Critical Infrastructure Art: Infrastructure, Hyperobject, Atmospheric Sensing

Abstract

In this thesis I analyse a selection of artistic projects about the internet that belong to an emerging field I propose to call critical infrastructure art. These projects are artistic, critical and take an infrastructural approach to perhaps the most important infrastructure of our modern society: the internet. By developing three concepts from various disciplines as analytical lenses and setting up a context into which the selected artistic projects can be situated, I combine concept-based with contextual research methods in order to answer the central research question: how can critical infrastructure art be defined as a new field through the concepts of ‘infrastructure’, ‘hyperobject’, and ‘atmospheric sensing’? Starting with the concept of infrastructure, I show how projects belonging to this field use methods of infrastructural inversion and intelligibility to make the material realities of the internet sensed and available for critical reflection. Through the concept of a hyperobject I make a case for why understanding the material internet as a whole is an impossible task and how the complexity of grasping such a vast object challenges artists and researchers to focus on making infrastructures appear to users aesthetically and interobjectively. Atmospheric sensing, as the third concept, zooms in on how critical infrastructure art projects do this, arguing that they promote an attunement of the sensing body that allows people to perceive in a pre-reflective manner. Together, I use these three concepts to analyse a selection of artistic projects, making sense of why they are unique and relevant, and, in doing so, shape and define the emerging field of critical infrastructure art, which can offer a frame to understand other projects that take a similar approach. Operationalising the notion of critical infrastructure art in different contexts also contributes to its own development, as I argue that this field can be shaped further by continuing the inquiry into this trend with various other concepts, artistic projects, and methodologies, which I hope artists and researchers will do in future.