Methodolatry and the Art of Measure - Siteations · Methodolatry and the Art of Measure ... soil samples from ... policies rarely have the opportunity to consider the nature of our

POSTED 11.05.13

Shannon Mattern

Methodolatry and the Art of Measure

MAP Architects, Svalbard Architectural Expedition, 2013. [Photo by MAP Architects]

In downtown Brooklyn, not far from where I live, New York University recently launched a public-private research center dedicated to advancing “the science of cities.” That word, science, has a way ofcreeping into public discourse these days. When the inaugural class in Applied Urban Science andInformatics arrived at the Center for Urban Science + Progress this fall, the students were personallywelcomed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose Applied Sciences NYC initiative funded the center’screation in 2012.

On the center’s website, director Steven Koonin acknowledges that today’s cities have to be more“efficient, resilient, sustainable.” And to get there, of course, they need data: “The digital age hasproduced an incredible ability to collect, store, and analyze data. Bringing this ‘big data’ to bear onsocietal problems — from clean air to transportation to healthcare — is at the heart of CUSP.” With itsvarious academic, corporate and government partners — including, among many others, CarnegieMellon University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay; IBM, Cisco and power companyConsolidated Edison; and a bevy of NYC municipal departments, including the police and firedepartments — the center, and its all-white, all-male leadership team, perched high above Brooklyn’sMetroTech, “observes, analyzes, and models cities to optimize outcomes, prototype new solutions,

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formalize new tools and processes, and develop new expertise/experts.”

NYU thus joins many corporately branded pursuits of algorithmic urban efficiency — IBM’s SmarterCities program, Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities Institute, Samsung’s u-City initiative, Intel’sSustainable Connected Cities project, Living PlanIT’s Urban Operating System, and various automobilecompanies’ efforts to envision new “urban futures.” These Big Data approaches have provoked popularconcern about surveillance and privacy, and raised questions among urbanists about how we’ll accountfor all the informal urban movements and transactions that take place off the sensor grid and outsidethe formal economy.

Luckily, most cities now have a growing corps of smartphone-equipped agents on bikes out in thestreets, tracking and mapping all things informal — either to fill the gaps in the “official” dataset, or toconstruct an alternative dataset for unofficial use. We have citizen scientists and public labs, urbanexplorers and infrastructural tourists generating and collecting their own data, in the form ofquantitative readings of air quality, soil samples from brownfields, or noise readings from industrialsites. Elsewhere, we have civic hackers hacking away on open data, developing a cornucopia of appsand data visualizations to disseminate social and environmental justice, one iPhone at a time.


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Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, Balloon Mapping Kit and Mobile Spectrometer, 2013. [Photos by Jeffrey Warren]

Despite their apparent differences in scale and ideology, these two camps — the institutional and theindividual, the corporate and collective, the big and little — are aligned at a foundational level. Whatlinks them is a way of conceptualizing and operationalizing the city: theirs is a city with an underlyingcode or logic, one that can be hacked and made more efficient — or just, or sustainable, or livable —with a tweak to its algorithms or an expansion of its dataset. They also seem to share a faith ininstrumental rationality, or what Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism” — as well as a tendency towarddata fetishism and “methodolatry,” the aestheticization and idolization of method.

Cities Are Made of DataThe contemporary “smart cities” model of urbanism is predicated on the rise of private-sectordevelopment, the emergence of new construction techniques that allow for the rapid erection of “citiesin a box,” and of course the availability of new technology — including, in particular, tools forgenerating, capturing and analyzing data, and feeding processed data back into the urban system. Butthis computational vision isn’t entirely new. We can trace today’s smart cities back to the durablemetaphor of the city-as-machine. While the metaphor is commonly regarded as a modernist invention,cities have long relied on machinic modules; the grid plan, for instance, has for millennia served as a“machine” for efficient circulation. Urban historians have also conceived the city as a machine forinformation management. As Lewis Mumford writes in The City in History:

Through its concentration of physical and cultural power, the city heightened the tempo ofhuman intercourse and translated its products into forms that could be stored andreproduced. ... By means of its storage facilities (buildings, vaults, archives, monuments,tablets, books), the city became capable of transmitting a complex culture fromgeneration to generation, for it marshalled together not only the physical means but thehuman agents needed to pass on and enlarge this heritage. That remains the greatest ofthe city’s gifts. As compared with the complex human order of the city, our presentingenious electronic mechanisms for storing and transmitting information are crude andlimited. [1]


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Media theorist Friedrich Kittler observes that cities have historically been not only sites of data storageand transmission, but also of data-processing and formatting. “It is almost as if the historian of cities[Mumford] had forgotten his insight that part of the greatness of ancient Florence consisted in havingerected, with the Uffizi, the first office building — a central bureau for data processing.” [2]

The Uffizi, ca. 1870. [Photo by Giorgio Sommer]

We’ve also developed, especially over the past few centuries, new modes of representation and tools ofadministration that have reinforced the conception of the city as a machine for rational management.Ola Söderström has explained how the development of new mapping and visualization techniques —theichnographic plan’s stabilizing, “precise and totalizing” representation of urban space; the master plan’suse of Victorian social statistics to divide the city into various demographic “zones”; and urban socialcartography’s depersonalized, aggregate representations of social districts, which allowed for theiradministration through “curative urban planning interventions” — have contributed to the increasing“rationalization” of the urban landscape. [3] And media scholar James Donald acknowledges the rolethat “population surveys, police records, sanitary reports, statistics, muck-raking journalism, andphotography” played in rendering the city “an object of knowledge, and so an object of government.”[4]

Today’s cities are morphing into a new kind of machine, for a more networked form of informationmanagement. Now we have cities “developing new artificial nervous systems, to supersede thosearticulated metabolic systems of the 19th century,” as Dan Hill puts it. The former urban informaticsleader at Arup (now CEO of the creative think tank Fabrica) writes:

These newer nervous systems, not centralised but distributed, and predicated on digitalnetworks of networks in which every object is informational and every movement orbehaviour is trackable, could combine to form a new kind of lattice-like informationalmembrane, hovering magically over the physical fabric of the city. [5]

Data FetishismWhile the notion of the city as a data-generating, storing, processing and formatting machine might notbe new, the reduction of the city to those functions — which are increasingly automated — and the


