Infrastructure

An interweaving of technical objects/material hardware, social organisation, and knowledge practices?

Any in the panoply of ‘built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space.’ (Larkin 2013)

Originally denoted a ‘plurality of integrated parts’, deployed to ‘support some higher-order project.’ (Carse, 2017) Relations of depth and hierarchy? In this sense:

infrastructure referred primarily to the organizational work required before railroad tracks could be laid: either establishing a roadbed of substrate material (literally beneath the tracks) or other work functionally prior to laying tracks like building bridges, embankments, and tunnels. — Ashley Carse, “Keyword: Infrastructure — How a humble French engineering term shaped the modern world” (2017)

Matter that facilitates the movement/circulation of other matter?

Or is it that infrastructures are the relations between things, rather than the things themselves?

Defining the boundaries of a given infrastructure is an interpretive act; what counts as infrastructure depends on the questions being asked. Infrastructure is not simply “out there,” but emerges through categorisation.

Infrastructures as sites where competing visions of society, what is good, and dreams of the future play out? Semiotic/aesthetic vehicles addressing and interpellating addressees. (Larkin 2013)

Multi-infrastructural assemblages, heterogenous infrastructural configurations?

Events rather than stable structures? (Jensen 2017)

Infrastructures as ontological experiments (Jensen and Morita 2015, 2017), which simultaneously ‘integrate a multiplicity of disjunctive elements and spin out new relations between them’ (2017).

Infrastructural inversion

Bringing the background into the foreground; shifting attention from the activities and processes supported by an infrastructure to those which enable infrastructures to function.

Can be a conceptual/analytic strategy, an empirical/ethnographic approach to study naturally occurring disruptions, or a generative designerly strategy.

Backlinks

: Practical ontology