Lecture on “Sensitive infrastructures: Aesthetic investigations of the critical zone in the exhibition space” at Aarhus University, organized by The Cultures and Practices of Digital Technologies research program and the STS and Digital Aesthetic Research Centers
August 23, 2024, Aarhus University, 5342-333 Ada Møderum (26)
The paper discusses the “thought exhibitions” developed by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, in collaboration with various co-curators, for the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (Germany), most notably “Critical Zones – Observatories for Earthly Politics” (2020–22). It provides an expansive insight into the complex scientific measurement methodologies and scholarly protocols that underpin the research practices of Earth System Science and emphasizes the infrastructural nature of this complex of data collection – infrastructures that include scientific instruments and data processing, but also “sensitive infrastructures” (Arènes) made up of trees, microorganisms, and collaborative research practices. Based on the author’s first-hand knowledge of the exhibition planning and collaboration with Weibel and Latour, the paper pinpoints the central predicament of an exhibition that ambitions to represent this complex infrastructure which itself responds to the impossibility of giving one proper representation of its object: namely how to mediate an unlimited infrastructural endeavor (of climate change monitoring) in the finite infrastructural organization of the exhibition space. While the paper focuses on the extensive installation “CZO Space” by Alexandra Arènes and Soheil Hajmirbaba – one of the centerpieces of the show –, it also discusses the curatorial work that has gone into making the exhibition and the negotiation between different infrastructural scales it entailed. In doing so, it emphasizes the necessity of exhibiting the impossibility of representation in a mediation that invites its spectators to take part in unraveling this infrastructural conundrum.
