critical infrastructure lab

Talk in the panel BP3: Reimagining Data (in Bangalore location), Friday 09:00 CEST, 12:30 IST, room B-RM R305.

The proposed panel brings together scholars and artists for methodological reflections on data walk as an empirical method and social practice. Data walk as a method emerged recently as a creative method employed by academics and artists for a variety of purposes from public engagement and project-based education to artistic research, or as a means of data collection for straightforward empirical studies. Loitering in urban public spaces of data infrastructures as a way to check our assumptions about more abstract notions of data power is the sensitivity that may connect these approaches. Nonetheless, the sensitivities go back historically and philosophically to the works of Walter Benjamin on the flaneur, the Situationist International on psychogeography, and to hacker practices such as wardriving.

After the fervent period of experimentation that describes the last few years, does it make sense now to discuss classical methodological issues such as canonisation, normative criteria, or the affordances and limitations of the interpretative power of the data walk methodology? In other words, what is a programmatic data walk? What is a successfully performed data walk? What data walks are suitable to address what epistemological questions? Which uses are there for data walks in academic life and artistic research?

A symposium on the topic is to be held Sprint 2025 at the University of Utrecht, bringing the results of the discussion at the data power conference to dedicated practitioners.

More about the Data Power conference and the programme.

Propose contribution!

It is clear that 5G makes a difference, but for a variety of factors it is far from settled what difference that difference makes. This combined format open panel seeks to convene new conversations about the transformations accompanying 5G, both to the information environment and network topology.

At the intersection of geopolitical struggle between global superpowers, domestic panics about viral conspiracy theories, and rapidly changing network infrastructures, 5G technology has emerged as a unique object of concern and contestation. This combined format open panel invites participants to present new research and engage in roundtable discussion on the transformations affected by the rollout of 5G devices and telecommunication networks. Such changes are broadly distributed and uniquely suited to the modalities offered by STS. They encompass global trade tensions, novel design choices by standard setters, and sustainable development goals, as well as renewed campaigns to define the place of wireless technology in contemporary society. To adequately address these transformations and the challenges they bring with them, critical scholarship on 5G must navigate between the quicksand of conspiratorial disinformation and the mirage of heavily financialized technosolutionism. This panel seeks to gather together a variety of researchers working in diverse locales on different aspects of 5G, in order to identify common obstacles, share collective insights, and advance the vocabulary of critical 5G research. Of special concern are the material contexts in which 5G technologies are situated, the workings of power in telecommunication networks, and their potentials for democratic engagement. What can the socio-technical differences 5G makes tell us about moments of transition? With this panel, we hope to make 5G matter as more than a marketing fad or lurid conspiracy theory and transform the terrain of 5G research in STS and related fields. We welcome proposals for paper presentations, workshops, and dialogue sessions.

Panel on the conference website

Conference website

Propose contribution!

The world is burning, but in and from the ashes a new world will be built. A new world needs new ideologies to inform subjectivity, organization, and materiality. In this panel we will interrogate experimental approaches to infrastructural ideologies that center limits, redistribution, and reduction.

The climate crisis, planetary scarcity, human limitations, and (geo)political conflicts force us to rethink transnational communication infrastructures to overcome their extractive, colonial, and imperialist tendencies. As policymakers, researchers, citizens, artists, users, and industry, it becomes increasingly hard to know and act in and through increasingly complex, layered, and entangled networks. To ensure that new infrastructures serve the public interest and contribute to social, economic, and environmental stability, we see an urgent need to develop alternative propositions for sustainable and equitable internet and digital technologies. Specifically, in this combined open panel we are responding to the need to articulate new ideologies, set a positive agenda, to inform subjectivity, organization, and materiality. In this combined format open panel we will interrogate theoretical, empirical, and speculative approaches to infrastructural ideologies that center limits, redistribution, and reduction over extraction, profit, and capital.

Since the internet has become the scaffolding of everyday life, there is a clear need to think and build beyond the principles of openness, interconnections, and networks. Now is the time to develop and prototype narratives about internet infrastructures that center people and the planet over profit and capital. Because an ideology cannot consist of text alone, this combined open panel will combine academic presentations, with a workshop and an interactive immersive experience.

This panel builds on the open panel ‘Overcoming Sociotechnical Imaginaries: infrastructural ideologies and materialities?’ organized at 4S 2023 in Honolulu and is in conversation with a growing body of work across – but not limited to – STS, media studies, infrastructure studies, and critical internet studies.

We encourage a diversity of submissions to help think through the complexity of today and develop new ideologies. These submissions can include but are not limited to, academic papers, essays, speculative fiction, solar punk, technology, code, and artistic interventions and installations.

Panel on the conference website

Conference website

This workshop, organized by the project B02 „Control/Space“ at the Collaborative Research Center 1265 at TU Berlin, explores different spatial changes and dynamics of the Internet infrastructure using the notion of refiguration, which presents a concept of tensions between four key spatial figures and spatial logics: the place, the territory, the network, and the route. These tensions allow for the explanation of key conflicts in contemporary modernity. Conference book with full programme available.

Maxigas (critical infrastructure lab): Media ecologies, infrastructures and environments: Infrastructure walk as a methodological approach

Or, things we learned from infrastructure walks.

The critical infrastructure lab held a series of “infrastructure walks” in
Amsterdam and Berlin, exploring the visibility of digital infrastructures
deployed in public spaces. I situate the methodological approach in
relation to other practices addressing key conflicts in contemporary urban
life that immerse observers within the spatial figures and spatial logics
of urban radioscapes. Subsequently, I highlight the methodological
advantages of the infrastructural walk compared to similar approaches.
Then, I report on the empirical and theoretical results obtained from the
walks. In short, the infrastructure walk experience is a good basis for
rethinking the key concepts of media infrastructures, media environments
and media ecologies.

Industrial standards can be mobilised as an analytical grid to structure
the urban experience of radioscapes. The insights thus generated
correspond to counter-mapping the spatial control exercised over and
through the electromagnetic spectrum in urban spaces. Such work exposes
the reconfiguration of power relationships in the city through emerging
technologies and legacy protocols. Infrastructure walks address the
question of what media technologies may mean “after all”, that is in the
context of the life world, lived experiences and action possibilities of
end users as embodied citizens.

Slides download

Hands-on research day about smart cities with Maxigas from the critical infrastructure lab for qualitative and quantitative researchers. Featuring datasets on programmable infrastructures such as 5G and its implementation in the OpenRAN software/hardware project. Discuss and analyse how infrastructural ideologies materialise in code bases, critique and propose alternative infrastructural futures!

Feel free to drop by any time.

friday 24 november 2023, 12:00 – 16:00

deakin downtown, melbourne, australia