1Object Worlds, Infrastructural Relationalities

We often encounter design as that which structures the everyday, from individual objects of use to the layout of urban systems that provide pathways to organize our lives. Here, I begin with the design of objects since it is at the level of design that key decisions are made regarding the future relationality of these objects, including the degree of their connectivity, their openness to reappropriation, the choice of raw materials and sourcing strategies, the parameters of production, the scope and structure of value chains. All of these decisions affect the way in which the object operates. And one way of comprehending these interdependencies, of bringing into focus the “total configurations” (Rams) around these objects, is to explore the perspective of an object’s constitution – its creation and endowment with a wide range of properties, its insertion into different architectures and ecologies.

To focus on objects is not meant to simply shift our perspective toward “the object” but to facilitate a design-driven comprehension and exploration of infrastructures in relational terms. Analytically, the question is not only what an infrastructure is – its concrete materiality, its situation, but when, including the material conditions of possibility of its operation, since “infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept. It becomes infrastructure in relation to organized practices. … Thus we ask, when – not what – is an infrastructure” (Star/Ruhleder 1996: 113). Such a concern for the contingency of infrastructure “de-emphasizes things or people as simply causal factors in the development of such systems; rather, changes in infrastructural relations become central” (ibid.). To focus on the when of infrastructure not only calls attention to the complexity of the social worlds of which they are a part, but also to the possibilities for reuse and reappropriation. Hacking, for examples, is less an act of infrastructural transformation than an attempt to affect a shift in the social world (in this case, alternative conceptions of intellectual property as always-already-common) framing specific infrastructural ensembles: “the hacker makes something new out of property that belongs to everyone in the first place” (Wark 2013; Powell 2016). We move from exploring the object from the perspective of its distribution to the contingent relationalities of infrastructures.

When we explore how objects affect our individual and collective agency, we have to take into account both their discreetness and their distribution across vast systemic architectures. Such an methodological interest in “scaling our senses” (Zehle 2015), an interest in shifting analytical attention from individual objects to the socio-technological assemblages that constitute them, is ultimately related to the question of use. How can we act, what kinds of usage are possible, and how do these possibilities define and determine our agency more generally? What comes into view as we explore distribution as a condition is the “distributedness” (Veran 2016) of our own agency, a comprehension of agency in terms of the material continuity of effects across vast spatial and temporal scales (Latour 2014). All of the decisions that affect (and govern) the constitution of objects are potential sites of intervention and collaborative creation to reshape not only these objects, but the relationalities of the infrastructures through and within which they exist and operate. To affect the shift of an object from one infrastructural constellation into another is easier said than done. Yet while fair foods are still far more common than fair phones, for example, disciplines such as ecological economics or systems toxicology suggest that the interest in comprehending objects from within such “total configurations” is already changing the way we organize research – including research on media architectures.

2xAmbient Media, Ecologies of Practice

What media architecture research can do as it reflects on the emergence of ambient media is, above all, to remind us of the extent to which we are, and will continue to be, attached to material worlds. Instead of culture-nature dichotomies that designate distinct spheres of experience, there is only a continuity of material effects (Zehle 2016). Such a focus on continuity is shared across a variety of urban ecologies (Mostafavi/Doherty 2010), comprehensions of architecture as dynamic organization of matter (Abraham 2015), and the analytical approaches to “ecologies of practice”, understood as the process of “inventing systemic and dialectical units of analysis” (Star 2016).

Research on media architectures exist in this context, from open technology exercises that focus on environmental monitoring to engage citizens in the politics of urban development (https://smartcitizen.me, https://arrayofthings.github.io to the large-scale collaborative interventions of “city making” (Brynskov et al. 2014; Hemmersam et al. 2015). Open to diverse communities, these processes of collaborative prototyping offer a form of communication above and beyond language (Gale/Ruecker 2010). The design of objects to facilitate specific forms of collaboration can be described in terms of the engineering of “boundary objects”, i.e. “objects that are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites” and facilitate cooperation across social worlds (Star 1989; Bowker and Star 1999), but also as “boundary-negotiating objects” that shift these boundaries (Lee 2007; Halpern et al. 2013; Pennington 2010). Acknowledging that collaborative design should itself be approached as a distributed activity (Bjørn/Boulus-Rødje 2015), such efforts are also open to the multiplicity of futures and the co-creation of speculative scenarios (Dunne/Ruby 2013, Forlano/Mathew 2014). The design of objects plays a key role in these dynamics of collaboration, and they exemplify the shift in focus that takes the constitution of objects as its point of departure not simply to create new objects, but to comprehend worlds and generate visions of system design (Dubberly/Pangaro 2015). In a sense, this is media architecture research as a form of reverse engineering – an invitation to explore the constitution of these objects, explore the worlds that made them, and comprehend the rules that govern their operation.

