Active Forms: The Artwork and its Infrastructures

Vitenskapelig sammendrag

The city today is a complex landscape of commercial and governmental interests that traverse both the physical and the digital. This is powered by an underlying network of infrastructure. While giving form to the surfaces we experience on a local level, the underbelly of our cities entangles us in a web of resources, energy, power structures and impact far beyond our sight and reach. This is a reality starkly illustrated by the climate catastrophe.

"Active Forms – The Artwork and its Infrastructures" is a research project investigating the relationship between the artwork and this unstable context. The question I ask myself is as simple as it is fundamental: How to continue making art within this condition?

Based in the understanding that the infrastructural is a shared space between artwork and its context, it investigates the position of art within this condition as both hazard and opportunity. In order to make an artwork which stands apart from society’s power structures, the way this space is utilised or navigated must differ. Making art at the time of climate catastrophe creates restrictions and responsibilities. However, by recognising that the process itself has potential for meaning, the consequences of decisions and strategies – the ethics - become an inherent part of the work.

The city and the artwork are also examined as interconnected entities through a wide understanding of form which encompasses both the composition of sculptures and structures that organise society. Based on the idea of affordances, form is a malleable quality which can be activated by those seeing, directing or imposing it. "Active forms" are, according to Keller Easterling, the bits of code in the operating system - or the infrastructure -  of the city.

Through the mediums of sculpture, video, lecture performance and text I search for ways the artwork can engage its context through production, exhibition and continued afterlife. And with Marina Vishmidt’s idea of critique as a temporality, the artwork can be a vehicle, or in itself an infrastructure. Working with the specificity of each situation I enter into, I arrive at multiple and flexible strategies including an expanded understanding of the sculptural object, sharing activist tools and navigating through the bureacracy of a city council. All these are ways the artwork can get to know its own deeper inherent form and harness its infratructural powers.