Stuff You Can Click: Sensing Infrastructure with Software Emulation

How can we sense infrastructure? In this article, I begin by investigating the role of the body in some recent influential approaches to media infrastructure. The critical work of Lisa Parks, as well as the cartographic project of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, prominently feature the eye, whereas the media archaeologies of Wolfgang Ernst and Erkki Huhtamo turn on a hand's interaction with individual media devices. By contrast, durational "recipes" and "walking tours" by UC Boulder's Media Archaeology Lab and Amsterdam's Critical Infrastructure Lab emphasize embodiment in time and (urban) space. In the context of this taxonomy, I  describe in-browser software emulation. Detailing the history of emulation and the technical processes that brought into the browser, I argue that sites like infinitemac.org stage a tactile reckoning with not only software history, but also the underlying techniques of network infrastructure.