A long-form essay about the challenge of grasping the complexity of planetary-scale computation.

While theory provides ingenious models to do so (and I draw on thinkers like Bratton, Parikka or Steyerl, among others), I suggest that a new generation of artists offer interesting perspectives about the "accidental megastructure" and the novel frictions and conflicts that it brings forward. So in this text I bring the reader with me in a little journey into artistic strategies that map, tour, stage, dissect, tell, visualize, tear open, restitch and embody the composite networked structure that we sometimes call Society, sometimes the Internet. And sometimes, just Planet Earth.

[ A quick and silly author's note: I wrote the first version of this essay in a week-long writing spree in the summer of 2019. It was meant to be a chapter of an introductory book about art, science and technology that (fortunately) never saw the light. I grew fond of it and developed it into a long form. While working on it, I realized that writing is some sort of performing art that require quick reflexes and an adrenaline-ridden alignment of body and mind. Which means that the book is not a collection of solid and never changing thougts, but rather a time traveling experience into the author's past self. I hope the reader may find it useful, in spite of or thanks to that. ]

Highways, antennas, containers, storehouses, pipes, submarine cables, sensors: the word infrastructure usually refers to “matter that enables the movement of other matter”, 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 “above”, 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.

First edition is sold out.
Second edition is available as pdf and print on demand at Aksioma.org