In 2020, the Cartha team invited specialists in computation, history, the arts, sciences and economics to contemplate the ways that the systems that generate the invisible structures of contemporary society, whose presence is outlined in the editors’ introductory extract below, are embedded in and inform their research. The outcomes of some of these discussions are included in this collection, and the full online publication can be read here.

Major shifts in the recent global narrative are less an exception to the norm than they are the heightened exposure of prescribed systems of social organization. These sprawling micro/macro symbiotic systems have always existed, the cyclical nature of attempting to order the world and the social conditioning in return: between bodies and technology, wherein we simultaneously produce the apparatus and are produced by it; the virtual representations of the self and their deep reverberations within the psyche; or the environments we create and their resulting authority over our habits and routines. The ways in which things produce each other can be inevitable, but where do the biases lie considering the multitude of stakeholders participating to create new forms of organization? What sort of narratives emerge as consequence? The interest lies in the infrastructures of taxonomies: not only who writes the script, but how you read it, and in what space it needs to perform.