Occupying Infrastructure

Infrastructure shapes and conditions the manner in which we live in the industrialised world, putting into circulation the matter essential for our living, a cycle of energy, materials, data, and even excrement. Infrastructures are not neutral but embedded within systems of power and inequality. As globalising networks, infrastructures trouble conventional temporalities, from high-speed communication at the speed of light to the 'deep time' of nuclear waste.

The essential condition of infrastructure means that it is paradoxically only revealed when its mechanisms cease to function normally. A multi-layered complexity performing with a global resolution, infrastructure exemplifies a planetary ontological condition for the human. Nonetheless, infrastructures are essentially nonhuman environments, designed and configured to direct and manage the material. These are spaces designed not for occupation by the human, yet embody the contemporary planetary status of our species, and the problematics that such a status proposes.

This article explores proposes strategies of occupation for these more-than-human environments. These speculative proposals with be sited within an expanded discourse of the planetary, framing the various modes of occupation to expound a critical discourse that contributes to contemporary discussions of climate change, the Anthropocene and the impact of the human on the planet. The research project will draw attention to the hidden spaces of infrastructure that exist in the everyday around us, and asks what new activities or ways of being might emerge from these hybrid spaces and planetary networks?