I arrange things into artworks, including paint, wood, plastic, raspberry pi, people, words, dialogues, arduino, sensors, web tech, light and code.
I use words other people have written to help guide these projects, so I read as often as I can. Most of what I read is literature (fiction) or nonfiction on philosophy, art theory, ethics and technology.
Also on Mastodon.
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The world is more astonishing, more miraculous and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In …
A friend printed out a chapter of this book for last year and I loved it. So I guess I started reading it then. But now I have a copy that I bought in a nice bookshop.
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, and all around us
Infrastructure …
JM Coetzee's 'Jesus' trilogy is a series of novels-as-philosophy. They take place in an unfamiliar world, one where it is hard to tell if the people in it are ghosts or something more physical. In the first two books, the scene is set as the central protagonist Simón becomes a father figure for a young boy David, and later finds him a mother figure in Inés. Their travails in a world that seems ethereal, almost without violence except for sudden extreme acts, and led by bureaucracy is magically inventive.
This third book is the best of the trilogy. It is brief and a very quick read, and brings together some of the ideas Coetzee has been working on both in this trilogy and throughout his career. This includes the idea of being an outsider within a system, and how this can affect decisions and behaviours of those around you. Each …
JM Coetzee's 'Jesus' trilogy is a series of novels-as-philosophy. They take place in an unfamiliar world, one where it is hard to tell if the people in it are ghosts or something more physical. In the first two books, the scene is set as the central protagonist Simón becomes a father figure for a young boy David, and later finds him a mother figure in Inés. Their travails in a world that seems ethereal, almost without violence except for sudden extreme acts, and led by bureaucracy is magically inventive.
This third book is the best of the trilogy. It is brief and a very quick read, and brings together some of the ideas Coetzee has been working on both in this trilogy and throughout his career. This includes the idea of being an outsider within a system, and how this can affect decisions and behaviours of those around you. Each character plays a role, and their role doesn't really change throughout the books – there is no extreme 'growth' or 'progression'.
In this book, David becomes ill after moving voluntarily into an orphanage, and his unique beauty helps to create a cult around him. His role is the 'Jesus' of the story, and his unique way of repositioning the world offers us as readers a chance to also rethink how embedded we are in our own structures and ontologies. In the end it is hard not to relate to the protagonist Simón and his more banal, practical view of the world, and I believe this is what Coetzee intends. Yet he too has unusual quirks and makes decisions that seem to contradict his otherwise pragmatic demeanour. The final words (and other references throughout) pay homage to Don Quixote, a more than fitting link in the maybe-imaginary world that Coetzee has created.
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
Not thinking about infrastructure, ever, is an indication that it's doing its job of individually supporting the rest of our lives. Infrastructural systems themselves are a form of care, made possible both by technologies and by the daily work of humans. But just as we still want to recognize, appreciate and value the human caregiving labor that makes our lives possible, we need to do that for infrastructural systems too, including the people whose skill and labor keeps them functioning.
— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 173)
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
What defines infrastructure is precisely that we don't have to think about it. It's not invisible so much as it's transparent — we see through it to the tasks it enables.
— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 172)
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
Deliberately and maliciously disrupting the electrical grid on a medium to large scale is surprisingly challenging. Paradoxically, the same thing that makes the electrical grid and other infrastructural systems vulnerable — that they are distributed across and embedded into the landscape — also means that they are generally designed for oversight and redundancy.
— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 148)
Mentioned in a talk at the Forum for Artistic Research in 2024 so added it here
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
Wealth might make it possible to pay people and communities to accept harms; conversely, the less wealth that the recipients have, the more likely they are to accept the terms. But that doesn't mean the terms are fair. Worse, it means that existing inequalities are compounded.
— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 134)
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
One of the reasons why I appreciate the Dinorwig Power Station so much is because of the decisions made to minimize harms, like rehoming the local fish or burying the transmission lines so as not to spoil the view. What this reveals is that the beneficiaries of Electric Mountain and the community that would be negatively affected were considered to be largely the same people: the British public, plugging their kettles in and spending [->] bank holiday weekends at Snowdonia National Park. This overlap provides an incentive to mitigate the negative effects of the project...
— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 132 - 133)
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Chachra repeatedly uses "Electric Mountain" as an example of considered design. It is very like Turlough Hill in Ireland, which I once lived near and visited regularly: A renewable reservoir built in the 1960s inside a mountain, but carefully considered to ensure minimal impact to wildlife, landscape and people.
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
If infrastructural systems are a physical manifestation of social cooperation, that also means they're a physical manifestation of the values and norms for the group. So as part of the transition from a service to a utility, this idea of what's "normal" also undergoes a transition.
— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 125)
"How to Eat is the second in a Parallax's series of how-to titles by Zen …
Started reading this in the morning together with the household, to take more time each day to remind ourselves of the value of our food.
About the American, French and Russian revolutions.
I always need more Arendt in my life. This book was quoted somewhere recently so I got it from the library.
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
Network effects mean that universal provision has the [->] potential to be both cheaper and better for each of its users; the fact that everyone has access to it is almost a side effect. This also explains why the provision of other basic human needs, like food and housing, isn't considered to be infrastructure: if your neighbors aren't adequately housed, it doesn't negatively affect your household in the same way as it does if they don't have adequate sanitation. And unlike electricity or telecommunications provision, your groceries generally don't get cheaper if your neighbors eat too. Even though food and housing security for all is a public good, it's "only" in the sense of having social value, not in the economic sense. I found this to be something of a grim realization because of how far it went toward explaining how Americans can take universal water provision, electricity, and roads mostly for granted while ensuring that everyone in their community is fed and housed remains an ongoing political and social problem.
— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 108 - 109)
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A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
Having some understanding of how airlines work has served me in good stead, but the first step is in learning to see collective systems as, well, collective systems. I'm part of it as a passenger, but so are the staff, whose behavior and flexibility within the system is likely even more constrained since their livelihood depends on it. I've only witnessed a "Do you know who I am?"-style meltdown at a gate a couple of times. They're rare because most adult humans, even when they're upset, do understand that their needs or desires don't outweigh those of a passenger jet full of people. It's the same idea as "You're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic." We can consciously sidestep the narrative solipsism of thinking we must be the hero of the story (or that anyone is) and the attendant fallacy that the systems are there to serve us individually or specifically, rather than as part of a collective.
— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 88)
