6    CANNED CHANCE: METHODS FOR FOLLOWING INFRASTRUCTURE

Stories about proxies are full of acts of concealment, erasure, and disavowal. The stories in this book are suffused with attempts to mask the arbitrary decisions and protocols that make standardization possible and make infrastructures persist. They are also full of stories of the spectacularity of proxies: people observed the bombing of Yodaville from grandstands and highly aestheticized images of these trainings circulated online; the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK) was consecrated in a ritualistic burial; the Lena image became an icon, its own proper piece of auratic media, far beyond its original purpose; and standardized patients have been used frequently in film, television, and literature to mock the peculiarity of medical education. But the spectacularity of proxies contributes to their concealment by affirming that these things, these places, and these people are special—they are vested with the power to stand in for the world. They are our chosen delegates.

To varying degrees, the concealment of standards is what makes them ordinary, what helps a standard integrate with infrastructure, and what allows infrastructure to operate unperturbed. The study of proxies, then, is the study of the basic conditions of infrastructure, the labor that it takes to make and maintain infrastructural conditions, and the process of repairing and recuperating those conditions when they inevitably break down.1 This approach to proxies, standards, and infrastructures provokes a necessary question: what tools or techniques are available to uncover this process? Or, to put it bluntly: how do we make infrastructures into objects of analysis, and what is at stake if we do?

In this final chapter, I want to sketch out some of the ways people have turned infrastructures into objects of analysis and suggest how a theory of proxies, as well as a process for tracing proxies, can supplement these existing strategies. As a coda to the preceding chapters, I want to offer that researching and writing the biographies of proxies can constitute a technique for getting at the lifeworlds and poetics of infrastructural thinking. In approaching infrastructure in this way, I want to propose three complementary ideas: first, that the concealment of infrastructure (including standards) is an ongoing and always partial process; second, that transparency is a political claim, not an ontological status of infrastructure; and, third, that based on the context, various tools and techniques can be used to map the relational and political dynamics of infrastructure. Following from these ideas, I explore two prominent and conspicuous techniques for mapping infrastructures and standards—the ironic repurposing of standardization in artistic practice and the revelatory promises and techniques of critical infrastructure studies—both of which rely on a promise that they can expose the taken-for-granted.

It is “a joke about the Meter,” responded Marcel Duchamp when asked to comment on his artwork 3 stoppages étalon (3 standard stoppages), shown in figure 6.1.2 In this work, Duchamp measured three meter-length pieces of string, dropped them onto a canvas from 1 meter above, and traced the twisted and sloping lines they created. These outlines reconfigured a measurement unit, the meter, as three slouchy lines, and Duchamp used these shapes as templates for three drafting straightedges, the objects displayed in 3 stoppages étalon. In his Box of 1914, Duchamp included fragmentary comments about the artwork, describing it as a distortion of standardized measurements:

Figure 6.1

Marcel Duchamp, 3 stoppages étalon (3 standard stoppages) 1913–1914, replica from 1964. ©Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020. Photo: ©Tate.

The Idea of the Fabrication

–If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane distorting itself as it pleases and creates a new shape of the measure of length.

–3 patterns obtained in more or less similar conditions: considered in their relation to one another they are an approximate reconstitution of the measure of length.

–The 3 standard stoppages are the meter diminished.3

Duchamp later named this process “canned chance.”4 In fact, 3 stoppages étalon is representative of a familiar trope from the interwoven histories of standardization, measurement, and artistic experimentation. If Duchamp’s 3 stoppages étalon is a joke about the meter, what’s the joke about? First, the International Prototype Meter was the basis of all length measurements in the metric system when Duchamp created his artwork. It was, by all appearances, the opposite of a piece of string dropped “as it pleases.” Instead, the Meter was a piece of platinum-iridium forged to be durable and stable—to mutate as little as it pleased. All proxies live in things—metal, paper, pixels, or flesh—and the exchange of a metal alloy for household string is a joke about the durability of proxies, a joke about the theater of objectivity, and a joke about the fantasy of authority attached to sturdy stuff. Making the Meter out of platinum-iridium invokes a fantasy of timelessness and the notion that the materiality of a proxy will live up to its (supposedly) invariant reference points.

