Feral Effects

Infrastructures are material apparatuses. They transform land-, air-, and seascapes, often radically so. While most studies of infrastructures focus on what they can do as apparatuses-or, alternatively, what blocks or stymies their function-Feral Atlas is a proposal to bring sustained attention to the nondesigned, or feral, effects of human infrastructures. It is concerned with the quietly insistent, even banal, ecological violence enacted by everyday imperial and industrial infrastructural processes. Deadly pathogens transported through global shipping networks, toxic accretions leaking from the brownfields in abandoned industrial zones, the devastating ecological simplifications imposed by plantation agriculture-the Atlas sets out to highlight the ways that infrastructures create new ecological conditions, belonging to what it is called Anthropocene.