ABOUT
Infrastructure is a complex network of fundamental systems and machines that are under us, over us, and around us. Often working as quietly as the concerted heartbeats of millions, this meshwork of housing, education, roads, electricity, water, and communication shapes the way people live. Created to enable us, protect us or dominate us, we exist in these structures.
These infrastructures are not only invented for us, but by us. Each individual builds their own personal infrastructure in order to live out their own existence. Tessellating from the macro to the micro, from the international to the personal, infrastructure is not a fixed set of systems, but a working field. Infrastructure shapes the way we live, and we can shape our own infrastructure.
This website serves to catalog our experiments and expand our research into the infrastructure of everyday life.
When we lived in a house without running water, we constructed sinks that used plants and mushrooms to filter water. Conducting field research in Denmark, we visited communities creating their own infrastructure: windpower cooperatives, neighborhood-owned district heating systems, and local food distribution networks. Then there are the ongoing projects of daily life: baking bread, grinding peanut butter by hand, making salt from evaporating seawater, all bound in the process of living.
Part of our continued working process examines the basic systems and components used in our daily lives, and establishes whether we can fabricate them ourselves.
A push and pull of infrastructure as malleable material, not fixed monolith.
Further information