June 2026
My artwork is an analysis of my experience working in IT for nearly 30 years. I use the objects and experiences that are part of what it is to live and work in the field of IT infrastructure as a conduit for critiquing the visible and invisible interactions of data and data processes which exist in all facets of our lives today. The digital technology which affects how we work, how we do 'leisure' and of course how we do art, has increasingly penetrated into every corner of our experience and for that reason, its effect would seem be have a persuasive directional power over aspirations and behaviours and is worth monitoring.
IT infrastructure is an enabling force for capitalistic global resource organisation and utilisation and the direction it takes us manifests in what we value and what we do. Importantly for systems within this system (of which art is one) there would seem to be little or no way to escape the event horizon of its grasp. Barbara Kruger, Nam June Paik and Jenny Holzer recognise this and their work is influential in what I do. I use ready-made objects, diagrams and assemblages to subvert Information Technology's place in our daily lives, I attempt to transition the viewer into being aware of a relationship of partially hidden things (cables, data centres, Wi-Fi signals), which in effect have a direct influence on their lives by being part of the larger technological dialectic of control.
IT infrastructure is somewhat like a national energy systems, or a water utility distribution system, it is largely hidden from view. Some of its appendages do appear from time to time, for example you may see an odd cable or wireless access point in a corner of a room but the vast majority of it is hidden. Data centres for example may be unmarked buildings in the centre of a city or hidden in a valley in the countryside but have significant physical security surrounding them and have an air of other (legal) worldliness like Carey Young's work: 'Declared Void'.
I am interested in the 'politic' of objects, places and situations similar to concerns Mike Nelson talks about in his reflection on the town of Mardin, Turkey where he saw physical infrastructural changes taking place there in the 2010s and questioned the source and motivation for them. A writer who exposes infrastructure's relationship with social interactions (micro and macro) is Marina Vishmidt. See the essay "Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique"*. Can a rupture (a 'cut') in infrastructure refoundationalise what is possible for us in social institutions?
The digital technologies which IT Infrastructure under-pin is unlike any other (hidden) utility system because IT infrastructure's power is in giving and receiving information made possible by the many Internet based applications we use minute by minute, like web sites, chat apps and more recently AI. The information provided to us can manipulate us, and the data we give out can expose us. Read about Carole Cadwalladr's investigations in to various tech companies abuses of selective advertising or data snooping. What role does IT infrastructure have our age of post-truth politics?
* Sternberg Press https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/23935/. 2017.