Navigating the Fog of System Complexity

Description

Highways, antennas, containers, storehouses, pipes, submarine cables, sensors: the word infrastructure usually refers to Òmatter that enables the movement of other matterÓ, the underlying organized structures and mediators that support human exchanges and the value people associate with them. However, simple observation suggests that something increasingly valuable is happening not simply ÒaboveÓ, but both within and outside, as well as in-between our so-called infra-structures while humans design and inhabit them in ever more convoluted ways, investing their emotions in them and using them to measure, automate and build world visions and expectations about the future. This essay is an introduction to artistic methodologies that map, tour, stage, dissect, tell, visualize, tear open, restitch and embody the composite networked structure that we sometimes call our Society, sometimes the Internet, and sometimes Planet Earth. Finding alternative ways to inhabit it, perform or run it allows us to discover more about these infrastructures and ourselves within them.

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