Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

The United States has always demonstrated a keen proficiency for wielding the instruments of infrastructure as a means of demarcating spaces and building barriers to access resources. The language used to undergird concepts of independence, in support of the original thirteen colonies, with intent of walling off the most inalienable resources from those most in need, particularly everyone rendered as other against the backdrop of settler colonial histories. Infrastructural Voids refers to the communities constrained by highway infrastructure projects of the past—thriving in its maintenance of economic, healthcare, and educational access impediments still in place today. Vestiges of the walled cities transposed onto segregated neighborhoods remain, not through gauche practices of physical containment but rather through the weighted spectral presence of neoliberal policies determined powers that enforce economic segregation and racial alienation. This research-based practice and essay applies computational animations to construct abstract composites of the frenetic existence of the infrastructural voids constructed inside of once thriving communities and archiving the cascading adverse impacts these projects have had on the American communities beset with their proximity to architecture’s violence. The technologies of infrastructural voids have shifted, yet the incentives of economic centers to sustain the status quo advancing its own prosperity—the opaque nature of infrastructural harms, remains operative.