3Urban Scenographies, Imperial Imaginaries

Whether electricity, light, glass, or mobile communication networks, infrastructures have always operated as material conditions of possibilities for new modes of cognition and perception, changing the complex relation between the demands for the mise-en-scene of economic and political power and the design of architectures to operate as stages for such display (McQuire 2006, Coutard/Rutherford 2015). As we configure our communication devices for individual use, we also locate ourselves in configurations so expansive that they call for a new understanding of experience, a space of experience that is neither exclusively social nor technological, neither exclusively human nor non-human. It is through the sensing of the scope of this space of experience that we develop a comprehension of the political, of the epistemological and material conditions of possibility that can facilitate or foreclose specific instances of politic intervention. Which is why, if media architecture research is to reflect on agency and the possibilities of different kinds of politics, it will have to be attentive to the structural transformation of use. How do we compare the exercise of individual and social freedom, how do we decide what extent of co-design we wish to be part of our understanding of use? The question of agency is directly linked to the question of interfaces. If media architectures confront us with new possibilities for participation, it is the design of interfaces – from mobile technologies open to re-appropriation and reuse to commons-based models of self-organization linking local sites in translocal networks – that structures our sense and scope of participation.

The “becoming-environmental” (Zehle 2016) of media is not a self-organizing process, a peaceful dynamic of technological progress that simply unfolds. It has always been a process of conflict and contestation. The history of informatization, for example, is by no means limited to the short historical horizon of the digital but deeply intertwined with the installation of imperial infrastructures, from undersea cables connecting colonial economies and metropolitan consumers (Mattelart 2003) to satellite networks triggering the desire for cultural self-determination and the design of a New World Information and Communication Order (Zehle 2012). These processes are imperial in more then one sense; while they have often been tied to processes of economic or cultural colonization, they are also imperial in that they cut across the conceptual and political boundaries of sovereignty understood in statist terms (Stoler 2006). While urban research has its academic origins in analyses of the dynamics of modernization in Europe and North America, attention to the “coloniality” (Mignolo/Escobar 2010) of these developments, e.g. the complex relationships of domination and exploitation whose reverberations continue to resound across the terrain of contemporary geopolitics, can assist media architecture research in contextualizing contemporary corporate visions of planetary connectivity.

While considering broader historical, geopolitical contexts makes research more complex, it also makes it more exciting: rather than assuming that we can operate with a model of agency and subjectivity as always already given, we attend to the parameters and processes of its constitution. As our own experience of media architectures affects our research, such research can therefore not only be framed in historical terms, as the continuation of a long process of reflecting on what happens to us as we inhabit our cities. It has to include a sense of contingency of our own analytical awareness, its scope and situatedness. We can, for example, continue to refer to the proudly imperial architectures established in the process of “Haussmannization” as paradigmatic media architectures, as they continue to guide our gaze toward the symbols of empire and have historically anchor a new sense of imperial citizenship in our experience of the everyday (Jordan 1995). Or we take the seemingly aleatory architectures of “arrival cities” (Sanders 2011) as alternative frame of reference. Collaboratively created by the people moving through them, these arrival cities are neither centrally planned nor stable in their architectural constellations. As more and more people experience the city as a space of transit rather than final destination, they engage new arrivals in a becoming-urban that cuts across the analytical dichotomies of city and country. These two examples illustrate different assumptions of who gets to determine and design the parameters of public experience. A ‘minor’ metropolitanism, attentive to the mise en scene of sovereign power as well as the subterranean practices that shape and sustain urban experience, suggests we focus on the latter, complementing canonical narratives of urbanization to come to terms with the actuality of urban life under the condition of distribution.