Standards are, to play off of Duchamp’s terminology, canned decisions about how to represent the world in a limited fashion; standards put a lid on a lengthy and necessarily cultural practice of choosing workable segments of the world. The official Meter, the subject of Duchamp’s joke, was based on a fraction of the Earth’s meridian, compiled during seven years of painstaking measurement of the French landscape during the peak of post-Revolutionary turmoil.5 The International Prototype Meter, like its sibling the IPK, was a materialization of the highest aspirations of Enlightenment ideals. Accordingly, Duchamp’s second joke is at the expense of French Enlightenment idealists, who could just as easily have saved the seven years of trouble by dropping a piece of string on a canvas. Standards, as this book describes, are enacted through strict protocols and rituals for creating systems of communication and coordination through the sharing of proxies. Proxies, as samples of the world out there, become stand-ins for how things might work. But 3 stoppages étalon turns the process on its head. Instead of choosing a proxy as a fixed point and establishing a repertoire to maintain it, Duchamp created a small-scale ritual to maintain a random set of points. The joke is on the theater of objectivity: there would be no need to shore up the legitimacy of a proxy if it were never intended to be legitimate in the first place.

Duchamp’s last joke concerns the fact that standards use traceable references to maintain order and create usable systems. The metric system works with very few errors because its references are accessible, reproducible, and guaranteed through a network of linkages that can be traced to the system’s bureaucratic home in France. The nested and internetworked dependability of standards is what makes them infrastructural.6 That is to say that standards work as the conditions of operability for other systems (e.g., the standards that make up networked computing allow applications to work across devices; the standards that make up the highway system allow any street-legal car to use it). Standards use fixed points so that each subsequent operation built on that standard doesn’t need to reperform the labor of fixing points. If every time someone wanted to build a house, they had to get the architects, engineers, contractors, and inspectors to agree on length standards, building would take a lot longer. In fact, this was the case at one time. Prior to standardized units of length, traveling masons involved in cathedral construction in the twelfth century used adjustable templates to format their tools to each town’s local measurements using, among other things, pieces of string reminiscent of Duchamp’s stoppages.7

In 3 stoppages étalon, Duchamp’s final product is a series of three straightedges that likewise are templates: representational technologies that materialize a process in a physical artifact. Like the standards that the artwork is intended to lampoon, 3 stoppages étalon uses a ritual to create its proxies. Although each Meter-proxy captures a different moment in the fall of the string onto the canvas, and their differences to one another demonstrate the ridiculousness of the exercise, they nonetheless evoke the ways that standards operate as “recipes for reality”:8 begin with a method for fixing points; use those points to create proxies; and use those proxies to create new objects, systems, and expressions. Thus, 3 stoppages étalon is a useful way to expose the logic and idealism of standardization. Among its many jokes, the artwork prods the performative and ritualistic labor that goes into transforming the arbitrariness of standardization into the appearance of objectivity.

Duchamp was not the first (and far from the last) artist to use the tools of standardization and infrastructuralization in his work. Such tools make attractive subject matter for artists because they embody a simplified formalism in which representation is reduced to elementary lines, shapes, and colors. The inclusion of common measurement tools in creative works also can be a way of signaling to a spectator a common way of seeing things. In Renaissance painting, artists were trained to use a familiar repertoire of stock objects that would allow viewers to gauge how accurately the artist had reproduced a particular perspective: “A painter who left traces of such analysis in his painting was leaving cues his public was well equipped to pick up.”9 These stock objects varied by locality but often relied on the knowledge of common containers: barrels, sacks, and bales. In this way, they foreshadowed contemporary proxies like the Lena image, which can be used to benchmark individual talent and the efficiency of an algorithmic process, or other, standard three-dimensional (3D) digital objects like the Stanford bunny and the Utah Teapot.10 The Utah Teapot, also known as the “Newell Teapot,” is a 3D representation of a Melitta teapot—a sample of domestic hardware meant as a stock object for testing a program or a user’s abilities, and easily recognized by other users. It was one of the first of such objects, and it frequently appears in computer-animated media as a winking nod to knowing insiders.11 While Duchamp could turn to the metric system and tweak its arbitrariness with aleatory play, and Renaissance painters could invoke standard objects to cue perspectival awareness, contemporary art is similarly festooned with standard measurement tools. Contemporary artists frequently demonstrate their familiarity with more recent common items used in the testing and calibration of codecs, file formats, and standards.

In her video installation How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, the artist Hito Steyerl begins with a handheld resolution target, a test image, and poses holding it in a fashion reminiscent of the Shirley cards discussed in chapter 3.12 The video proceeds through other resolution targets used by the US government and military in the calibration of spy satellites since the 1950s. The image in figure 6.2 depicts one of these resolution targets, a tri-bar test image in the California desert. The targets have fallen into disrepair, with grass and trees sprouting through the concrete—a visual reminder of the porousness of proxies. Steyerl’s work ties together several of the threads discussed throughout this book. It brings us full circle from the visual and experiential stand-in of Yodaville, presenting yet another materialization of the military imaginary and its apparatuses for controlling space through surveillance. The fact that the targets are themselves objects of fascination for contemporary artists also foregrounds the theatrical and mediatic potential of proxies, which always exist as unsettled instruments—at once operating as objects of measurement and props in a theater of objectivity.