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reification of that data, is distinct to our time. Imagine the CUSP researchers merging massive streamsof data to map all real-time traffic, weather, energy use, mobile device use, financial transactions,criminal activity, etc. — producing on their multiple flat-screens a map so rich that it becomes aterritory itself. Then imagine that processed data, filtered through algorithms, feeding back into andtransforming urban space or affecting human behavior in real-time (or pretty darn fast): re-syncing thestreetlights or rerouting cabs to areas of high cell-phone activity. Morozov has identified the impulsebehind such approaches as “solutionism,” which recasts “complex social situations either as neatlydefined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes thatcan be easily optimized — if only the right algorithms are in place!” [6]

Songdo, South Korea, envisioned as The City of the Future by Cisco's Smart+Connected Communities Institute. [Image by Cisco]

The default recourse to data-fication, the presumption that all meaningful flows and activity can besensed and measured, is taking us toward a future in which the people shaping our cities and theirpolicies rarely have the opportunity to consider the nature of our stickiest urban problems and the kindof questions they raise. Often they do not even stop to wonder if the blips — which “the system” flagsas “snafus” or “clogs” — are really problems at all. Are all “inefficiencies” — having parent-teacherconferences, for example, rather than standardized electronic evaluations posted to a governmentwebsite — necessarily obstacles to be overcome? What’s more, Morozov says, “In promising almostimmediate and much cheaper results,” solutionist techniques “undermine support for more ambitious,more intellectually stimulating, but also more demanding reform projects.” [7] If we can simplyautomate the depersonalized dispensation of social welfare, there may not be sufficient motivation toget our hands dirty digging for root problems like poverty, unequal access to healthcare andinformation services, and socioeconomic disparity in school performance.

Is there an ethos, a value system, driving these data-generated processes, or is it all just algorithms?Of course, we wouldn’t say that there’s no ideology inherent in the algorithms themselves, but thecomputers powering these Big Data projects run billions of operations that cumulatively producesubstantive transformations in the urban landscape, with little regard for underlying values. As OritHalpern and her colleagues argue, in their study of Songdo, South Korea, as a site for “testbedurbanism,” the rise of such programs “marks a turn against the faith in liberal subjectivity, denigratesthe place of older political processes in decision making … and operates at a level far beneath


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consciousness.” [8]

Mark Foster Gage has identified a similarly “solutionist” and ethically compromised approach in what hecalls “research architecture,” which often relies heavily on data collection and visualization and assumes“a legitimate cause-and-effect relationship between cursorily observed problems and their subsequentarchitectural solutions.” Research architecture too often cultivates the “mistaken assumption that weare always more powerful in dealing with social injustice or inequality in our role as architects than inour roles as citizens or activists.” [9] How many of today’s urban designers and policymakers and publicservants see themselves as more powerful, and efficient, in dealing with urban problems as datascientists than as activists or critics or citizens or humanists?

Fields Arranged by Purity. [Comic by xkcd]

Data HumanismRecall Mumford’s claim, in 1961, that “our present ingenious electronic mechanisms for storing andtransmitting information” are crude in comparison with “the complex human order of the city.” Morethan 50 years later, even our exponentially more ingenious electronics are incapable of runningalgorithms that can fully describe and predict the urban sociocultural ecology. As John Thackara notes,so many of our urban resources, like health care, depend on interactions that are “relational, embodied,and context-dependent.” Trust is an important part of those exchanges, and “trust is not an algorithm.”[10]

Even quantitative metrics like energy use are not as simple as they seem. Sarah Bell points out that wecan’t simply monitor energy use with infrared cameras to track buildings’ heat loss; we also have toconsider cultural norms, including dress codes that require men to wear suits in the hottest months ofsummer and thereby necessitate excessive air conditioning. [11] “The intelligence of cities lies in theindividual and collective minds of people who live there, not merely in the technologies they deploy,”Bell states. “Smart city technologies can provide useful knowledge about urban services and systems,but intelligent implementation requires critical understanding of what they amplify and what theyreduce.”

Kate Crawford, of Microsoft Research, agrees that data scientists would benefit from better qualitativeanalysis of their quantitative data. [12] Those making and using urban data should follow the exampleof social scientists and humanists, pausing regularly to consider where the data come from, and howthey’re derived and analyzed. “We know that data insights can be found at multiple levels ofgranularity,” Crawford writes, “and by combining methods such as ethnography with analytics, orconducting semi-structured interviews paired with information retrieval techniques, we can add depthto the data we collect. We get a much richer sense of the world when we ask people the why and thehow not just the ‘how many.’”


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Earlier this year, NYU launched the Marron Institute on Cities and the Urban Environment, funded by a$40 million gift from Lightyear Capital Chairman Donald Marron, who, not coincidentally, founded DataResources Inc., the world’s largest source of economic data, in 1969. The new institute ties togetherthree NYU programs: the interdisciplinary Institute for Public Knowledge, the business school’sUrbanization Project and CUSP. Ostensibly it will provide an opportunity for CUSP researchers tocritically frame their data through the lenses of the social sciences and humanities, and for those fieldsto explore more deeply the potential of data-driven methodologies. Announcing the new venture —again, beside Mayor Bloomberg — university president John Sexton acknowledged that “Cities are morethan just infrastructure and technology; they are also social interactions, culture, and neighborhoods.”

Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter at a Code for America civic hackathon in 2012. [Photo by Alex Yule]

Citizen DataYet it’s not enough simply to get social scientists and humanists in on the action of extracting data fromurban residents. Those residents themselves should play a greater role in determining how, and if,they’re exploited in the production of urban data; and they might want to generate data of their own, tofeed back into the city, as agents of what Adam Greenfield calls “read/write urbanism.” [13] Dan Hillenvisions a future of grassroots engagement in urban governance:

Urban information design emerges in a call-and-response relationship with informatics,filtering and describing these patterns for the benefit of citizens and machines. Theinvisible becomes visible, as the impact of people on their urban environment can beunderstood in real-time. Citizens turn off taps earlier, watching their water use patternsimprove immediately. ... Road systems can funnel traffic via speed limits and trafficsignals in order to route around congestion. ... Citizens can not only explore proposeddesigns for their environment, but now have a shared platform for proposing their own.They can plug in their own data sources, effectively hacking the model by augmenting orprocessing the feeds they’re concerned with. [14]


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We, the urban publics, aren’t limited merely to responding to the system — e.g., turning off the tapwhen a bathroom console tells us we’ve used more water this month than last. We have the potential to“hack” the official urban network with user-processed and -formatted data.

