The Bureau of Operational Landscapes: Infrastructural Walking

The Bureau of Operational Landscapes: Infrastructural Walking

This talk introduces a still-emerging concept of what I call “infrastructural walking” as an artistic research method. Drawing on my Bureau of Operational Landscapes, a quasi-institutional agency that develops methods for encountering infrastructural space through walking, photography, and writing, each walk traces the edges of logistical zones, transportation networks, and service roads, places often undermined as overlooked and peripheral yet organize daily life. Each excursion produces notes and images that accumulate into a loose field archive. A bent pipe or half-erased sign declaring DANGER may be treated as an entry, a monument, or simply another marker along the way. Infrastructural walking is an experiment in paying attention to the discarded and ephemeral, a method to collect the raw material of who and how we are now. Walking accumulates fragments that resist order, a certain form of inscription and attunement. The body becomes a recording…