Figure 6.2

A tri-bar resolution target from the 1950s, used to calibrate satellite imaging technology. The target is located near Cuddeback Lake, in the Mojave Desert, California. Photo: ©CLUI. Courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

The April 2006 cover of ArtForum (figure 6.3) features a photograph by the artist Christopher Williams—a reproduction of a Kodak Shirley card. The artwork, with the unwieldy title Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide © 1968 Eastman Kodak Company, 1968 (Meiko laughing), Vancouver, B.C., April 6, 2005, is a staged reenactment of the now-familiar genre of the test image. The Museum of Modern Art describes the work as “[sending] up the aesthetic conventions of photographic representation.” Like Duchamp’s 3 stoppages étalon, this work is meant to transform the “invisible” standard of representation into an aestheticized object and turn the format of photography into an object of critical appraisal.13

Figure 6.3

An artist’s interpretation of the April 2006 cover of ArtForum magazine, featuring a representation of a Kodak test image, or Shirley card. Image: R. R. Mulvin.

In 2005, Julie Buck and Karin Segal mounted an exhibit at Harvard’s Sert Gallery titled “Girls on Film,” which displayed film control strips, including many so-called China Girl images (the show was written up in the Harvard Gazette under the headline “A Bevy of Unknown Beauties”).14 For the 2012 Whitney Biennale, the artist Lucy Raven contributed a much-heralded series of works titled “Standard Evaluation Materials,” which included a set of film projector calibration images and speaker test tones, accompanied by a public lecture about contemporary test films used in digital projector calibration.15 The infamous phrase discussed in chapter 3 and used by the Kodak executive to describe new film stock that could “photograph the details of a dark horse in low light” (coded language, as Lorna Roth argues, for the film stock’s capacity for representing the skin of people of color) became the title of a photography exhibition by the artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. In staging this exhibition in Toronto, they mounted Shirley cards on billboards throughout the city.16 As Robin Lynch argues, the interplay of technological appropriations of art and artistic appropriations of technical materials can be read in some ways as an implicit attempt to bridge the two cultures that supposedly divide the human and the scientific. However, any such attempt is never guaranteed; it is subject to the power dynamics of representation, the gendering of technical disciplines, the instrumentalization of women’s bodies, and the use of racialized prototypes.17

These are just the beginning: proxies, standardized instruments, and the application of tacit knowledge of commonplace objects are recurrent themes in the history of art and attest to the inseparability of all three.18 Like Duchamp tweaking the metric system’s performative objectivity, the use of a proxy as the basis of artistic expression is nothing short of a rite of passage for these materials. The Lena test image has not only appeared in HBO’s Silicon Valley, as discussed in chapter 4, but has also been the subject of poems, reenactments, and video art. Artists like Trevor Paglen and Luke DuBois have used different versions of the image and the centerfold in recent years, with DuBois even receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Playboy for his artwork.

If there is an overemphasis on visual proxies in this book, that shouldn’t be taken as an indication of their exclusive role in artistic appropriation. Test sounds also are featured frequently in artwork; for instance, the Suzanne Vega song “Tom’s Diner,” which was used in many tests of what would become the MP3, became material for artwork by Ryan Maguire.19 Standardized patients are also a popular topic in television, film, and journalism, appearing as comic relief in episodes of both Seinfeld and ER. Moreover, standard-makers are often eager to reappropriate their own proxies. The first standardized patient, Lynn Taylor, was painted by Phyllis Barrows, the wife of Howard Barrows (she was apparently in a class where Taylor modeled). Later, in 1997, Howard Barrows used the painting in a special issue of the medical journal Caduceus, on a topic called “Simulation in Medical Education.”20 The examples here demonstrate the fluid movement of proxies between different domains of cultural expression.21

Proxies are not simple instruments used in the standardization process: rather, they are cultural artifacts used by people steeped in culture, and through reuse, proxies become new materials for creative expression. The dynamic interaction of creative and technical expression is never unidirectional, and this demonstrates the impossible task of fully separating the technical life of proxies from their affective, creative, and embodied dimensions. As the Lena image indicates, and examples like “Tom’s Diner” corroborate, standard-makers are not isolated from the culture at large. They are workers, and consumers, embedded in their own cultural milieus and their proxies are suffused with the cultural work of analogy and adhesion: they allow us to think through things to make new connections.

