On Means, Ends, and Infrastructural Realism: Interview with Nicolay Boyadjiev

by Nicolay Boyadjiev & Digital Earth

“Is it possible for example to achieve “humane” ends without necessarily deploying “human-centered” means?”

We interviewed architect Nicolay Boyadjiev following his lab with the Digital Earth Fellows in March 2021. Boyadjiev stresses the importance of “boring” infrastructure because he believes that “the future will not be “resisted” into shape, which will therefore require a different approach from this generation of architects, artists, and designers.”

Your lab focused on infrastructural realism and how we should rethink our relationship with technology. Could you please elaborate how the notion of infrastructural realism is questioning the status-quo of the dominant digital conditions?

In broad terms, the surprisingly challenging objective of our lab was to think through our contemporary relationship with digital technologies in somewhat “drier” and “de-sensationalised” terms – beyond luddism, fatalism or paranoia – in order to demystify these systems and actively uncover positions of agency within them (some contained within us as “moral agents,” but also others contained within the contemporary technical systems themselves). Of course we shouldn’t think of technology as something that “happens” to us, but it’s not something that is/was ever fully in our control either. This therefore calls for some notion of “design”, but also complicates its implications in this context.

Less a fully-fledged theory or manifesto, “Infrastructural Realism” simply delineated both an area and an attitude of exploration. It implies that whether we like it or not, we are effectively already and always embedded in infrastructures upon infrastructures (some are obviously technological, but many are ecological, with the term possibly complicating some of the lingering ontological distinctions we still hold between “nature” and “technology”). It implies that “the failure to change the world may not be unrelated to the failure to understand it”, and hence that in addition to various resistance or escapism fantasies (of which there is no shortage), what is equally required is an ongoing, truly genuine curiosity about the evolving systems which contain us... And finally as many authors have also argued, it implies a long overdue recognition of “infrastructure” as an important site of governance, of collective decision-making, of speculative potential, and ultimately of a different kind of political agency with perhaps farther-reaching implications than some more visible and likely more celebrated forms of activism...

In terms of the “status quo” of our dominant digital condition, hopefully it is clear that the goal isn’t to “naturalise” one current very narrow and highly contingent arrangement nor to forfeit any of our critical instincts, but rather to recognise that the future will not be “resisted” into shape, which will therefore require a different approach from this generation of architects, artists, and designers. Some models of practice overemphasize the “radical” creativity implied seemingly in the “latest solutions / theory / critique”, over more editorial modes of creativity driven by an interest in layering, maintenance, and perhaps more “boring” (or “post-interesting”) areas of involvement implied by the term infrastructure. I tend to believe that all design is actually re-design, that there is no such thing as tabula rasa, and therefore that “infrastructural realism” could stand for the propositional ability to posit new worlds through positing alternative infrastructural regimes, conceived through strategic involvement in the terms of transition rather than the recurring (re)production of wholesale utopias / dystopias.

Digital Earth’s leading question is how to imagine humane digital earths to come. Envisioning your lab through this lens, what is now crucial in our quest for building humane digital futures?

Referring back to your first question, part of what is urgently required is a renewed technical literacy followed by a properly restored theoretical grasp as to the infrastructural technologies within which we find ourselves entangled, in order to effectively understand and therefore possibly re-orient our actual relative “human” status within them. Simply put, I think there is sometimes a large and growing gap between how we think we understand a certain technology to work vs. how it actually works, and therefore the terms with which we see ourselves in relation to its outcomes tends to be skewed to fit any number of preferred pre-established narratives. Before we even hope to embark on speculating on their potentially more “humane” trajectories, understanding what actually drives these systems is certainly crucial. This is easier said than done considering how quickly some of these have evolved / are evolving, and how entrenched some of our foundational theories or biases about them are.

