Infrastructure Aesthetics

When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media – music, videos, games, and software – before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release the material for free. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy is the first scholarly research book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites") in the mid- to late-1990s. The “Scene," as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. The term “Warez" itself refers to pirated media, a derivative of “software." Taking a deep dive in the documentary evidence produced by the Scene itself, Warez describes the operations and infrastructures an underground culture with its own norms and rules of participation, its own forms of sociality, and its own artistic forms. Even though forms of digital piracy are often framed within ideological terms of equal access to knowledge and culture, Eve uncovers in the Warez Scene a culture of competitive ranking and one-upmanship that is at odds with the often communalist interpretations of piracy. Broad in scope and novel in its approach, Warez is indispensible reading for anyone interested in recent developments in digital culture, access to knowledge and culture, and the infrastructures that support our digital age.

An upsurge in artworks negotiating the conditions of their own production, distribution, and reception has called attention to the infrastructural relations that shape the art world but have long been understudied. In response, this book introduces the concept of infrastructure aesthetics into the study of culture. The concept is drawn from infrastructure studies, media theory, and aesthetic theory. This volume develops it further, addressing: the analytical challenge of working with works that blur the boundaries between art and infrastructure, both historically and in the present, the aesthetic problem of assessing artistic forms that operate on an infrastructural level, and the politics of artistic agency on a social level, beyond the work's content or message. As the relation between artworks and their institutional and social settings becomes infrastructural in nature, we need to move beyond the reductive division of the study of artworks into production, articulation, and reception. This book provides its readers with an innovative conceptual toolbox designed for precisely this task, as well as a forceful set of exemplary case studies applying the concepts in theory and practice.

How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.

A critical reading of the unstable structures that organize biological and social life This timely and radically interdisciplinary volume uncovers the aesthetics and politics of infrastructure. From roads and bridges to harbors and canals, infrastructure is conventionally understood as the public works that allow for the circulation of capital. Yet this naturalized concept of infrastructure, driven by capital’s restless expansion, is haunted by imperial tendencies to occupy territory, extract resources, and organize life. Infrastructure thus undergirds the living nexus of modernity in an ongoing project of racialization, affective embodiment, and environmental praxis. Rather than merely making visible infrastructure’s modes of power, however, The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure brings literary methods to bear on the interpretive terrain, reading infrastructural space and temporalities to show that their aesthetic and sensorial experience cannot be understood apart from histories of production and political economies. Building on critical infrastructure studies in anthropology, geography, and media studies, this collection demonstrates the field’s vitality to scholars working across the humanities, including in literary, visual, and cultural studies. By querying the presumed invisibility of infrastructure’s hidden life, the volume’s contributors revitalize ongoing literary debates about reading surface and depth. How, they ask, might infrastructure and aesthetics then function as epistemic tools for rethinking each other? And what urgency do they acquire in light of current crises that bear on death, whether biological, social, or planetary?

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment. Contributors Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler

The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy provides a deep understanding of the nuances of ethics in the creative environment and contributes to the critical exploration of the nature of research ethics in higher education. Written by world-renown academics with a wealth of experience in this field, this volume explores ethical challenges and responses across a range of creative practices and disciplines including design, documentary film making, journalism, socially engaged arts and the visual arts. It addresses the complex negotiations that creative practice researchers in higher education undertake to ensure that the ethical compliance required does not undermine the research integrity and artistic aspirations. By presenting carefully considered challenges to accepted models of research, this book illustrates critical analysis through a variety of case studies and anecdotal examples that provide an insight into improved ethics practices and policies in higher education. This book is perfect for academics, ethics administrators, higher degree research candidates and supervisors looking to engage further in creative practice research and wanting to explore and understand its ethical oversight.

The first book to look at both aesthetics and human resource development, this timely and original work investigates existing, as well as possible future, connections and relations between the two areas. Well structured and expertly written, The Aesthetic Challenges of Human Resource Development is undoubtedly a valuable reference for students of human resource management, business and management, and aesthetics.

This major collection of essays examines issues surrounding aesthetics and ethics.