Textual Actants (Infrastructure)

Textual Actants is a reflexive exploration of the things which hold things together, be they lengths of steel, programming protocols, recognised authors, or narratives of self. It pivots from the steel I-beam, via a pilgrimage to the former steelworks in Wallonia where these were first produced, to the on-screen ‘I-beam’ cursor by which we navigate digital text. Across six interweaving texts, and via the supposed blankness of deserts and the techno-utopian imaginaries of Silicon Valley, Textual Actants attends to the slippery shifting relations of textualities and materialities, and where we as bodies and subjects (and authors and readers) sit within these.