Lisa Parks’ “Stuff You Can Kick”: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures fundamentally challenges the prevailing abstraction of digital media by insisting that infrastructures must be understood as material, territorial, and labour-intensive formations rather than invisible technological substrates. Parks critiques the tendency within media theory to treat infrastructures as seamless systems of immaterial connectivity while ignoring the physical environments, maintenance practices, and embodied labour that sustain global communication networks. Instead, she proposes a methodology of infrastructural visibility attentive to the “stuff you can kick”: cables, satellites, power poles, antennas, servers, and transmission systems whose apparent banality conceals immense geopolitical and economic significance. Early in the essay, Parks argues that infrastructures should be studied not merely as technical supports but as assemblages composed of physical artefacts, social relations, territorial politics, and regimes of labour. Her analysis of utility poles in Los Angeles and electrical line workers in training vividly demonstrates this perspective. The photographs on pages 330–333 depict workers suspended on poles and performing coordinated balancing exercises, visually foregrounding the bodily discipline and physical risk concealed behind the abstraction of electrical and communication networks. Parks thereby exposes infrastructure as a site where labouring bodies become integrated into technological systems through repetitive training, muscular adaptation, and procedural choreography. Equally significant is her discussion of discarded satellite dishes in urban environments, particularly the photographic series on pages 336–339 showing abandoned dishes repurposed as shelters or discarded in public space. These images reveal the afterlives of communication technologies and challenge narratives of perpetual digital novelty by exposing infrastructures as accumulative and residual rather than immaterial or ephemeral. Parks further argues that infrastructures become most visible during moments of breakdown, obsolescence, or political conflict, when their ordinarily invisible operations surface into public consciousness. Through this framework, media infrastructures emerge as contested terrains through which states, corporations, and communities negotiate access, mobility, surveillance, and power. Ultimately, Parks transforms infrastructure studies into a materialist critique of contemporary media culture, demonstrating that every act of digital communication depends upon vast yet frequently disavowed systems of extraction, maintenance, territorial organisation, and embodied human labour.
URBANISM MEETS ART