Hon*Celerator civic hackathon in Honolulu, Hawaii, 2012. [Photo by Ryan Ozawa]

Still, it seems to me, even if we “citizens” are generating the data — via D.I.Y. science projects, fieldsurveys, hackathons, etc. — we’re still facing the city as a computational problem. And the master’stools will never dismantle the master’s house. [15] If we gather lots of (mostly well-educated male)programmers, armed with expensive machinery, and put them in a room with a tank of coffee, theirversion of “social change” will almost always involve finding the right open data set and hacking thecrap out of it. Not only does the hackathon reify the dataset, but the whole form of such events —which emphasize efficiency and presume that the end result, regardless of the challenge at hand, willbe an app or another software product — upholds the algorithmic ethos.

We’d do well to think more about the motivations and ideologies behind, and methodologies implied by,these quick-attack “-thons” and “sprints” and “slams.” “Most companies think that if you can just gethackers, pizza, and data together in a room, magic will happen,” contends DataKind’s Jake Porway.Hackathons often lead with the data, from which participants then retroactively construct a question orproblem. Instead, Porway argues, it’s imperative to begin with a clearly defined problem — onearticulated through consultation with specialists who understand not only how the data were derived,but also how those data reflect, or fail to reflect, on-the-ground urban realities — and then involvethose same specialists in evaluating the end results. We might also consider the possibility that thereare no “results” to evaluate: perhaps no app is the right approach. Perhaps a hackathon could end withthe admission that the data offer no solutions — that particular urban challenges simply can’t be“conditioned” or “normalized” into algorithmically-tuned efficiency.

Data AestheticsPart of data’s appeal, we must acknowledge, is aesthetic. Data lends itself to presentation in sexyvisualizations and packaging in sleek apps. Philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method,


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reminds us that science — and this applies particularly well to data science — proceeds not only byrational, quantifiable means, but also through “irrational means such as propaganda, emotion, ad hochypotheses, and appeal to prejudices of all kinds.” [16] Data are, as intellectual historian DanielRosenberg notes, “rhetorical.” “Data” is the plural of the Latin datum, which is the neuter past participleof the verb dare, to give. Thus, “a ‘datum’ in English … is something given in an argument, somethingtaken for granted.” [17] There’s no such thing as “raw” data; all data are formed through the means bywhich they are derived and presented. And there’s an aesthetic dimension to their derivation andpresentation.

Survey instruments used by Venue, 2012–13. [Photo by Nicola Twilley]

The exhausting ubiquity of data visualizations — thousands more of which are sure to emerge fromCUSP — has made it clear that data, in their “givenness,” are inherently aesthetic. Yet in many recentcitizen science, public lab and design research projects, even the methods for generating data arestylized; we see the rise of an aesthetics of measurement. Researchers seem to be fascinated by thesensory and affective dimensions of measuring things — the fact that measurement isn’t a purelyobjective task — and, to feed their passion, they’re designing a host of measurement tools as objetsd’art: lovely little bento boxes of tools, fanciful surveying equipment, deliciously weird Tom Sachs-ishvisioning machines. Speaking of Sachs: we can certainly see the influence of the artist’s own modusoperandi, knolling, or the ordered arrangement of objects, in many of these projects.

Consider Venue, “a portable media rig, interview studio, multi-format event platform, and forward-operating landscape research base” that recently toured the continent documenting “overlooked yetfascinating sites through the eyes of the innovators, trendsetters, entrepreneurs, and designers at theforefront of ideas today.” By “record[ing] and survey[ing] each site through an array of both analog andhigh-tech instruments,” the Venue team aimed to “assemble a cumulative, participatory, andmedia-rich core sample of the greater North American landscape.” In an interview with MAS Context,


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Venue’s Nicola Twilley confessed that their use of various instruments was in large part poetic,aesthetic: “a self-conscious gesture to the fact that the devices that you choose to bring along with youalready are embedding assumptions onto the landscape.” [18] Venue partner Geoff Manaugh addedthat “once you have the instruments to measure the landscape, you start paying attention to that thingthat you maybe would have not otherwise thought about or noticed.” The instrument embodies a modeof observation that conditions how one engages with the landscape and what data one collects.

Venue participants also kept a logbook in which they recorded site variables such as ground winddirection and speed, solar wind direction and speed, sun spots and barometric pressure, and theytagged the posts on their research blog with this metadata. Twilley admitted to “amassing big amountsof data about the landscape and not even knowing how to make sense of it” — generating data not forsense-making but perhaps for all those irrational means Feyerabend talks about. Venue’s pastiche oftools and methods from journalism and geology makes measurement an aesthetic endeavor.


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Top and bottom right: Venue's walnut toolbox, under construction in the workshop of the designer, Semigood. [Photos by Venue] Bottomleft: Interstate Road Trip Specialist Field Kit, 2006. [Photo by the Los Angeles Urban Rangers]

Consider also the Los Angeles Urban Rangers’ 2006 project, Interstate: The American Road Trip, whichwas “intended to facilitate sharpened observational skills for reading 21st century roadsidegeographies.” A key component of the project was their Interstate Road Trip Specialist Field Kit, anobjet d’art itself, which contained tools whose methodological utility was explained in an accompanyingField Guide, which I discussed earlier in this journal. Then there is David Garcia, of Lund University,whose Svalbard Architectural Expedition in the Arctic utilized a range of beautiful, custom-designedsurveying instruments, which tested the sound-absorption properties of snow and the insulation


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properties of ice and snow tiles, as well as the translucency of those tiles; investigated how the extremelandscape and climate impact the visible appearance of light; and warned when polar bears wereapproaching. This data will implicitly feed into the creation of more contextually responsive design.

We might trace these recent “toolkit” projects back to precursors like Fluxus game kits, and to the useof cultural probes in design research. Eric Paulos and Tom Jenkins have designed “urban probes” thatare meant to “bypass many classical design approaches — opting instead for rapid, nimble, oftenintentional encroachments on urban places rather than following a series of typical design iterationcycles.” Probes, they write, are a “fail-fast approach,” a means of “conducting rapid urban applicationdiscovery and evaluation metrics.” [19] Or, as Kirsten Boehner, William Gaver and Andy Boucherexplain, probes “open up possibilities, rather than converging toward singular truths”; they favor“playfulness, exploration and enjoyment.” [20] The new wave of designerly toolkits are similarlyspeculative, generative, meant to stimulate new ideas rather than deduce facts. Venue and companyhave adopted what sociologists Cecilia Lury and Nina Wakeford would consider “inventive methods,”methods whose thoughtful application has the potential to “address a problem and change that problemas it performs itself,” but whose impact can’t be given in advance. [21]

The specific aesthetic qualities of these projects seem to follow from the aesthetics of administration,archival aesthetics and the aesthetics of the lab. Undoubtedly they are also inspired by the circuitbending and “make your own tools” movements. But still, I wonder what has made measurement anddata collection — often with analog tools — so cool, so worth aestheticizing, in this age of sentienttechnologies and Big Data. Perhaps it’s partly because, in contrast with the machines automaticallyharvesting mountains of data, these toolkits allow for a slower, more intentional, reflective,site-specific, embodied means of engaging with research sites and subjects. In some cases, they alsoallow researchers to design their methods. Kirsten Boehner and her colleagues note that the design of aprobe or methodological toolkit reflects the character of both the research site or subject and theresearchers; and at the same time, it serves rhetorically to elicit a particular kind of user engagement.

