Infrastructures for Objection examines how urban and media infrastructures organise contemporary public space. Developed in response to the growing convergence of digital media, algorithmic technologies and urban environments, the work investigates how systems of information, circulation and visibility structure everyday experience in the city.
Rather than only critiquing the political or cultural consequences of these transformations, the project approaches infrastructure itself as a site of design. Through spatial analysis and experimental design methods, it explores how the material and technical systems that organise urban space might be reconfigured to support more critical, reflective and participatory forms of engagement.
As the research proposes, design and spatial infrastructures reproduce categories of identity and the body, orienting behaviour and perception in particular ways. The project therefore distinguishes between the material elements that order behaviour and the processes through which such order is produced, opening these systems to interrogation and redesign.
The research informed the chapter “A Glitch in the System: Deconstructing JCDecaux | Decoding Suitsupply” published in Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space (Routledge, 2020).
Format
Spatial and visual investigations, digital tools
Credits
Gabriel A. Maher
Ro Pérez Gayo
Support
Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie (NL)
Maher, G., & Pérez Gayo, R. (Eds). (2020). A glitch in the system. In Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space (1st edn, pp. 84–101). Routledge.
In late February 2018, 5,000 print posters distributed throughout the Netherlands featured a series of staged, intimately homoerotic images for the Dutch fashion brand Suitsupply. In reaction, billboards were vandalised, public demonstrations ensued, and counter-protests were organised both online and offline across the country. Suitsupply’s campaign images were distributed by JC Decaux Group—the largest outdoor advertising group in the world. Its private operations in public space rely on geomarketing technologies to distribute targeted advertising through specifically designed urban architectures and interfaces that seamlessly integrate into the urban fabric. Taking this as a case study, and drawing upon queer and feminist frameworks, we critically analyse the mechanisms and systems at play in the production and reproduction of gender and sexual identities within the urban sphere in the Netherlands. We argue that it is not sufficient to problematise current cultural or political debates. Instead, it is crucial to deconstruct the role of design across the infrastructures by which the campaign was displayed and distributed.