In a current Western information capitalism and distribution, infrastructure has become more and more synonymous with technology. In this research project, Peter Lemmens wants to look at how technology operates with an obfuscated backend narrativity. Although technology’s ubiquity is beyond obvious, it simultaneously retreats into a background: it has become a covert database operation in darkness. Infrastructure is not about content that flows as information. Content is simply replaced over and over again. The real information piggybacks on the inconsequential frontend content and operates in backend darkness.
Darkness is a setting for narratives. Everybody loves a good story. However, more and more, stories are overhauled as unilateral constructs for leverage that require neither dialogue nor reflection. This is where the underlying infrastructure and technology become key. Infrastructure is no longer a neutral operational database. Technology actually shapes whatever it stores and distributes. In doing so, infrastructure applies two types of narrativity. The frontend scenario and the backend script. As more and more the frontend scenario is of no consequence, we are presented with a double ghost story: the frontend scenario insists on its characters' belief in them and the backend script not only plays out in the dark, but also keeps you in the dark.
Narrativity doesn’t mean coinciding with words then. It expands into the intangible constructions of production and distribution when we ask what something does. It expands the “what to produce” with the “how to produce”.
Here, the artwork is questioned as a site of interference for dominant narratives instead of the search for an alternative dominant narrative. If infrastructure has become a party-in-the-front- business-in-the-back model, then let’s ask what frontend narratives are, what backend narratives are and how art can expand its content providing role and create meaningful relationships between these two?