One of the goals of this book is to show how the nodes in the circuit of culture (identity, production, representation, regulation, consumption) could be expanded to include standardization, which is interlinked with every one of these other nodes.22 The identities, consumption practices, and practices of representation of the people who work in the standardization process bear directly on the standards they create. Examples of this include the suturing of soft-core porn into the basic visual architecture of the internet and the scripting of embodied performance of disease and disability into the standardized patient program. This is not a novelty of the twentieth century. Standards have always soaked up the world around them. They tell stories about how to represent the world and in turn crystallize an abstracted version of the world that they set out to represent. Throughout this book, I have relied on an artist to represent certain artifacts of the world surrounding proxies: diagrams, images, video stills, and journal and magazine covers have each been reproduced and reinterpreted by hand. These works are meant to underline the contingent connection of proxies to their claims of verisimilitude—or the realishness of proxies. In addition, the illustrations are meant to foreground the manual and embodied labor of making and maintaining proxies that lies at the heart of the histories in this book.

A turn toward materiality within media and infrastructure studies has often implied a turn away from the cultural and representational—as well as the assertion or implication that we can study one without the other.23 As the histories of proxies demonstrate, however, even the most basic standards and infrastructures, including the measurement standards of the metric system, are always built through cultural, representational, and embodied practices. They are thoroughly material and technological, but these practices never escape the human work of bringing the world into representational comparison. Artistic practices can provide an avenue for exposing the logics and inner workings of standards and infrastructures; but they also highlight the flows of texts, images, and cultural detritus that circulate more widely, and they expose any strict division between the cultural, the technological, and the scientific as always fictional.

THE TRANSPARENCY HYPOTHESIS

Where artists use ironic recontextualization to tweak the deadpan seriousness of standards and infrastructures, scholars of infrastructure have often used the inevitable breakdown of all technologies to expose how such systems work. The argument goes as follows: whereas infrastructure is typically a ground on which other things figure, a breakdown turns that ground into a figure for analysis. Within a growing body of work at the intersections of standards, infrastructure, media, and technology, scholars use this widely accepted premise to expose the givenness of standards, infrastructures, norms, platforms, and other related phenomena. This work depends on a transparency hypothesis to argue that these objects of study deserve attention in part because they are taken for granted.

The most complete articulations of the transparency hypothesis are put forward by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star and their collaborators. Bowker’s 1994 introduction of the very popular and useful method of “infrastructural inversion,”24 which tasked researchers with looking to the embedded infrastructural preconditions that make science and technology possible, was followed in 1996 by Star and Karen Ruhleder’s now-canonical definition of infrastructure.25 Their definition is used by many scholars focused on the problematics of infrastructure, and it is often invoked as the basis for a new kind of “infrastructure studies.”26 Among the most cited and repeated features of infrastructure that Star and Ruhleder defined is the manner in which infrastructure is embedded, invisible, and revealed only when it breaks down. They write:

These features of infrastructure are recapitulated regularly wherever infrastructure is said to “exist in the background,”28 where “science and media become transparent when scientists and society at large forget many of the norms and standards they are heeding,”29 where platforms are described as “whatever the programmer takes for granted when developing,”30 and where comparisons are made between the relative transparency of infrastructure to other conditions of social life: “software code … is much less visible than law.”31 There are many more examples that repeat this familiar, powerful refrain: like breathing warm air onto a cold window, we might convey some shape of ignored, overlooked, and unseen objects. This is a powerful gesture, and one that accorded some measure of legitimacy to a nascent, interdisciplinary field.

The transparency hypothesis works in concert with a turn toward materiality and an analytic rematerialization of information technologies that were mistakenly or misleadingly described as immaterial for a generation or more. In massive, networked, digital communication systems, where control and resistance are exerted at the level of infrastructure, a realignment of investigatory interests is especially necessary. A new alignment should not, as the argument goes, focus exclusively on the surface content of communication technologies and media, but rather on the conditions that make communication technologies and media possible. Such work is conscientious in its unearthing and exposing of standards, infrastructures, and technologies; many of these objects were ignored and were, practically speaking, invisible to the kinds of investigations that were normally regarded as legitimate.

Another complication comes from the contradictory meaning of “transparent” in different contexts. In infrastructure studies, it has come to mean that something escapes attention, is ready-at-hand, or can be taken for granted. In institutional discourses (like those of the state, the corporation, or the university), “transparency” has the opposite meaning: it is a name for the exposure of processes, data, and practices that are otherwise considered to be hidden; or it can be the claim that particular processes, like those surrounding Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI), or behavioral tracking, will expose otherwise-hidden laws of social life. Calls for greater transparency are often calls for exposition, for making the secret public. But we all know from experience in these institutions that claims of offering greater transparency from political, corporate, or university actors are often attempts to control and manage oversight of their operations. Limited transparency, as much as total concealment, can be a tool of obfuscation. Hence, promises from tech companies that they will make their decision-making processes more transparent are an attempt to immunize themselves against other claims made against their business and labor practices.32

Likewise, in recent years, researchers have used “fairness, accountability, and transparency” within AI and machine learning as benchmarks of algorithmic in/justice—though these terms too have been coopted by the very institutions they were meant to question. As Mikkel Flyverbom argues, these negotiations over transparency and concealment are not zero-sum struggles, but rather a part of a larger social practice of “managing visibilities.” In managing visibility, organizations wield transparency as a resource to be employed in negotiations over power and control, and in the formation of organizational identities.33 What this leads us to conclude is that transparency is a political claim, a discursive resource, and a relational tool that gets instrumentalized in the struggle over boundaries and claims for justice and accountability.