Christopher Erdman's project, Perception and Interpretation of the Aurora Borealis, part of the Svalbard Architectural Expedition, 2013.[Photo via Lund University]


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Data PoliticsIn the appendix to his 2010 book, Political Aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell proposes 52 potential researchprojects that would “encourage the greatest possible variety of methodologies.” Proposal #2 is a studyof the “political aesthetics of measurement.” [22] That’s precisely what we need here, since both campsof urban research I’ve discussed — the Big Data initiatives of CUSP and IBM, and the citizen scienceprojects of D.I.Y. data-collectors and manipulators — are simultaneously aesthetic and political.Similarly, we need to consider the relationships between (1) data collection, which is foregrounded inmuch of this work; (2) method; and (3) methodology. [23] In many cases, concern with the aestheticsof measurement and data overpowers considerations of how that measurement functions as a method.By method I mean “the techniques or procedures used to gather and analyze data related to someresearch question or hypotheses.” Methodology refers to the “strategy, plan of action, process or designlying behind the choice and use of particular methods; and the connection of the choice and use ofmethods to the desired outcomes.” [24]

Of course we are free to use tools for tools’ sake and gather data in an exploratory fashion, as part ofinventive, speculative research. But to combat fetishism of the tools and the data we also have to thinkharder about what it all adds up to — or what we want it all to add up to — and select our tools insupport of larger epistemological and theoretical goals. We would do well to pause and question thenature of our urban problems, and consider our strategies for gaining better understanding of thoseproblems, before jumping to the conclusion that data have the answers.

I am not a data scientist, but I do work in fields in which the methods and ideals of “scientific” datacollection have a growing appeal. And sometimes the most readily apparent or accessible way — forstudents in particular — to gain entry to those complex practices is to take on the aesthetics ofmeasurement: to devise a clever data collection system, to accumulate a reassuringly big pile of data,and to massage that data into a persuasive visualization. That’s a worrisome trend. This isn’t to saythat engagement with the affective or stylistic dimensions of measurement precludes engagement withits larger methodological functions; Feyerabend has shown us otherwise. Rather, I hope these concernsare brought into alignment: that the methodological packaging suits the purpose, the form serves thefunction, the knolling serves the knowledge.

To isolate these concerns, and to focus only on measurement for measurement’s sake — or its scientific“look” — feels a bit like methodolatry, a neologism composed, as you might expect, by mixing“method” and “idolatry.” Valeria Janesick defines methodolatry as “a preoccupation with selecting anddefending methods to the exclusion of the actual substance of the story being told.” [25] Onemanifestation of methodolatry is the fetishization of method, or a preoccupation with method to theextent that it directs one’s research, perhaps even driving the questions one asks. Medical scientistsspeak of the “worship of the clinical trial,” and we of course see plenty of examples in urban and designresearch in which the data lead the way. Another manifestation of methodolatry is the idolization ofmethod — the adoration of measurement’s image or representation: the knolled toolbox, the hackedperceptual machines, the scientific flowchart, the seductive data visualization.

Or perhaps these methodolatrous projects, in their aestheticization of measurement, are calling ourattention to presumptions about scientific rigor, parodying our algorithmic impulses, tacitly askingquestions about the ideology of a pervasive culture of measurement and assessment. Perhaps, despitetheir implicit alliance with CUSP and Cisco and the like, our citizen data gatherers want to highlight the“givenness,” the rhetorical nature of that data, to show its inherent irrationality, to demonstrate thatthe “science of cities” is also, necessarily, an art.

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POSTED 07.01.13

Shannon Mattern

Infrastructural Tourism

Communication infrastructure access; from Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors, a documentary by Ben Mendelsohn. [Image: BenMendelsohn and Alex Chohlas-Wood, courtesy of Ben Mendelsohn]

On a warm late summer evening a few years ago, I gathered with a group of graduate students on asidewalk outside 195 Broadway, in Lower Manhattan. We were there to meet journalist Andrew Blum,then in the midst of researching his book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. Blum walkedus over to 33 Thomas, then on to 60 Hudson Street and 32 Avenue of the Americas, with stops atvarious manholes along the way. It took us almost three hours to traverse the 1.2-mile route becauseBlum kept stopping to tell us riveting stories about the mysterious and fantastical goings-on insidenondescript office buildings and beneath the busy sidewalks. My media studies class and I were“visiting the Internet,” the physical environs where it actually lives in Lower Manhattan: the specificrooms where numerous networks’ servers physically connect with one another, the basement portalswhere cables breach the foundation walls, the subterranean conduits stuffed with optical fibers.

It's all these tubes and cables that enable us to connect “wirelessly” to the Internet from ourapartments and houses, our classrooms, offices and cafés; and so our evening stroll clarified animportant fact: that connectivity is neither as untethered nor ethereal as wifi implies. As the sociologistAdrian Mackenzie argues in Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures:

While the notion of wireless networks implies that there are fewer wires, it could easily be

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argued that actually there are more wires. Rather than wireless cities or wirelessnetworks, it might be more accurate to speak of the rewiring of cities through the highlyreconfigurable paths of chipsets. Billions of chipsets means trillions of wires or conductorson a microscopic scale. [1]

And, as Blum recounts, it also means millions of wires at the global scale, traversing continents andoceans, and serving as the “fundamental medium of the global village.” [2]

Why “visit” the Internet? Why contemplate the intercontinental and nano-scale mechanisms throughwhich it operates? In part because our ostensibly “wireless” networked-ness constitutes nothing lessthan a new human experience — as Mackenzie describes it, an experience “trending towardentanglements with things, objects, gadgets, infrastructures, and services, and imbued with indistinctsensations and practices of network-associated change. Wirelessness affects how people arrive, depart,and inhabit places, how they relate to others, and indeed, how they embody change.” [3] What’s more,as Mackenzie argues, wirelessness constitutes a distinctive way of being — an existence somewherebetween the material and immaterial, the empirical and theoretical, the place-bound and the placeless,the local and the global. To visit the sites that are producing our networked experiences is thus anattempt to understand these new entanglements, sensations and practices, these network-associatedchanges — this new way of being.

