A thought on

Extrastatecraft, The Power of Infrastructure Space

Keller Easterling

Another Net is Possible

Rachel O’Dwyer

Wiley Blackwell - Infrastructure and Platforms

“Infrastructure is the physical backbone of a community”.

Infrastructure is divided into “infra” meaning “below” and “structure” meaning “building,” or the arrangement and relations between the parts or elements of something complex, according to Merriam-Webster.

According to the Wall Street Mojo, ”Infrastructure refers to the fundamental physical and technological frameworks that a region or industry establishes for its economy to function properly. All these underlying structures form interrelated systems that make people’s lives easier, sustainable, and more comfortable”.

Besides facilitating transportation, communication, and utilities, infrastructure networks also dictate the shape, law, and positive consequences. As a result, today’s infrastructure is not just pipes and wires, but also everything from the thickness of our credit cards to the Wi-Fi signal that supports all aspects of our everyday lives, including electronic devices, funding partners, foresight and planning for the future, as well as social activities. These arrangements help make daily necessities accessible to everyone in an area.

She claimed that, as a community, we are no longer following the repeatable character and reproducing the lines of the traditional infrastructure definition of our society, instead, we are more tend to build up our societies on the most “prevalent” technology’s formula, and directly according to the text, ”infrastructure is then not the urban substructure, but the urban structure itself—the very parameters of global urbanism.”

In addition, surprisingly according to an article named “Digital Circulation: Media, Materiality, Infrastructure - published in TECHNOSCIENZA - 2016 ”, until fairly recently, there has not been a consistent emphasis on the role of infrastructures in the development of information and communication technologies in media and communication studies. It might be worth mentioning that the impact they possess on each other is of an interrelated nature, and this “fluid” communication between infrastructures, networks, technologies, society, and culture has begun to flow through and across diverse disciplines.

In the past few decades (90s), the Internet and network infrastructures have become increasingly significant in our everyday lives, as well as within the media system, resulting in greater contributions to the technological/digital dimension of infrastructure at the forefront of society.

Today, we are more likely to employ radical technologies into our structures because of our vastly developed technology and increasingly connected society; however, this does not mean we are no longer valued for our architectural aesthetics and urban environments. We are formulating the characteristics of our perfect utopia as it evolves, as self-replicating agents, phenomenological in terms of technology and information, and powerful in terms of network creation.

These two places are an example of a zone phenomenon related to our content in some way. I would like to mention two museums in Abu Dhabi, one is the UAE Museum and the other is the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, as an example, since in terms of shaping the culture of the modern era, it is crucial to understand how technologies/software/media and infrastructure/society/hardware interact with each other. It is very significant that the UAE (as our example) has shifted its perspective towards its culture and environment in comparison with the expectations we had of it, which gives us a reason to rethink and renew these approaches in light of digital technologies for the future. 

Please refer to this interview with Villa Design Architects and engineer Bruno Haploid, is you are interested to know more about the UAE Museum.

And also refer tolling below, which is an interview with the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, if you are interested:

The Region’s Pre-eminent Museum of Global Modern and Contemporary Art.

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- You may also find this interview with Keller Eaterling about “Infrastructure as Landscape” useful!

- Balbi, G., Delfanti, A., & Magaudda, P. (2016). Digital Circulation: Media, Materiality, Infrastructure. An Introduction.TECHNOSCIENZA - Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, One(Double Special Issue), 7–15.