Instead of seeking to expose the transparent, this book approaches standards and infrastructures as technologies that undergo constant, yet always partial, concealment. Concealment is treated here as a repetitive and reparative process. This is most obvious in the ways that the IPK underwent cleaning, and more subtle in the ways that image engineers responded to criticism of the Lena image from fellow students and coworkers. If, by definition, infrastructure is invisible—with infra referring to its occupation of a level below the readily perceptible—there is perhaps no good to be gained from upending a solid etymology. Yet, as Lampland and Star stipulate, it is “good infrastructure, by definition [that is] is invisible.”34 And here we should pause in order not to let the word “good” slip by because a distinction between what is seen as good infrastructure and what is seen as bad infrastructure ought to pique our interest. The experience and appreciation of infrastructure will vary by any number of sociodemographic conditions, including location, age, ability, and access to alternative systems. For thirty years, there has been an “infrastructure crisis” in the Global North.35 If we are in a constant state of crisis about our basic infrastructure, then is any of it good, and by extension, invisible?

The term “infrastructure” as a category of critical analysis and as a category of social experience was always meant to be relational.36 Critically gazing at the flows and barriers of infrastructure ought to prioritize the perspectival and social aspects of what makes a way of doing things seem transparent for some people at some times, and impossible for other people at other times.37 As Kregg Hetherington puts it, the transparency of infrastructure is dependent on a “geography of uneven development.”38 This is clear for anyone who can’t take infrastructure for granted, for whom breakdown is a fact of life, or anyone who lives in a place that is singled out as a target of neocolonial development.39 As Gabrielle Hecht shows us, infrastructures have uneven “valuation/waste dialectics” that permit the making of modernity’s scales.40 We must understand the ideology of infrastructure-as-taken-for-granted as the dream of frictionlessness, the dream of handiness, and the dream of development.41 This means that we have to account for the ways that infrastructure’s promise is an always unfulfilled assurance of modernity, that things can always get better.

Transparency has politics. Sometimes things are hidden from view because they are repugnant or unjust.42 Sometimes they are hidden because revealing them would expose an underlying exploitation. Drawing together the transparency of the clear glass skyscrapers of Toronto’s modernist architecture with Canadian government claims to truth and openness, Jas Rault argues that settler colonialism operates through colonial “tricks of transparency,” and an “architecture that means to feel like a natural, inevitable and inescapable environment.”43 Armond Towns argues that the manner in which infrastructures are discussed as taken for granted throws into relief how Black bodies are treated as always ready-at-hand resources and, in being treated as such, rendered invisible.44 Rachel Hall teaches us how to view airport security through a theater of transparency, showing that it is unevenly enforced on racialized bodies.45 For some, transparency is a threat; for others, it is a promise that one might be able to take the conditions of their lived environment for granted. Infrastructure is never only a system of substrates; it is always a means of distributing and redistributing security, access, recognition, and the conditions of making do.

SEEKING TRACES

As this book has described, things, places, images, and people undergo many forms of maintenance, repair, and transformation to allow them to continue functioning in their capacity as the material and representational underpinnings of infrastructure. All these acts of erasure, concealment, and suspended disbelief are relational, provisional, and contingent, and they are meant to manage the visibility of knowledge-making practices.46 Think of the keepers of the IPK washing away the cylinder’s contamination and the way that they consecrated the IPK by burying it with paperwork; think of the ripping or tearing of the Lena image and the stories that those engineers told for how and why they ripped or tore or folded the image just so; think of the standardized patients suppressing their actual bodies (via breath mints, granola bars, and other means) to highlight their simulated diseases and disabilities; think of the doctors playacting until it seems all too real because their careers depend on it. Proxies are crucial to the making of standards and infrastructures, and they too operate only within organizational practices of managed visibility.

