breckenridge recognizes a particular mode of capitalism currently developing on the African continent: population registries based on biometric identification technologies that serve as a credit risk scoring tool for financial firms. He describes how such privatized biometric data keeping and processing transforms citizenship under the pressure of rapid demographic changes and states incapable of administering their population.

The universal standardization of materials, sizes and processes have enabled the technosphere to scale to its present scope, building intermodal infrastructures, logistics and protocols that contour the globe. Journalist and cultural scientist Alexander Klose portends how the blackboxing of global goods and data also opened up a Pandora's box of psychic fears and anxieties.

In its hard materiality, infrastructure is often depicted as concourses of metal and wire, steel and concrete. But how is it that these materials, and the interconnections they make apparent, manage ephemera like our attention or our responsiveness. Media scholar Lisa Parks describes her phenomenological method of understanding what is at stake when we speak about and imagine media infrastructures.

What does it mean to share or feel another's embodied experience? Experience designer Lizzie Stark explores this idea through an anthropotechnic of “live action role-play” (larp) – a gaming format that allows one to improvise different roles in various scenarios as a means to better understand the situation of others and themselves.

As environments increasingly become computational so does computation become environmental. Tech-driven practices of environmental monitoring such as citizen-based air quality measurements and sensor networks generate material-political worlds through “creaturing data.” Jennifer Gabrys shows how the instrumentation of the planet with sensor devices produces specific forms of concretizations that have a life of their own and contour the earthly space anew.

With satellites and their debris now orbiting the planet, it serves to explore this beyond-stratosphere infrastructure and how it monitors the technosphere’s more terrestrial happenings. Environmental historian Johan Gärdebo introduces us to this outermost layer of the technosphere and discusses the consequences of such verticality in “environing” the Earth.

At the bottom of the history of communication infrastructures lays a history of the forest. Media scholar Birgit Schneider takes us into the history of early submarine telegraphy cables, moving through their material construction and the subsequent organic and inorganic entanglements that connect them.

High frequency trading is usually known for its ability to ultimately virtualize value but as sociologist Donald MacKenzie shows, these valuations are also a consequence of very real and non-abstract infrastructures. Looking at the cables and antennae that bring the networked data between different trading floors into correspondence, MacKenzie depicts the time-critical infrastructure of automated finance.

Traditionally, urban planning and architecture carry a form of utopian optimism for a livable city with them. Yet, all too often infrastructural dreams turn into nightmares and the skyward ideals of a towered cityscape turns into the symbolism of degraded holes. In a narrative that takes off from an architectural apprentice and the cast-in-concrete spirits that he called, photographer Sammy Baloji and anthropologist Filip de Boeck weave photos and text into a construction of hopes, failures, and social complexities nested into the material existence of postcolonial Kinshasa.

Sensing is an integral part of collecting data in the field. As apparatuses become more refined, they increase the capacity and precision of data that can be collected in even the most forbidding of zones. Historian of science Etienne Benson describes how the increasingly complex infrastructure of sensing is altering the experience of fieldwork, the persona of the scientist, and the nature of the knowledge that is produced.

MIT's Sensible City Lab project Underworlds attempts to provide better sensory capacities for understanding bacterial and viral activities in sewer systems to better serve the cities that rely on them. Technosphere Magazine talked with Professor Carlo Ratti and Eric Alms about urban infrastructures, biochemical layers and real-time disease surveillance.

With new urban spatial products proliferating globally, subsequent forms of advertising these products have emerged to lure in global investment. But what are the selling points? In her video collage, architect Keller Easterling pieces together the strange tropes and idealizations characterizing these sellable traits raising questions as to who or what these cities of the future are for.