Mapping InfrastructureBlum and Mackenzie are in good company these days; many writers and scholars are now exploring thenew ways of being that are resulting from ontologically slippery communication networks. Media scholarLisa Parks, in her pioneering work on satellite television, has described satellite transmission asparadoxical — both distant and proximate, separate and connected, imaginary and real; shecharacterizes it as a “technology of knowledge,” an “epistemological system structured in part throughthe technologization of sound and vision.” [4] At a recent meeting of the Society for Cinema and MediaStudies, Parks argued further that a focus on infrastructure encourages media scholars to think more“elementally” about “what media are made of”; to foreground processes of distribution, which are oftenoverlooked in favor of production and consumption; and to recognize the myriad biophysical resourcesnecessary for that distribution, including the "trees that power poles are made of [and] the aluminum ofa satellite dish." Such an approach suggests too that the field of media studies might collaborate moreclosely with disciplines like environmental studies, geography, science and technology studies, as wellas architecture, urban studies, engineering and information science.

Of course, the environmental design disciplines have been thinking a lot about infrastructure. [5] Urbandesigners and historians have recognized that remote and often hidden technologies dramaticallyinform how we design cities, manage natural resources, interact with other living creatures andinanimate objects, and understand our place in the universe. What’s more, the cities, landscapes,objects and systems that we design often interrelate with each other independent of humaninvolvement or awareness. At the very least, then, we humans can become involved as externalobservers, and seek to understand the material and immaterial workings of these interconnectedsystems — not only how soil is dredged and landscapes are reshaped, or how traffic and waste arestreamed through the built environment, but also how an email travels from New York to Lagos, or howa television program is beamed into our living room or onto our computer screens.

Lisa Parks suggests that it is our duty as infrastructural “citizen/users” to be aware of the “systems thatsurround [us] and that [we] subsidize and use,” and she proposes that we “devise ... ways ofvisualizing and developing literacy about infrastructures and the relations that take shape through andaround them.” In her study of so-called "antenna trees” — cell phone towers tricked up to look liketrees — she wonders: “Are there ways of representing cell towers that will encourage citizens toparticipate in sustained discussions and decisions about network ownership, development, and access?”We might pose similar questions about other infrastructures. Can we devise ways to map these systemsso as to reveal, as Parks suggests, how they inform "neighborhood aesthetics, health and property


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values," and environmental protection; how they permit or deny access to resources; and how theyshape our daily experience — and even structure a new mode of infrastructural existence?

English tourists gather around the generators at Hoover Dam, ca. 1940; an example of what historian David Nye has described as ourlongstanding fascination with the "technological sublime." [Image: Bureau of Reclamation, via Wikimedia Commons]

We should consider too the variety of infrastructures we citizen/users need to be aware of and tounderstand. First used in the mid-1920s to refer to roads, tunnels and other public works, as well aspermanent military structures, the term "infrastructure" is often instantiated as the asphalt roadwaysand steel rails that were typically national (often military) initiatives, and which ultimately broadenedinto systems that connected entire continents. By the late 1990s, according to a U.S. PresidentialCommission, the term came to encompass “man-made systems and processes that functioncollaboratively and synergistically to produce and distribute a continuous flow of essential goods andservices” — systems like transportation, oil and gas distribution and storage, water supply, emergencymanagement, government services, banking and finance, electrical power, and information andcommunications. [6].

Geographers Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin identify infrastructures as “the largest and mostsophisticated technological artifacts ever devised by humans" [7]; and sociologists Susan Leigh Starand Geoffrey Bowker remind us that infrastructures also extend to intellectual and institutionaloperations, including measurement standards, naming conventions, classification systems, technicalprotocols and bureaucratic forms. [8] Star and Bowker suggest too that infrastructure is inevitably aflexible term, often defined with regard to context and situation. They describe infrastructure as “thatwhich runs ‘underneath’ actual structures ... that upon which something else rides, or works, a platformof sorts”; but then acknowledge that “this common-sense definition begins to unravel when we ... lookat multiple, overlapping and perhaps contradictory infrastructural arrangements. For the railroadengineer, the rails are only infrastructure when she or he is a passenger.” In other words,


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Infrastructure can easily flip between figure and ground. Quoting Gregory Bateson, Star and Bowkersuggest that an infrastructure is a “relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never a ‘thing.'”[9]

How to map such large and sophisticated phenomena — such "non-things"? In Alien Phenomenology,the media scholar/game designer Ian Bogost recommends several ways to describe our new networked,infrastructural existence, including ontography, which can encompass “the many processes ofaccounting for the various units that strew themselves throughout the universe." To create anontograph, Bogost says, you need "to [catalogue] things” — through verbal and visual lists, for instance— and "also [to draw] attention to the couplings and chasms between them,” thus revealing how thesethings “exist not just for us but also for themselves and for one another.” [10] As examples ofontographs, Bogost offers a wide range, from the photographs of Stephen Shore — which depict"ordinary" scenes in great detail — to exploded view diagrams to games like Scribblenauts and In aPickle. Lisa Parks has been studying various techniques for visualizing satellite technologies — forcataloguing and diagramming the relationships among satellites in orbit, and between those satellitesand terrestrial dishes, antennas, cables and related elements; she questions the rhetoric and politics ofimages taken by satellites, as well as visualizations of the satellites themselves and their processes ofoperation, including maps of satellite footprints and signal distribution. [11] And in one of my owngraduate classes, students think critically about the use of diverse media — photographs, video, audio,data visualizations, etc. — to map historical communication infrastructures, ranging from newspaperdelivery to carrier-pigeon dispatch to telephone switching.