So, how should we study things that are meant to be invisible if we cannot or will not wait for their breakdown-induced inversion? The artist, scholar, and writer Ingrid Burrington provides a handbook for seeing and understanding the internet infrastructure in New York City, which she describes as “hiding in plain sight.”47 In Networks of New York, she has created a field guide for deciphering the insider codes of urban architecture, including the cable markings, manhole covers, surveillance cameras, and antennae that saturate a city landscape but mostly go without notice. For Burrington, uncovering the black box of technology does not require special access, but rather a way of seeing and a particular positionality:

The trick of how to see the internet isn’t tech know-how or gaining access to secret rooms. It’s learning what to look for and how to look for it. Learning how to see and pay attention to the fragmented indicators and nodes of networks on any city street is also a process of learning how to see and live within a world full of large, complicated systems.48

Using hand-drawn sketches, Burrington’s brilliant field guide turns the opaque internetworks of concealed infrastructure into type-images like those of a bird-watching or tree-spotting guide. It converts the impenetrability of infrastructural semiosis into a pocket-size glossary of infrastructure’s plumage, all without the need for breakdown. Her approach bridges the artistic representation of standards and infrastructure and the excavatory impulse of infrastructure studies.

If artistic appropriation and infrastructural inversion are techniques for defamiliarizing technologies that are taken for granted, then this book builds on these techniques. Proxies and their protocols (including data hygienics, instructions for performance, declarations about their accordance with the natural world, and so on) need constant attention and that attention leaves a trace. Through the process of writing a history of a proxy it is possible to follow how things, places, and people are turned into representations of the world and function as the necessary fictions of knowledge systems. To study infrastructure through its material assemblages, protocols, performances, documents, and embodiments is to understand how infrastructure works and is made to drift from view. But this book has aimed for something else, too: to account for what is excised, what is made a remainder of the process of creating a proxy. It has done so as a matter of justice and equity and as a matter of exposing the representational and world-making limitations of infrastructures.

As standard-makers expanded the ambit of phenomena that they might standardize, they were both driven and accompanied by a widening scope of things that seemed measurable. Thus, this book traces a filament of standardization throughout the long twentieth century, from basic measurement units to the standardization of digital images to, finally, the attempt to standardize medical care through the use of human actors employed as test patients. These histories both add to an understanding of how standards and knowledge infrastructures developed and give us an understanding of who works to make standards possible. These cases were also chosen because they left behind a body of evidence that tells us something about how proxies are chosen and maintained through the routines, rituals, and embodied performances of scientific and technical labor.

My research took me to the sites of official standardization and its histories: the Library of Congress, National Archives, National Library of Medicine, and National Institute of Standards and Technology; but it also led me to the less official places where the traces of standardization reside: countless hours spent reading digitized reports about image processing, following the message board discussions of standardized patients, navigating to photography sites where people exchange test and calibration images, and fruitlessly trying to get permission to see the IPK. It involved a dozen different borrowers’ cards, a documentary regime that could attest to my identity,49 and at each, a different set of embodied techniques for creating, requesting, or making scans and photocopies to produce my own set of traces and linkages between objects, people, and places. These are part of the embodied experiences and routines of archival work.

Where Carolyn Steedman describes the “dust of an archive” and the specific form of possession that haunts the historian, we might add to that dust the sad sandwich or premade burrito that we lug through humid Washington on our way to College Park, or the eerie loneliness of the picnic bench at the National Library of Medicine.50 The burrito of the archive is the topic for another day, but these practices extend the larger world of proxies and their traces to mundane routines and protocols, the forms of access we can or cannot acquire, and the makeshift infrastructural labor of research.

>>>

Proxies are clarifying: their creation, maintenance, and use illuminate the connective tissue between the people, objects, and protocols that make infrastructure vibrant. The process of following proxies centers on the cultures that surround technical and scientific knowledge production. It trains a gaze, or a perspective, on the articulation work that everyone must perform.

In the final days of this project, I found myself re-creating 3 stoppages étalon. I stood with Lewis Bush in his backyard and tried to drop some string onto pieces of cardboard that Lewis had lying around his studio (see figures 6.4 and 6.5). The string was twisted from being stored in a ball, and the wind carried the string away from the cardboard. It took many attempts. I have to confess that I had to move much closer than a 1-meter height to get a usable shape. It was a reminder of the contours of proxies: the embodied labor, the communities of practice, the makeshift materiality, the haphazard interventions of place and circumstance.

Figure 6.4

The author in the process of creating a standard stoppage. String and pen on cardboard. Photo: Lewis Bush.

Figure 6.5

“Three More Standard Stoppages.” Cardboard. Dylan Mulvin and Lewis Bush (2020). Image: Lewis Bush.

Proxies are real things, real places, real people; but they are also always memories of a world gone by and forecasts of a world to come. While they appear durable, they are porous, flexible, and, finally breakable. The proxies in this book are not unique, but they are stickier than some, having picked up the traces of the places where they’ve traveled.51 The cases given here map a way of studying stand-ins as the pragmatic and practical artifacts for representing the world and the assumptions that are made of that world.