4Working Futures, Social Machines

As neo-industrial paradigms (Industry 4.0, Industrial Internet) refashion our understanding of the factory, places of production are effectively turned into media architectures, suggesting we explore the encounter between current shifts in infrastructural relationalities and the future of work. This is not as much of a conceptual leap as one might expect. On the contrary, the very idea of ecologies of practice implies attention to the structural transformation of work: “The constitution of anyone’s work is a mixture of human and nonhuman which can be analyzed ecologically. But the nature and quality of that composition will reflect back on the organization of work in important ways. … To change the ecological mix with respect to my work organization means changing the organization in which I work. It is not merely an exercise of imagination, but a real political risk” (Star 2015). The analytical focus on work is not a matter of aligning media architecture research with labor studies; it is already contained in our own situation within the human-non-human assemblages that frame what we do.

In this context, it is maybe time to revisit the “Durkheim Test” suggested by Star to guide the design of boundary objects, “a test adequate to meet the challenges of distributed open systems” (Gießmann 2015). Because distributed systems can neither be tested locally nor assessed in their totality, “the very concept of the test must change in order to deal with such systems”, i.e. a test that “would be communal, irreducible, distributed, and dynamic” (ibid.). “In order to understand the acceptance and use of a machine in and by a community, that community must be actively present as it evolves” (ibid.). During the decades since the initial publication of these suggestions, methods of citizen science, open and social innovation have been mainstreamed and even begun to transform the way we talk about innovation and our collective futures (De Waag 2015). But the “Durkheim Test” also speaks to the blurring boundaries of labor and the exercise of citizenship: “In an open, evolving system, the boundaries between design and use, between technology and user, between laboratory and workplace, necessarily blur” (ibid.). To conduct research from within distributed systems implies that, at least in principle, we are already engaging in a vast “Durkheim Test” that explores whether or not these systems speak to our present and future needs. Given that the open discourse of futurity currently risks being absorbed into the technical idioms of predictive analytics (Hansen 2016), claiming the right to an open, multiple future above and beyond any “technological solutionism” (Morozov 2012) is no small matter.

Such a focus on risk resonates with the perspective of “social machines”, be it as a way to understand the dynamics of self-organization (Raunig 2010) or explore the algorithmic design of computational systems geared toward the production of sociality (Donath 2014). Both include injunctions to create truly social objects – distributed, open to reconfiguration, and operational across a variety of social worlds and infrastructural constellations. Today, the question of media architectures is necessarily part of a broader comprehension of the role of informatized urban infrastructures, and the current stage of informatization is widely perceived as a threshold moment. While we can isolate the devices that connect us to communication networks, the vast infrastructures that sustain their operation and position us in a complex constellation that extends from satellites to the semiotics of machine-to-machine communication (De Souza 2005, Lazzarato 2014) can only be comprehended in relation to a general condition of distribution. And as the factory turns into a media architecture, there is an urgency to broaden the scope of those involved in speculative design scenarios and take the methods of “material deliberation” (Forlano/Halpern 2015) into places of work.

5Minor Metropolitanisms

Allowing our analytical gaze to wander beyond customary fields of vision, we may come to terms with distribution as a condition of contemporary existence, increasingly defined by infrastructural informatization and the algorithmicization of core cultural techniques. Above and beyond specific media architectural ensembles organized around specific forms of display, encounter, or interaction, the essay therefore uses the term “media architecture” to frame the situation we find ourselves in, inviting us to explore both the transformations of urban experience and the ways in which we change with it as we explore the role of media architectures in structuring and sustaining our experience.

To suggest a minor metropolitanism, an analysis that moves sideways rather than seeking vertical conceptual integration, is not to discount that changes in the relationality of imperial infrastructures require systemic interventions. But it is to say that such systemic effects may well occur as consequence of aggregated interventions rather than by imagining that change occurs only when actors act on a central stage, share a script, or agree on the scope of individual and collective agency. In fact, one of the tasks of such minor research is to imagine the mise-en-scene of agency in distributed systems, of creating the fantastic fictions of such stagings not in terms of the aesthetic economy of a revolutionary Bildungsroman but as a commons-based storytelling series, engaging each other in acts of translation across sites and situations. Finally, minor is meant as reminder of the subtle rhythms of urban change, over and against the ambitious and sometimes even heroic visions of “smart citizenship” that anticipate an expansion of agency as we embrace technologies of the future. Maybe the changes will not be quite as grand, yet significant all the same – adopting a minor perspective serves as a reminder to be attentive to the effects of exhaustion (Chun 2011) as well as empowerment. Given its capacity to attend to the aesthetic, economic, and political registers of urban experience, media architecture research can play a key role in the collaborative creation of the imaginary of such a minor metropolitanism.