My work examines the supportive structures that emerge at the intersection of the ephemeral and infrastructure.
First some definitions:
infrastructure (noun):
“the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.” (from The Oxford English Dictionary)
It refers to things such as the power grid, railroad, highway system, data networks, pipelines, logistical networks, airports, etc.
supportive structure (noun):
infrastructure + the ephemeral (people, stories, effects of time, etc.)
This implies that, from infrastructure, emerge workplaces, organizations, culture, politics, power structures, failure, rituals, standards, jobs, knowledge, etc…
Therefore:
- My work attempts to make visible the hidden networks of people, systems, standards, and practice that shape our world.
- I am interested in stories of people, as told through supportive structures. Almost all actions leave a durable trace in some sort of infrastructure.
- I am interested in work culture–the things that only those “in the field” know; language, rituals and tacit knowledge. For example, the language of police radio dispatchers or air traffic controllers, or hand signals to crane operators.
- I critically analyze what the government calls critical infrastructure–large, pervasive systems that society relies upon; things that few people notice until they break. What stories can be told by looking at the actions of society, aggregated through infrastructure?
- I am interested in how humans contribute to the ostensibly (un)systematic behavior of systems; correcting the errors of machines and sometimes being the source of error themselves. Failure makes the invisible, visible.