This book began with a simple question: to whom or to what do we delegate the power to stand in for the world? Some of the answers to this question have included cities in the American Midwest, shipping containers in Arizona, pieces of metal in France, centerfolds in Los Angeles, and medical actors anywhere. But these were only starting points. A concern for the cultural labor of standing in also demands that we ask: To whom do we delegate the power to choose stand-ins? And, finally, for whom do these delegates stand in? These final questions, which underlie the histories throughout this book, attune the analysis to the conditions in which proxy work happens, the injustices of representation and performance, and the labor politics of standing in. Our references shape who we are, how we think, how we communicate, and how we build shared worlds. It is no surprise that when these references take the form of recognizable objects, places, or people, they are often enchanting. When viewed from afar, or askew, the particular enchantment of, say, a piece of platinum iridium can appear ridiculous. Or, seen from another standpoint, the power to choose a centerfold to act as a stand-in for the world of images loses its aura. Instead, it appears as the manifestation of the constitutive injustices of visual culture.

Proxies are in operation in all places where communities of practice share representations of the world to form a common understanding. So let this be an invitation to you to take stock of the common reference points of your own knowledge infrastructures: the examples, prototypes, and stand-ins of a world out there. Our shared references may be the material through which we think and make new connections, but they are never permanent. The cultural work of standing in takes form in the “ritualized repetition of norms” that produce and stabilize difference, and encode it in the materiality of culture.52 Our identities, our bodies, our worlds are formed through the ways that norms persist, and the labor of creating and maintaining technology is one way that norms are encoded in the infrastructure of everyday life. Our proxies are cultural, and at the same time as they shape the infrastructures through which culture circulates, they will be reshaped by the ebbs and flows of power and the demands for more just representation. The purpose of cataloging these proxies is to show how practices of standing in, as well as the work of embodiment, representation, and memory, impinge directly on the capacity for people to navigate institutions and achieve recognition within systems not of their own making.

Notes

  1.     1.    Steven Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 221–239.

  2.     2.    Sarah Ganz Blythe and Edward D. Powers, Looking at Dada (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 52.

  3.     3.    Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 22.

  4.     4.    Herbert Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2.

  5.     5.    Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World (New York: Free Press, 2002).

  6.     6.    Matthew Fuller approaches “media ecologies” through standard objects—such as the shipping container and packet switching protocols—and he understands a standard to be a continuum with itself at one pole and total disorder at the other. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

  7.     7.    David Turnbull, “The Ad Hoc Collective Work of Building Gothic Cathedrals with Templates, String, and Geometry,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 18, no. 3 (1993): 315–340.

  8.     8.    Lawrence Busch, Standards: Recipes for Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

  9.     9.    Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 86–89.

  10.   10.    Jacob Gaboury, “Image Objects: An Archaeology of 3D Computer Graphics, 1965–1979,” PhD dissertation (New York University, 2015); Ann-Sophie Lehmann, “Taking the Lid off the Utah Teapot towards a Material Analysis of Computer Graphics,” Zeitschrift für Medien-und Kulturforschung 2012, no. 1 (2012): 169–184.

  11.   11.    As Lehmann states about the Utah Teapot in “Taking the Lid off the Utah Teapot,” 176,

  12. In the white, male, and mostly bearded scientific community that produced the first computer graphics in the 1970s, it was an object not from the lab but from the home, a different, yet familiar thing, blending the efficiency of mathematics with the cosiness of a warm cup of tea. The teapot thus crossed boundaries between genders and cultures, but also between art and science, as it served to develop and express visual creativity in a scientific environment, or joined the left and right side of the brain, as James Blinn once put it.

  13.   12.    Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, video, Museum of Modern Art, New York, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/181784.

  14.   13.    Christopher Williams, Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide © 1968 Eastman Kodak Company, 1968 (Meiko laughing), Vancouver, B.C., April 6, 2005, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, https://whitney.org/collection/works/27531.

  15.   14.    Ken Gewerts, “A Bevy of Unknown Beauties,” Harvard Gazette, July 21, 2005, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/07.21/00-girls.html.

  16.   15.    I attended this lecture myself, and both Raven and her audience focused on the formal simplicity of test materials as their most compelling aspect.

  17.   16.    Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light. Gallery TPW R&D and Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, 2013, http://gallerytpw.ca/rd/broomberg-chanarin/billboard-locations/.

  18.   17.    Robin Lynch, “Man Scans: The Matter of Expertise in Art and Technology Histories,” RACAR (Spring 2021, forthcoming).

