The Fog of Systems

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.