Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Theresa Enright, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

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Description:

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.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda