is it possible to feel the infrastructural time?

situated action, performative lecture, video-documentation

Part of Documenta 15, together with INSTAR and antiwarcoalition.art, Kassel (DE); Transmediale 2023, Berlin; Fusion Festival 2023

In this session, we wanted to work with infrastructural time and how it can be embodied (if even it is possible). Taking some concrete timing events – delays in cables, time to get particular knowledges about a railway infrastructure, time of burning the cabinets responsible for the algoritmization of the railway in case of sabotage, time of flying rocket from Gomel region to Kyiv, time of masking the wires that can make a signal for the whole system to slow down the train, time of a decision of an operator in a control room – we were shuffling around them, trying to navigate and be navigated, trying to mix the “precision of the computer” with events that act upon it, that can be error-friendly towards the infrastructures, that can wrestle this precise time down. As we think we need to unpack the seemingly untouchable algorithmic processes — they could be actually interrupted, mutable, shakable.

This session took place in Kassel as part of friendly Antiwarcoalition invitation, 2022.