Constructing Invisibility: Infrastructure, Militarization, and the Extreme Environment

Today, designers, researchers, and scholars must responsibly engage the entangled networks and delineated systems far beyond boundaries of typical design practice to engage in thoughtful critique of the past and consider counter-imaginations of the future.

Our discussion of the unseen begins first with an understanding of the power of sight. A look back at the technologies of control implicated in documenting the world reveals the closely intertwined evolution of imperial occupation and technological progress. Constructing Invisibility continues the exchanges initiated during the first symposium and builds upon the diversity of knowledge shared. The late French philosopher Bruno Latour reminds us that “politics has always been oriented toward objects, stakes, situations, material entities, bodies, landscapes, places. This is in effect the decisive discovery of political ecology: it is an object-oriented politics. Change the territories and you will also change the attitudes.”

This issue uses these economies, landscapes, and places, including the boundless corporations and destructive climate realities, to better see the world. Further, the collection of essays seeks to understand how the construction of such sight impacts civilian occupation in the remaining world. Illuminating stories and places has become the aim of this volume, and shedding light on distant territories has become confounded by extremity, complexity, disparity, and secrecy.

Jeffrey S. Nesbit is an architect, urbanist, and assistant professor of architecture and urbanism at Temple University. Nesbit’s research focuses on processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and the evolution of "technical lands."