Bratton, Benjamin H. and Jeremijenko, Natalie. Suspicious images, latent interfaces. Architectural League of New York, 2008..

He suggests that the recognition of the inherently politicized nature of objects and what he calls quasi-objects forces us to rethink historical distinctions between nature and society, and therefore the political institutions that have artificially excluded material and non-human historical actors. If objects come alive with information in new ways , the possibility of their public voice seems not only possible but in some ways inevitable.” (16. on Latour's "parliament of things")

“...concerning participatory democracy, the production of knowledge is the commons we are concerned about: what kind of knowledge gets supported, for whom, by whom? This really is the political question." (18)

 

“...in participatory democracy, that means restructuring participation from the production of scientific or authoritative data and knowledge to this structured participation.” (20)

“The whole Enlightenment concept that knowledge leads to action has failed drastically!”..(28)..”The knowledge society”

 

//Knowledge is power?

“Yes, because they do relocate the authority, and who has the authority to act. It is not just writing to your local representative in the hope that they might do something that improves air quality around the airport, for instance.” …”The act of voting in itself becomes an act of transferring of one’s own sovereignty.” (30)



"The interesting role of the artist in this context, as a kind of politician in the framework of the material public, is one where the artist stands in as the non-expert, the everyman, counter to the institutions of expertise (of the scientist, the engineer, the architect)."

"As the "missing expert", what is the role of the artist for creating politically legitimate forms of knowledge as minor sciences " (35)


(36/37) on agency of the interface vs consumer purchasing power

A few years back, I noticed a book titled, Tubes, that immediately stood out by its graphic depiction of a physical reality of what the author was claiming to be the internet. The internet, in basest terms, is made up of pulses of light (running through some fiber optic cables). It exists. "It has a physical reality, an essential infrastructure, a "hard bottom", as Henry David Thoreau said of Walden Pond" (Blum, Andrew. Tubes).


By "making visible the invisible", academics like Andrew Blum, along with a growing number of artists and designers, are looking to further identify the natural phenomena around us. While demystifying natural systems can help us redesign more meaningful connections, Shannon Mattern argues that there is a fine line in this act of observation and categorization. While in an earlier essay she makes a promising argument for those in the practice of fieldwork, a follow up essay that was just recently published questions the fieldworker with its tendencies to be looking through "colonialist binoculars".  While social practices of documenting and rebranding infrastructures can arguably lead to motivation for activism and a possible restructuring of these systems, there is also a tendency for many to alienate the subject or "specimen" from us. The age old methods of taxonomy are known for sterilizing and reducing nature to objects that seem to bare no connection to its larger ecosystem. As the Romantic naturalist and painter said in reply to Goethe's request for a commissioned catalog of clouds, "‘to force the free and airy clouds into a rigid order and classification’ would damage their expressive potential and even ‘undermine the whole foundation of landscape painting.’”" The importance to reflect on our ideologies behind our methods is what Shannon Mattern stresses in her conclusion to the essay titled, "Cloud and Field".

The sound artist, Christina Kubisch, is one good example of someone interested in "making the invisible visible" (Infrastructure Tourism). While she may be encouraging us to probe the urban landscape as does reductive science, there is also the intention for the listener to be more aware and present in their environment. The sound work, "Electical Walks" involves listening through wireleess headphones that can respond to electromagnegtic waves in the environment and make them audible. In a sense, this sort of extray hearing is an experiment with the idea of connecting otherwise separate systems and suggesting a physicality to everyday unnoticed apparatus/objects around us.