Insubordinate Infrastructure Intelligence Series
N°1 “Tension”
Transmission/Sound Installation
Material: Broken Wood Chairs, Copper Wires, Audio Boards, Exciters
2026
“Tension” is the first installation of the series Insubordinate Infrastructure Intelligence, which results from a long-term arts-based research on gambiarra and other forms of relational design that responds to the circumstances, rather than human engineering. The series works with broken wood furniture, mostly chairs and tables - both iconic of human-centered design and, when turned upside down, become vectors of the cartesian grid. The wastes of domestic life become structures for rudimentary loop antennas. The excessive turns of one single copper wire thread around the foot turned into poles and the feet into transmission lines, creates an antenna sensitive to the electromagnetism of its environment. An exciter - core component of any speaker - attached to a surface of the furniture and connected to the antenna, makes audible the signals the furniture is capturing, which are environment-specific live transmissions. As the installation is presented in an art venue, usually a building in an urban space, the installation hears and makes audible the electricity from the power grid, 50 or 60 Hz grid hum, depending on the country; and possibly a few other signals.
The work explores different aesthetics and narratives around breakdown and collapse, paying attention to forms of intelligence that are often overlooked, yet highly complex and dynamic. When human infrastructure fails, how do excess and expenditure find their own order?
At the same time, Tension looks further back, toward electricity not simply as a technology but as a historical turning point: a moment in which energy , reorganized the scale and logic of human settlement. Electrification transformed cities and rural landscapes, and the electric grid introduced a new way of conceiving infrastructure that we still didn't reinvent. The faint hum captured by the antenna is therefore not merely an incidental sound. It is the residue of an enormous historical transformation. The work listens to an infrastructure that is both localized and planetary. Likewise copper carries another layer of this history. The mesh coil of copper in Tension thus connects the domestic scale of the broken chair to much larger geological, industrial and territorial histories.
N°1 “Tension”
Transmission/Sound Installation
Material: Broken Wood Chairs, Copper Wires, Audio Boards, Exciters
2026
“Tension” is the first installation of the series Insubordinate Infrastructure Intelligence, which results from a long-term arts-based research on gambiarra and other forms of relational design that responds to the circumstances, rather than human engineering. The series works with broken wood furniture, mostly chairs and tables - both iconic of human-centered design and, when turned upside down, become vectors of the cartesian grid. The wastes of domestic life become structures for rudimentary loop antennas. The excessive turns of one single copper wire thread around the foot turned into poles and the feet into transmission lines, creates an antenna sensitive to the electromagnetism of its environment. An exciter - core component of any speaker - attached to a surface of the furniture and connected to the antenna, makes audible the signals the furniture is capturing, which are environment-specific live transmissions. As the installation is presented in an art venue, usually a building in an urban space, the installation hears and makes audible the electricity from the power grid, 50 or 60 Hz grid hum, depending on the country; and possibly a few other signals.
The work explores different aesthetics and narratives around breakdown and collapse, paying attention to forms of intelligence that are often overlooked, yet highly complex and dynamic. When human infrastructure fails, how do excess and expenditure find their own order?
At the same time, Tension looks further back, toward electricity not simply as a technology but as a historical turning point: a moment in which energy , reorganized the scale and logic of human settlement. Electrification transformed cities and rural landscapes, and the electric grid introduced a new way of conceiving infrastructure that we still didn't reinvent. The faint hum captured by the antenna is therefore not merely an incidental sound. It is the residue of an enormous historical transformation. The work listens to an infrastructure that is both localized and planetary. Likewise copper carries another layer of this history. The mesh coil of copper in Tension thus connects the domestic scale of the broken chair to much larger geological, industrial and territorial histories.
Insubordinate Infrastructure Intelligence Series N°1 “Tension”, Transmission/Sound Installation, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, What lies below is another above exhibtion, 2026 © photo Mistura Allisson