We might also explore whether there are other ways — again to reference Bogost — to account forinfrastructural units and operations that don’t easily translate into more conventional, or visual, graphformats. In one of his last books, the planner Kevin Lynch suggested that the landscape, through“graceful land management,” might open itself up to scrutiny and accounting. Planners might ensurethat the “inner workings” of various “functional element[s] ... are there to be seen if one is interested.”More specifically Lynch envisions "guidebooks to the sewer system, with instructions on how to read theseason and the time of day by watching the flow. Signs, obscure marks, the traces of activity, listeningdevices, diagrams, remote sensors, magnifying glasses, slow-motion films, periscopes, peepholes —any of these may be used to make some process perceptible.” [12]


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Invisible-5, scenes from Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco. [Images from Invisible-5, created by Amy Balkin, TimHalbur, Kim Stringfellow, Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, and Pond: Art, Activism & Ideas]

Touring, Collecting, Documenting InfrastructureKevin Lynch died almost three decades ago; but lately a number of artists and activists have in essencetaken up his challenge, deploying diverse pedagogical techniques and representational strategies withthe goal of "making some process perceptible," of enhancing our understanding of the infrastructuresthat surround us and upon which we depend. For instance, in a special issue of Art Journal devoted to“Land Use in Contemporary Art,” the artist-academic Emily Eliza Scott discusses Invisible-5, aself-guided audio tour of Interstate 5 in California between Los Angeles and San Francisco. According toits creators — artists Amy Balkin and Kim Stringfellow, producer Tim Halbur, and the organizationsGreenaction for Health and Environmental Justice and Pond: Art, Activism & Ideas — Invisible-5 aims to"investigate the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5corridor, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audiodocuments.” The tour’s 24 tracks — moving south to north from "Boyle Heights – East LA" and "LosAngeles River" to "West Oakland" and "Bayview Hunters Point – SF" — are synched with visible markersalong the highway. And while the cues to push PLAY are hard to miss, each track focuses not on whatyou can see through the windshield of your car but on what you cannot: in Scott's words, “airbornetoxins, diseased bodies, displaced native populations, covert operations, stories underrepresented inthe media, and flows of labor and capital.” Thus the stops on the audio tour highlight not the usual cityor landscape sites but rather the "underbelly, circuitry board, and dumping ground — sites ofextraction, exchange, and expenditure, the Other to those of capital’s obvious accumulation.” [13].

Scott describes Invisible-5 as an example of what the architectural theorist Jane Rendell calls “criticalspatial practice” — a project that seeks "to produce effects beyond the art world — on the ground, so tospeak.” She also references the curator Nato Thompson, and his 2008 exhibition ExperimentalGeography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography and Urbanism, and argues that projects likeInvisible-5 should be evaluated not only on the basis of their aesthetic value, but also for their"material consequences" and their ability to "translate into radical action." In this sense Invisible-5 isnot simply about "making visible the invisible" — not just about focusing our attention upon the oilderricks and cattle ranches, the pesticides and pollutants; as Scott says, the tour attempts to link"those who travel along the interstate corridor to those who live there”; the ultimate goal is "tointervene in the unjust conditions at hand.” [14]

How does that linking happen? Scott suggests that a conventional map would not have sufficed, in partbecause one of the goals of Invisible-5 is, in her words, to “disrupt coherent representations of space,simultaneously highlighting the fragmentary nature of knowledge itself and critiquing, for instance, theGod’s-eye view inherent to traditional maps.” [15] Invisible-5 highlights what usually remains “at theperiphery of visibility,” what seems illegible or even un-mappable, what might be evoked instead by thesounds bubbling below the surface, or by the personal narratives of those palpably harmed byimperceptible dangers. And by capturing its audience in motion, in an automobile with a gas-fueled,oil-burning engine driving down the expressway, Invisible-5 "implicates the user directly in land-usepolitics explored during the tour”; the motorist/user is, in short, perpetuating the problem.


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Top: Kettleman City, Chemical Waste Management Facility, LANDSAT map, courtesy of Invisible-5. Middle: Los Angeles, Official Map and

Guide, from Los Angeles Urban Rangers. Bottom: Interstate Road Trip Specialist Field Kit, from Los Angeles Urban Rangers.

“We might," says Scott, "think of Invisible-5 as a form of alternative pedagogy or creative-criticaltourism, aimed at stimulating heightened and self-reflexive observation.” We might think much thesame of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, an art collective co-founded by Scott that develops “guidedhikes, campfire talks, field kits, and other interpretive tools to spark creative explorations of everydayhabitats." The Urban Rangers' mission is at once political and ontological. In a recent article, Scott andco-founding Ranger Nicholas Bauch explain it this way: “Our practice upsets the handed-downontological categories of nature and culture. The acting out of this categorical disruption is the sine quanon of our identity.” One of their interpretive tools is to create maps that mimic the style of the U.S.National Park Service, but which aim not to clarify the geography of natural locales but instead toreveal the “tangled legal, environmental, and social histories” that shape our “natural” and culturallandscapes. [16]

In a 2006 project on the Interstate Highway System, for instance, the Rangers created a kit and a fieldguide; although modeled upon children’s activity books, the kit and guide were intended not to combattravel-induced boredom but rather to “facilitate sharpened observational skills for reading 21st-centuryroadside geographies” — e.g., to encourage engagement with the road, the car traversing it, thelandscapes it passes through, the people in that landscape, etc. [17] The kit and guide contained thefollowing:

car-mapping exercise (to encourage travelers to consider the mobile viewing devices (a.k.a.,cars) that frame our interaction with the environment);windshield framing device (to highlight how travel speed influences our observations);color swatch of the American landscape (to spur travelers to think about individual hues anddiscern the countless objects and materials, e.g., vegetation, concrete, brick, asphalt, metal,etc., that constitute the landscape);field observation log (to stimulate critical awareness of the road, local cultures and physicalenvironments, and one's own body);photo scavenger hunts (to train travelers' attention on various thresholds, including thosebetween city/non-city, between states, and between landscapes);list of prompts for roadside interviews;a set of highway-themed mad libs;


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specimen collection system with variously sized containers, customizable labels, and pre-printedword tags (the former, to give users the freedom to select many different items; the latter, toforce users to fit diverse objects into fixed classifications).

In all these ways the American Road Trip kit and guide work to frame the “highway system” asconsisting not only of long ribbons of macadam and on/off ramps, but also trees, mountains, rocks,people, restaurants, signs, laws, windshields, gas mileage, standards — and the list goes on. TheRangers deploy similar methods for their other "field sites," which include Downtown L.A., Malibu PublicBeaches and — the only non-U.S. site to date — SITE2F7 Ontdekkingstocht, the "last urban wildernessin the hyper-planned" Dutch city of Almere. “It is conceivable that our analyses of urban places andlandscapes could be communicated solely through written publications," write Bauch and Scott."However, the process of bringing people to the places we study ... teaches people through directcorporeal experience ... in a way that is impossible from reading alone.” [18]

Sensing InfrastructureThe kind of "direct corporeal experience" that the Rangers encourage often escapes, or exceeds, oursense of sight. Can we imagine tasting infrastructure and its effects in the water supply or food chain?Certainly we know that we can smell air pollution and organic byproducts in the waste-removal system;and as Nicola Twilley regularly points out in her blog, Edible Geography, olfactory perception is a keydimension of food production and distribution infrastructures. Mineral deposits in drinking water,chemical contamination of water or air, malfunctioning refrigeration on a shipping container — all havepotentially sense-able consequences. At home and work we can feel the effects of our HVAC systems,and an experienced technician can sense when a cable is improperly threaded through conduit, or whena transformer is overheating.

