I arrived at Munich’s Pavilion 333 just as the opening speech of “Ecologies of the Machine” was wrapping up. To the static noise of applause the speaker both rendered the exhibition a black box, wrapping it in a thick grey curtain, and opened its doors to the public. As I entered into the gloom, visitors already gathered illuminated by video projections. A jolt stopped my advance. My foot had caught under one of the orange electrical wires which openly snaked across the exhibition floor. With this accident, my attention now turned to its backend, its cables and wires.

That this kind of exhibition installation would make a professional art installer, so concerned with the exhibition making’s seamless stagecraft, cringe is besides the point. “Ecologies of the Machine” presents as “seamful” a subject as its installation. While projected videos link multiple stories of Mexico’s global cement industry, orange electrical wires trace the ecology of electrical power which sustains architectural exhibiting writ large.

Here, each projector hooks into a sub-floor plug socket hooking into the building’s electrical breaker box hooking into the nearby Theresienstrasse electrical substation stepping-down electricity supplied by the gas and coal burning power plants at the city’s northern periphery continually burning gas refined in Karlsruhe with crude oil pipe-lining up from Trieste.

These visible wires call for further network tracing: what mines, factories, and OEM designers were involved in producing the projectors, taking pride of place on their pedestals? Who built Pavilion 333? What trees provided its timber structure? Who markets the plastic paper who’s off-gassing smell still lingers on the exhibition brochure on my desk? Through these, perhaps accidental, details “Ecologies of the Machine” attends to architecture’s conflictuous building material infrastructures, all the while confronting visitors, in my case physically, with its own sustaining network of externalities, and dependencies.

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