Hong Kong, 2012. Image Source: Brian Rosa
Infrastructural Aesthetics and Imaginaries
Paper session at the AAG, New York City, February 25-March 1, 2022
Theresa Enright (University of Toronto)
Brian Rosa (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Justinien Tribillon (University College London)
Over the past two decades, scholars have demonstrated that infrastructure is made of images and representations as much as concrete and steel. Infrastructures are at once symbols, projections of political ideals, and expressions of modernity (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000; Gandy, 2014; Rouillard, 2017; Weizman, 2012). When they crack, rust, and collapse, we seek to understand failure in extramaterial terms: as technological, moral, and political decay (Simonnet, 2019; Denis and Pontille, 2021; Truscello, 2020). As such, transdisciplinary works have studied infrastructure as optical (De Boeck, 2011; Chattopadhyay,2012), visual (Parks, 2009; Mukherjee, 2020), symbolic (Appel, Anand and Gupta, 2018; Easterling, 2014), sonic (Ouzounian, 2020), spectral (Simone, 2012), as poetics (Larkin, 2013), as spatial aesthetics of race (Summers, 2019, as commons (Berlant 2016) and as ideologies (Graham and Marvin 2001; Humphrey, 2005). Addressing the shifting meanings embedded within, and signaled by infrastructure, these works have demonstrated both the power of human representation and the power of material significations in ordering space and subjects. Infrastructural imaginaries and aesthetics change over time, and historic infrastructures, for example, may be recast as valuable heritage and/or as artifacts of socio-spatial division, driving arguments for their conservation or dismantling (Caratzas, 2008). With attention to how different actors modulate infrastructure’s visibility and meaning to communicate problems, solutions, values, and ownership, scholars have identified the exposure of infrastructure as an important horizon of control (Mattern, 2021; Picon, 2018; Simone, 2012).
Who and what imagines infrastructure? With what effects? What aesthetic work is involved in the production and transformation of infrastructure? How do we articulate the relation between the imaginaries and aesthetics of infrastructure, materiality, and socio-spatial change? How does this differ between societies and over time? Addressing these questions, this panel examines the relationship between aesthetics and infrastructure from multiple, historic, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.
We invite papers that consider the social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics of infrastructural imaginaries and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives. In particular, we welcome contributions which focus on one (or more) of the following questions:
· How are infrastructural imaginaries and aesthetics involved in contemporary urbanization in a variety of contexts?
· How do racist, patriarchal, bourgeois, ableist, and colonial forms of knowledge and power become symbolically embedded in purportedly ‘neutral’ technological systems?
· What parts of infrastructure can be represented and by whom? What contests exist over how infrastructure is imagined?
· How are regimes of visuality and sensibility formed and transformed in relation to technical systems including digital and ‘smart’ cities?
· What are the temporalities of the imagination? How does it engage in the past and the future?
· How is the imaginary tied to forms of infrastructural literacy (i.e. the ability of citizens to better understand complex networked environments and to gain agency within them)?
· How are creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields used to critically engage infrastructure politics and to imagine infrastructure in emancipatory and revolutionary ways?
· What speculative and scientific methods and knowledge apparatuses might facilitate seeing, and building infrastructure in ways adequate to the challenges of the 21st century?
If you are interested in contributing a paper, please send a 250-word abstract by 10 October 2021 to: theresa.enright@utoronto.ca, brian.rosa@upf.edu, and j.tribillon@ucl.ac.uk. You will be notified about the outcome of your submission before the official AAG abstract submission deadline on 19 October 2021. At this date we are planning to be in New York for the conference but this may change due to COVID-19. If AAG permits, we will make this a hybrid (in-person/virtual) session. We look forward to your participation and/or contribution! If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to be in touch.
References
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L. Berlant, “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times”, Environment and Planning D, 34:3 (2016) 393-419.
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