The Internet itself is more multisensory than the sounds and images it summons to our devices. In thecourse of dozens of visits to exchange points and data centers, Andrew Blum became aware that “theInternet had a smell, an odd but distinctive mix of industrial-strength air-conditioners and the ozonereleased by capacitors.” [19] He describes it also as haptic and audible: “Data centers are kept cold tocompensate for the incredible heat emitted by the equipment that fills them. And they’re noisy, as thesound of the fans used to push around the cold air combines into a single deafening roar, as loud as arushing highway.” [20] Exploring the senses of infrastructures can reveal not only how those systemsindicate their functionality for us — via blinking lights, beeps, etc. — but also their own operationalmodes and logics.

For the past several years I’ve been studying what we can learn about infrastructures by listening tothem. [21] Sound serves as a useful diagnostic tool; we can often hear infrastructural malfunctions —like clanging pipes or a stuttering computer hard drive — that aren’t visible on the surface. Some artistsuse contact microphones to pick up on movements within infrastructure — the flexing of a plate-glasswindow on a windy day, or the straining of a bridge under the weight of traffic — that are imperceptibleto the naked eye. For decades sound artist Bill Fontana has been recording the sounds of bridges andtrains and water, and often “relocating” those sounds by broadcasting them in other areas. In 1983, forexample, for the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge, (which then still had its original steel grid roadway),he mounted eight microphones under the bridge and broadcast the sounds to the plaza of the WorldTrade Center, via speakers embedded within the facade of One World Trade Center.


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Electrical Walks, art project by Christina Kubisch. [Images courtesy of Christina Kubisch via Networked Music Review and Digimag]

Sound can give a kind of presence to infrastructures we’re unaware of, even when we're inhabitingthem. Consider the work of composer/sound artist Christina Kubisch, whose Electrical Walks usespecially designed headphones to translate electromagnetic signals into sounds, making “real” themyriad waves and particles that make possible, for instance, ATM transactions, wifi connectivity, andbuilding security systems, and that envelop and penetrate our bodies when we walk down the street orwithdraw cash from the bank or open our front doors. Sound is also a useful index of the rhythmicity ofmechanical movements. Consider the rhythm of a printing press or a fabric loom or a rail locomotive, oreven the beeps and alarms of air traffic control towers or nuclear power plants, and how these compeltheir human attendants to leap to action.

For several years now architect Nick Sowers has been traveling the world, examining space —particularly military landscapes — through the medium of sound. “Sound has become my medium ofchoice,” he explains. “Recording sound as a means of observing spatial conditions de-emphasizes thevisual realm and opens up another dialogue with place, one that is haptic and time-based.” In a projectpublished in this journal, focusing on the acoustic ecology of unoccupied World War II bunkers alongthe coast of France, Sowers aims to capture the sounds of his approach to the concrete fortifications —to convey how the structures are sited — and the sounds within the bunker. As he writes, “In bunkerspace, the visual limitations of vanguard/rearguard give way to a stereophonic redistribution of space.”Might these disparate modes of looking and listening have some significance for military strategy? [22]In his exploration of the “subterranean architectonics” of warfare, the sound artist and researcher WillSchrimshaw contrasts the convention of visual domination and its implied vertical, view-from-aboveorganization, with auditory perception and its associated horizontal on-the-ground action; he notes itsparticular relevance to our own era of terrorism: "Insurgency forces a loss of vertical domination andthe disorganisation — if not dissolution — of ubiquitous, centralised vision."

Playing and Performing InfrastructureInfrastructural systems are not necessarily static; often they are even mutable, portable, transient; andso some infrastructure engagement projects focus on processes or events. Games, for instance, caneffectively convey the temporal dimension of an infrastructure; board games like Rush Hour and videogames like Sim City and Civilization model the complexity of urban systems. In Alien Phenomenology,Bogost discusses some of these games, and describes a few interactive projects that make manifest themechanical functions and web protocols that enable them to function. I am TIA, which Bogost createdhimself, demonstrates how an Atari VCS “sees” its own screen, while Ben Fry’s Deconstructulator opensup the Nintendo Entertainment System to reveal its software and hardware operations. Likewise, in hisown work, architect Morgen Fleisig also seeks to “open the black box" and to reveal "the aesthetics ofcomputation"; as a graduate student in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, he set out tomodel, or perform, the most basic of computational operations: the opening and closing of relays. To dothis Fleisig constructed a one-bit computer, “an electro-magnetic sculpture in which every part iscomposed of readily recognizable objects, and the transfer of signal from one element to the next is


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accompanied by a humanly intelligible sign, whether acoustic or visual.” His goal was to make “humanlysensible the protocols of information management.”

Scenes from Repository: A Typological Guide to America's Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructures: Top left, Yucca Mountain. Top right:High-level waste storage lockers, West Valley, New York. Bottom: RH-72B, a lead-lined cask used for shipping transuranic waste to theWaste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. [All images from Smudge Studio]

Smudge studio, a collaborative project of the New York-based artist-scholars Elizabeth Ellsworth andJamie Kruse, grapples with infrastructures on a much larger scale: the geologic, from the age-oldhuman quest to move mountains to the deep time of radioactive waste. In their recent work, Ellsworthand Kruse approach both landscape and infrastructure not as discrete objects or places "but rather asstreaming phenomena to be experienced as events.” [23] They take care to avoid hubristic attempts tomodel or map events that span millennia, focusing instead on “signaling” forces that “unfold at scalesthat can exceed human cognitive capacity.”

One of these forces is that of atomic power, which Ellsworth and Kruse explore in Repository: ATypological Guide to America’s Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure. The central element of the project,which they launched in summer 2012 at the Proteus Gowanus gallery, is a deck of 42 cards, intended tobe played — or "activated" — by motorists on U.S. highways. Featuring information on various topicslike uranium tailings, cooling processes, storage infrastructures and the like, and modeled on World War


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II-era spotter cards, the deck is, as Smudge says, “designed to help you spot and identify today’stemporary solutions for the storage of radioactive waste, as you pass by them on the highway, or asthey pass by you.” Smudge explains the significance of that “temporary” designation:

Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository was our nation’s best attempt to store andcontain high-level waste. In 2010 the site was deemed unsuitable and the project’sfunding was eliminated. No permanent storage options are expected to be available for thenext 100 – 300 years. In 2004, the EPA determined that high-level radioactive waste willremain dangerous to humans for 1 million years. [The agency] stipulated that anyrepository for high-level waste will have to meet the unprecedentedly long-term safetygoal of 1,000 millennia. As of 2011, about 66,000 metric tons of spent fuel were beingheld at power reactor sites in 33 states. Each year, this amount increases by another2,000 metric tons.

