What are our rights to public spaces? 

What are the technologies that connect us to each other and to these spaces?

What are our rights to these technologies? 

Who hears when we speak out in public spaces? 

Who takes care when listening?

A Public Infrastructure asks to what extent infrastructures are in the hands of the public. In practical terms, it is a tech justice assembly (September), preceded by a series of playful workshops and conversations (June-August) that take place in the city and in the physical installation inside JHG’s Gallery 1 (June-September). 

Thinking about what voices are heard in public spaces, we frame our workshops as street games that allow us to treat urban space as our own, to document and trace technologies, sound and space. We will use communal, creative and investigative methods that are useful and friendly in learning together about the technologies and infrastructures around us in Southampton and Winchester. 

With participants making recordings, embroideries, sounds, photos and other artifacts together, the installation unfolds into a one-day public forum in September - a tech justice assembly where we will hold a collective discussion-performance on the rights to technology and rights to public space, drawing on public concerns such as climate, racial and socio-economic justice. 

A Public Infrastructurestarted from a funded research project Soundscale, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Southampton, working on developing sound-sensing technologies that use fiber optic cables infrastructure. You can see more at soundscale.ac.uk.  

In the artistic research part of the project, we want to explore how, in the era of being heard but not always listened to, we can speak up; what space of public decision-making can and should accompany the development of emerging technologies and how we can shape the experience of technologies everyday.