The infrastructures we depend on—data cables, surveillance networks, logistics chains, energy grids—tend to recede into the background, becoming visible only when they fail. Viewed through the lens of artistic and design practice, these hidden systems become sites of inquiry into how power, accountability, and fragility circulate within the networks that structure contemporary life. From forensic analysis of state violence to speculative visions of planetary governance, this work reframes infrastructure not as neutral support but as contested terrain.
Making Systems Legible
Forensic Architecture has become one of the most recognized collectives in this field, pioneering the use of architectural modeling, open-source intelligence, and digital forensics to investigate human rights abuses. Their meticulous reconstructions of bombings, shootings, and environmental crimes are not only legal evidence but also a form of public pedagogy, teaching audiences to read the built environment as testimony. By transforming satellite imagery, smartphone videos, and architectural plans into evidence chains, the group underscores how infrastructures of violence and surveillance can be scrutinized with the same technical tools that enable them.
A recent investigation, A Cartography of Genocide (2023–24), exemplifies this approach. Produced with partners in Palestine, the project assembled an 827-page report and interactive platform that mapped the systematic destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, water networks, and agricultural sites in Gaza. By analyzing patterns of bombardment and infrastructural collapse, Forensic Architecture demonstrated how assaults on life-sustaining systems function not as collateral damage but as an organized strategy of dispossession. The project reframes infrastructure itself—electricity grids, water systems, food supplies—as central evidence in the politics of survival.
Mapping Invisible Networks
Shu Lea Cheang has long examined how digital networks shape identity, sexuality, and control. Her practice brings into view the ways infrastructures of surveillance extend older systems of confinement and regulation into the present. In 3x3x6 (2019), Taiwan’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Cheang used surveillance cameras, facial recognition, and 3D scanning to interrogate how monitoring technologies echo historic regimes of incarceration. The title refers to the dimensions of a standard prison cell—three meters by three meters—watched by six cameras, collapsing architectural space and digital oversight into a single system of control.
Through immersive projections and interactive interfaces, 3x3x6 reframed surveillance infrastructure as both a technological apparatus and a cultural script, binding together sexuality, criminality, and state power. Cheang’s work highlights how contemporary infrastructures are not just logistical or material but also deeply entangled with the politics of visibility—determining who is monitored, how they are represented, and under what conditions they are allowed to exist.
Designing at a Planetary Scale
While some artists make visible what already exists, others speculate on futures where infrastructures themselves are redesigned. Liam Young’s planetary-scale fictions, including Planet City, reimagine governance and logistics beyond national borders, aligning them instead with ecological systems and global resource flows. Using cinematic worldbuilding, Young constructs visual narratives that imagine how architecture, supply chains, and collective governance might operate if infrastructures were designed with planetary crises in mind.
These speculative futures are not prescriptions but provocations. They encourage audiences to confront the mismatch between existing systems of governance and the challenges of climate change, resource depletion, and mass migration. By rendering these alternate realities in vivid detail, Young collapses the distance between speculative fiction and infrastructural planning, showing how imagination itself becomes a tool of governance.
Infrastructure as Cultural Inquiry
Taken together, these practices reveal how infrastructure has become a cultural, political, and artistic question as much as a technical one. Forensic Architecture transforms data into evidence of state violence and infrastructural collapse; Shu Lea Cheang exposes surveillance as both a technological apparatus and a cultural script; Liam Young visualizes speculative futures of planetary governance and logistics. Each project highlights that infrastructures are not static or inevitable—they are designed, contested, and open to reimagination. These works serve as both warnings and prompts. They insist that understanding systems is a prerequisite for reshaping them, and that critical attention to infrastructures may be one of the most consequential arenas for creative practice today.
