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infrastructure, 2024
braden perryman
laser cut paper and archival quality bookbinding PVA glue
dimensions: approx. 18” x 18” x 18”
infrastructure’s poly-symmetrical formwork is a sphere tiled with pentagons, with swept faces containing detailed linework extracted from the city of Blacksburg’s open-source Geographic Information System (GIS) files. the specific extracted GIS layer is the city’s street and sidewalk network - this linework was vectorized, rescaled, and mirrored to generate the resulting patterning. this process results in a sculpture that is at first glance abstract and decorative, but contains geo-tagged visual data linking the sculpture to a specific place (an area on the edge of Virginia Tech’s campus and Blacksburg’s downtown), within the range of a specific time (the early-to-mid 2020’s, before construction inevitably reroutes these sidewalks and streets).
the kaleidoscopic tessellation of these streets as viewed from above mimics the abstraction that happens in the translation of our direct perception of a place to our more conceptual experience of being a part of that place. infrastructure speaks to the reciprocal nature of design decisions: the ways in which we design and build our material environments has ripple-effects, cascading back into our very conceptions of self, other, and the ways in which we inhabit and transport our ‘selves’ through space and time. just as the way in which a doorknob is designed impacts the way hundreds (or thousands) of hands reach for it during its ‘lifetime’ as a small part of a larger building, so too does the way we design our mobility networks (with regards to the safety of intersections, various types of traffic, the prioritization of foot or wheeled traffic over each other, accessibility for those differentially abled, etc.) create complex choreographies that play out in and through our bodies over an extended duration.
- Bruce Mau, Massisve Change
excerpted from the essay ‘Placelessness’
Bélanger investigates the relationship between infrastructure, landscape, and society in his chapter of Is Landscape…?, arguing that “the outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape is the dominance of pathways over settlements … [governments] have transformed spatial relations by establishing lines of force that are privileged over the places and people left outside those lines” (Bélanger 190 – referencing the work of Rosalind Williams). Placelessness and displacement have become accepted facets of human experience - supply chains have become so niche, complex, intertwined, and interdependent that the arterial networks of these systems themselves have become ‘place-defining’ – new ‘placeless places’ are created around the pathing of arterial networks, rather than pathway-networks traditionally serving as augmenting, or connecting, existing places.
The increasing dominance of pathway over place can be attributed to specialization wherein “patterns of remote consumption are further and further removed from the means and processes of production” (Bélanger 191). Consumers are alienated from the sources, materials, and knowledge of production, which often unfolds in remote locations – as that which we consume (such as personal electronics) becomes more complex, sites of production are increasingly distanced from sites of consumption. This removal expedites the destructive nature of distant resource extraction and unfair labor practices, as ‘core consumers’ are unaware of or lack an understanding of how their consumption habits feed exploitative systems in ‘productive peripheries.’ Were production practices unfolding in consumers’ communities, the consequences of their actions would become highly visible, near inescapable, and consumers would object to the very consumption in which they currently engage.
Infrastructure serves as channels along which extraction and reallocation occur, mediating all facets of contemporary life.
Critical approaches to infrastructure argue that “infrastructure is instrumental as a ‘tool and technique of power,’ as Michel Foucault references, deployed as ‘lines of control’ and ‘equipment of power’ by institutions across vast territories from the City to the State” (Bélanger 195). The shift towards more sustainable production and consumption practices is entirely contingent upon our ability to deconstruct, understand, and critique current assumptions about what infrastructure is and could be: no easy task, as “the assumed neutrality of infrastructure is perhaps its most dangerous weapon” (Bélanger 199). Infrastructure that is ‘standard,’ ‘self-similar,’ and ‘universal’ in its design appears neutral at face value – accessible and accessed by all – however, accessibility itself is our dilemma: hyper-accessibility produces overconsumption, and deepens our dependence on external entities for the most basic of necessities, amplifying existing unequitable power/knowledge/class/racial relations. As Colin Yarbrough argues in Paved a Way, infrastructure’s erasure of our attachment to place undermines our sense of community, disproportionately displacing vulnerable communities.
Infrastructure has become so ubiquitous in its mediation of our lives that we have come to take it for granted:
“while we may argue on where infrastructure starts and ends, or how it actually works […] its perverse influence has exerted itself most often to the point of near invisibility lending an appearance of irreversibility. As media, infrastructure completely works us over.” (Bélanger 195).
Drinking water reservoirs, channels, sewage purification and sanitation plants, stormwater management practices, waste removal, storage, and management systems, oil rigs, coal mines, and energy refinement plants, as well as the labor that upholds all these systems, exist ‘at a distance’ from those which ‘consume’ or use these services. Consumers’ closest contact with these systems is the water that comes out of their faucet, the light that turns on with the flip of a switch, the dump truck that takes away the waste bin left at the curb each Tuesday. It’s impossible to imagine a city today operating without these vast and remote superstructures, indeed, considering the consequences of these systems’ collapse is alarming – water wars, widespread pestilence, the uselessness of all electronic/digital technology, and ever-piling waste in the streets. Our cities are now irreversibly integrated with these systems – our ‘places’ have been designed around ‘pathways.’ We have become so deeply entrained within these systems that we cease to question them or envision alternatives. In Design with Nature, McHarg calls this phenomenon ‘the shifting baseline effect,’ where each generation takes for granted a ‘new normal’ based on the circumstances they are born into.
Our fixation on efficiency and stability has blinded us to the inherent instability of our present situation.