Medialab Prado

"In the four years that have passed since its introduction, the iPhone has become a ubiquitous symbol of what has been called the “invisible city” – the webs of immaterial data and telecommunications that are essential to the functioning of vast portions of the global economy and the daily lives of billions. The key characteristic of this infrastructure, though, is that invisibility, which may obscure another, equally important fact: the iPhone is entangled not only with immaterial networks of data, but also with a vast array of physical landscapes.

This lecture outlines the spatial trace and organizational logic of the processes which the iPhone is materially embedded in and inextricable from.  In doing so, this lecture aims to both reveal hidden landscapes and demonstrate the potential of an ontology of infrastructure which reads the cyclical interdependence of contemporary technological and economic processes, where scanning the internet in a Virginia coffeeshop on a smartphone is understood as directly linked to the smelting of zinc ores into refined indium at Teck Resource’s refinery in British Columbia." By Rob Holmes