Three notes on the Introduction of Signal Traffic

  1. Scholarship which is more intellectually accessible, and not just produced for other scholars to consume.

 

2. What is not media infrastructure?

 

3. Assuming infrastructure as something in the background or being invisible, the modernist design movement bases its aesthetic on the pretense that infrastructure doesn’t exist. Media devices and other products, architecture, etc need to look ‘effortless’ in order to be modern. Traditional minimalism opposes any reminder of messy infrastructural elements. It serves the capitalist agenda to make everything seem simpler than it really is. It also follows, that deliberately revealing infrastructural elements became a big part of postmodern design.

Deliberately hiding infrastructure 

Deliberately revealing infrastructure

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