Early in the context of the lab, we discussed a hard distinction between notions of a “humane digital earth” vs. “human-centered digital earth,” as sometimes these concepts get conflated as if interchangeable. Is it possible for example to achieve “humane” ends without necessarily deploying “human-centered” means? Does the translation of our aspirational values into infrastructural systems, or the linear pipeline from “humane mean” to “humane ends”, operate in the ways we assume it does under the current conditions? Fundamentally, another crucial question also had to do with the articulation of the “humane” as a truly inclusive category. As a social construct, the notion of the “human” has been an ongoing ideological project, one not necessarily having the best historical track record in its application… In the quest for building humane digital futures, it is also crucial to demistify the figure of the human, to move beyond the idealised, self-contained “vitruvian action figure” perceived either as a servant or master of its technology, and articulate more representative imaginaries for our co-dependency within technological and ecological systems. In other words, it is crucial to demystify the technologies that surround us, to demystify the terms of our co-entanglement, in order to demystify our role and the terms of our agency towards truly more humane futures.

From seeing the fellows interact with a research topic you have dealt with for so long, what remarks, questions, or other contemplations stayed with you following the lab?

There were several overlaps between the work of Digital Earth fellows re-imagining the current narratives of our digital futures, and the ongoing work of the design-research think tank I co-lead [at Strelka] where we seek to re-imagine the current dominant design narratives associated with our pressing environmental issues. For one, both these topics are certainly thematically linked, but more directly in both projects it is clear that the prevailing established conceptual dichotomies on offer aren’t serving us very well... For me one interesting insight perhaps emerged in group discussions over “scale” and “scalability”, or rather over the provocative notion of “scale without scalability.” For example, in the scope of the ecological problems we are facing, beyond letting go of superficial binaries regarding scale (i.e. indiscriminate championing vs. performative suspicion), we also need more accurate vocabularies to actually map “registers of scale” without the presumption of linear vertical scalability between them. Many would argue that both notions of “top-down” and “bottom-up” are in fact inadequate processes or “means” to address contemporary challenges at the scale(s) at which they need to be addressed. Both these “low-resolution” concepts imply the vertical translation of scalable activity one way or the other, rather than a “scale of effect”. We’ve had similar collective realisations over other low-resolution dichotomies such as centralisation vs. decentralisation, self-composition vs. planless emergence, etc. The easiest reflex is often to pick a position on this spectrum. And this is just the wrong spectrum.

We would like to know more about what has inspired your work and establish a reference list for our readers. Could you name work which you draw from to build your arguments or experiences which has shaped your perspective?

To be honest, professionally I think was very lucky early on in my architectural career to avoid a kind of legacy disciplinary indoctrination which tends to over-fetishize either high-end, theoretically driven “cultural statements” or seemingly socially / community driven “small-is-beautiful” tactical interventions, both perhaps at the expense of the other 99% of built matter on the earth’s crust… Instead, I found myself working for over half a decade within a remarkable multidisciplinary team on the CHUM mega-hospital in downtown Montreal: 2 urban blocks and 22 floors of program, one of the largest healthcare projects in North America, and in retrospect I think a great example of “Infrastructural Realism” leading to more humane futures. This was truly an infrastructure project at massive industrial scale and technical complexity; an incredible machine of intertwined, co-entangled, literally life-supporting digital and mechanical technical systems working together to create the ultimate synthetic environmental back-end at the service of its unequivocally “humane” and “human-centered” purpose from the POV of the patient. On such a project, you learn implicitly to focus on the daily complex negotiation of infrastructural means, on systemic constraints, “on the real”... while keeping the symbolic, aspirational and humane “ends” of building a hospital in the back of your mind. The gymnastics of this dissociation of ends & means - of “infrastructure-centred-design” towards the ultimate benefit of the human - should appear commonsense in the case of a hospital, but the approach is not always fully internalised in some practices where the combing of inner narratives and refinement of personal, sanctimonious values is necessarily presumed to both precede and isomorphically condition their accurate and rightful translation as outcomes in the form of impersonal technical systems.

And so, coming back to your original question, I think it would be easy to list some influential readings and references - Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminist Manifesto, Manuel Delanda’s Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Keller Easterling’s work, and Benjamin H. Bratton’s recent The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World quickly all now come to mind - however as an architect I prefer to mention a project. No matter what and how much is being said, it is through the constraints, inertia and resistance of the real that ideas take shape, and through their foundational layering in our collective infrastructures that they begin to take hold.