  19.   18.    Genevieve Yue has compiled a long list of appropriations of test images in contemporary art. See Genevieve Yue, “The China Girl on the Margins of Film,” October, no. 153 (2015), 96–116; Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

  20.   19.    See Ryan Maguire, “The Ghost in the MP3,” 2014, http://ryanmaguiremusic.com/theghostinthemp3.html.

  21.   20.    Howard S. Barrows, “Simulation in Medical Education,” Caduceus 13, no. 2 (1997): 4.

  22.   21.    On other recent artistic appropriations of computer vision, see Jill Walker Rettberg, “Machine Vision as Viewed through Art: Hostile Other or Part of Ourselves?” Paper presented at Post-Screen Festival: PSF2016, Lisbon, November 17–18, 2016.

  23.   22.    Paul Du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Anders Koed Madsen, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: SAGE, 2013).

  24.   23.    Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010).

  25.   24.    Geoffrey C. Bowker, Science on the Run Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 10–14.

  26.   25.    Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces,” Information Systems Research Information Systems Research 7, no. 1 (1996): 111–134.

  27.   26.    Geoffrey C. Bowker, Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, and David Ribes, “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment,” in International Handbook of Internet Research, ed. Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, and Matthew M. Allen (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2010); Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Sterne, MP3.

  28.   27.    Star and Ruhleder, “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure,” 113 (emphasis added). Note, as well, that these items are drawn from a longer list of the characteristics of infrastructure.

  29.   28.    Bowker et al., “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies.”

  30.   29.    Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7.

  31.   30.    Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: the Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 2–3.

  32.   31.    Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 93–94.

  33.   32.    Mikkel Flyverbom, The Digital Prism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford, “Seeing without Knowing: Limitations of the Transparency Ideal and Its Application to Algorithmic Accountability,” New Media & Society 20, no. 3 (2018): 973–989.

  34.   33.    Flyverbom, Digital Prism, 97.

  35.   34.    Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, Standards and Their Stories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 17 (emphasis added).

  36.   35.    Mentions of an infrastructure crisis in the United States started to gather in the 1980s. In subsequent decades they expanded and multiplied exponentially. In an early comment on this emergent pattern, Heywood T. Sanders expressed rare skepticism on the topic: “What Infrastructure Crisis?” Public Interest, no. 110 (1993): 3–18.

  37.   36.    Star and Ruhleder, “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure”; William J. Rankin, “Infrastructure and the International Governance of Economic Development, 1950–1965,” in Internationalization of Infrastructures, eds. Jean-François Auger, Jan Jaap Bouma, and Rolf Künneke (Delft, Netherlands: Delft University of Technology, 2009): 61–75.

  38.   37.    Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, “Where the Internet Lives,” in Signal Traffic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 71–93; Mél Hogan, “Facebook Data Storage Centers as the Archive’s Underbelly,” Television & New Media 16, no. 1 (2015): 3–18; Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

  39.   38.    Kregg Hetherington, “Surveying the Future Perfect: Anthropology, Development and the Promise of Infrastructure,” in Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion, eds. Penelope Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita (London: Routledge, 2016): 42.

  40.   39.    Shaylih Muehlmann, “Clandestine Infrastructures: Illicit Connectivities in the US-Mexico Borderlands,” in Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, ed. Kregg Hetherington (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019): 45–65; Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2013): 327–343; Lauren Berlant, “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 393–419; Megan Finn, Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); Marisa Elena Duarte, Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).

  41.   40.    Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109–141.

  42.   41.    Paul N. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in The History of Sociotechnical Systems: Modernity and Technology, eds. Thomas Misa, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press): 185–226.

  43.   42.    Thomas Pachirat examines the “politics of sight” involved in the managed invisibility of the US meat industry and its slaughterhouses. For a different approach, see the issue of Postcolonial Studies on toilets and the politics of modernity and transparency. Thomas Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Michael Dutton, Sanjay Seth, and Leela Gandhi, “Plumbing the Depths: Toilets, Transparency, and Modernity,” Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2002): 137–142.

  44.   43.    Jas Rault, “Tricks of Transparency in Colonial Modernity,” Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC), http://www.drecollab.org/tricks-of-transparency/.

  45.   44.    Armond R. Towns, “Toward a Black Media Philosophy,” Cultural Studies 34 (2020): 853.

  46.   45.    Rachel Hall, The Transparent Traveler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

  47.   46.    Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places Journal, November 2018, https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/.

  48.   47.    Ingrid Burrington, Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (Brooklyn: Melville House Printing, 2016).

  49.   48.    Burrington, Networks of New York.

  50.   49.    Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  51.   50.    Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust,” American Historical Review 106, no. 4 (2001): 1163.

  52.   51.    Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

  53.   52.    Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), ix.