UNFAMILIAR MATTER
Saturday 12th September, 7-9pm
Doors open 6.30pm
Lighthouse Arts, Brighton
Tickets are available through Eventbrite.
"Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter... They are things and also the relation between things." - Brian Larkin, The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
As part of the exhibition of their new installation FAMILIARS, Georgina Voss and Wesley Goatley are hosting an evening of talks and films which reflect on the politics, power, visibility, and familiarity of infrastructures and systems.
We live with increasing dependence on large-scale infrastructures and logistics systems which are exceptionally important to our lives whilst being intentionally designed to be invisible and overlooked. Originating from military terminology to describe fixed facilities such as airbases, we think of infrastructures as being material, solid, reliable; responsible for some sense of ambient stability of life in the developed world. Long-standing and ephemeral, infrastructures shape our sense of time, providing the sense that things work and will go on working. Trains, planes, and boats; roads and railway lines; wind farms, oil refineries, and solar fields; cables and pipelines; generators and wires; sewers and water treatment plants; we only tend to notice these massive dynamic systems when they fail.
In UNFAMILIAR MATTER, our speakers will look at the politics, power, human roles, and hidden relations around infrastructure. As resources necessary for the common good, infrastructures raise questions about public goods and collective resources. Despite the inhuman 'infrastructural sublime' of their enormous, looming, beautiful forms, these systems depends wholly on people for their planning, execution, use, and interpretation. And whilst infrastructures are coded as separate from society, their fluxes and failures can only truly be understood by understanding the interplay between the people, systems, and social expectations involved.
Alice Bell is is a writer, campaigner and researcher interested in the intersections between science, technology and society. She will talk on energy infrastructures.
Ingrid Burrington writes, makes maps, and tells jokes about places, politics, and the weird feelings people have about both. She will talk on internet infrastructures.
Georgina Voss is an anthropologist of technology and innovation, whose work centres on the interplay between technologies, politics, and social systems. She will talk on logistics infrastructures.
Wesley Goatley is a critical sound artist whose work explores opaque processes and hidden power in technologies. He will open the event, with a short introduction on sound and infrastructure.