Spotter cards, part of Smudge Studio's project Repository: A Typological Guide to America's Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructures. [Imagecourtesy of Smudge Studio]

Repository's card deck includes several “Key Cards” that provide contextualizing information. (Theresonances with Invisible-5 are strong.) Say we spot one of the trucks specially designed to carrynuclear waste on a highway somewhere in California or Utah or Nevada; the matching Repository cardwill tell us that the truck has 192 wheels and travels at an average speed of 15 miles per hour; it willalso signal the "long now" of the radioactive materials contained in the truck. According to the artists,some motorist/players report keeping the deck handy, in their glove compartments; the project hasbeen added to the collection of the Atomic Photographers Guild and displayed at the Rocky Flats ColdWar Museum in Arvada, CO. Yet the text-heavy design often complicates attempts to read the cardsquickly, on the road, or to engage with them in an exhibition. As a result Smudge has decided toextend the project into other forms. To better capture the “aesthetic, sensory experience” of themovement of nuclear materials, Ellsworth and Kruse are now creating a video, which will travel tovarious exhibition venues near key nuclear sites.

Meanwhile, Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers and Javier Arbona of Demilit, a research/art/design collective


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dedicated to “decoding military landscapes,” have created a game called Terra Incognita, in whichplayers are encouraged to explore their cities, ideally on foot, and “identify conflicts and fissures ...explore unknown neighborhoods ... solve evolving mysteries, and fantasize about hidden geographies.”The object of the game, which appeared in the puzzle-themed Istanbul-focused issue of New CityReader, is to create cartographic puzzles that reveal the myriad interlocking networks and forces thatshape urban space. The point is not really to solve the puzzle, but to perceive the city as an infinitelyexpanding assemblage of puzzles. For instance, an individual or group might create a puzzle focusingon, in the words of the creators, "... the spaces of the founding myths of the city; the new musicalsub-cultures; the personal knowledge and memories of urban spaces; the sensory aspects of space; themilitarization of everyday life; the geology and hydrology underneath your feet; the air space;surveillance; neighborhood concentrations of interesting hairstyles; the metaphors of the city; thespaces of falling in love." Demilit suggests that such playful, map-based explorations, drawing obviousinspiration from psychogeography, may be our best way to understand some of the forces — financial,political, military, etc. — that shape our “landscapes of secrecy and violence,” since these forces areoften imperceptible, “spectral abstractions,” in Demilit's phrase. [24]

Terra Incognita, created by Demilit, on view in Istanbul. [Image from New City Reader]

From Perception to Awareness … and ActionThe methods of engagement employed in projects like Invisible-5 or Repository could easily be adaptedto diverse infrastructures. We could develop a field kit to trace our cell phone infrastructures, ororganize a safari to track e-waste, or follow our noses to sniff out myriad nodes in global food orchemical distribution networks. But then what? What might happen after all the touring and mapping,the listening and smelling, the playing of games? What do we do with all that we have discovered andidentified and sensed? So you know where your Internet lives ... now what?

The ambitious intentions to “make visible the invisible” and raise awareness of imperceptible systems,much like Situationist-style dérives or interventions, can too often become ends in themselves. There’s


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been debate about the effectiveness of these awareness-raising art and design projects, includingcritical spatial practice. In their book series on critical practice, architects Nikolaus Hirsch and MarkusMiessen wonder whether space can truly function as a medium for political activism. And philosopherJacques Rancière, writing about critical art practice, argues that “understanding does not, in and ofitself, help to transform intellectual attitudes and situations”; and more, he posits that efforts to unveilthe secret, or unearth the buried, might ultimately “kill ... the strangeness” of the forces andphenomena we want to transform. [25]

What kinds of impact can we reasonably expect from these infrastructural literacy projects? Emily ElizaScott of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers puts it this way: if the group's hikes and field kits and safaris“can get people to question, and to be more self-reflexive, for instance, about what it means to travelalong a particular infrastructure, and about how it delimits our perceptions and experiences of thelandscape, then I think that’s enough.” [26] Ellsworth and Kruse, of Smudge, differentiate their workfrom consciousness-raising practice, which they see as presumptuous; instead they see infrastructuresand landscapes as always in flux, which in turn requires us to continually adapt our perceptualcapacities and design parameters in order to understand and shape those landscapes. [27] Thus theyhope their projects will generate not just awareness about existing infrastructures but also the capacityto imagine potential ones.

But again: what then? As Hannah Arendt argued decades ago, political efficacy requires concertedaction, or praxis — so what kinds of action does infrastructural literacy beget? Scott admits that it’s“hard, maybe even impossible, to know exactly if, when, and how critical thinking will translate intoaction, or take some tangible form.” To this same point, the liberal arts in our contemporaryuniversities are struggling to prove (as they’re often asked to do given the current “culture ofassessment”) that the development of critical thinking or global consciousness has any measurableimpact on students’ lives, particularly in the form of job prospects or salaries; those of us who teach inthe humanities occasionally turn to case studies or even anecdotes to affirm the long-term positiveinfluence of our pedagogical efforts. Scott offers her own anecdote:

One of the most gratifying bits of feedback I ever received from one of my Ranger projectscame from a 60-something woman who’d attended a campfire program on freewaylandscapes in Los Angeles. Months later, she told me that she never looked at a freeway inthe same way. Who knows what this kind of change in perception might ultimately leadto?

Who knows indeed? Over the years hundreds of people have signed up for the Los Angeles UrbanRangers' safaris. Invisible-5 has achieved a wide reach, and many of the groups featured in the tourhave adopted it as a teaching and training tool. The more people who participate in and experiencethese kinds of projects, the more various will be the possible outcomes. And I would argue too thatthese projects create their own infrastructures — informational, social, political, creative, etc. — forfurther action. Mapping-as-method, touring-as-method, sensing-as-method, signaling-as-method,playing-as-method — all represent the ontological complexity of various forms of infrastructures, andencourage us to translate heightened knowledge into real meaningful action.

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