The Aesthetic Regime of 5G: Decolonial politics and notions of hyper-connectivity, speed, and progress

Keywords: Aesthetics, Politics, Infrastructure, Material Aesthetics, Aesthetic Regimes of Race
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 28

Abstract

The implementation of large and robust 5G infrastructure to reach ‘hyper-connectivity’ raises important questions about embodied engagements with cityscapes and imaginations of spatial justice. In this paper I reflect on a roundtable discussion at the Finnish Institute UK in October 2021 that followed a workshop on ‘the incorporation of 5G urban infrastructure and the ecologies around them at the intersection of urban aesthetics and techno-social challenges’. The roundtable was structured around questions such as: How does the look and feel of cities change due to the implementation of 5G technology? What are the socio-spatial effects of critical infrastructure being privately managed? What should we take into consideration to better understand infrastructure’s relation to different urban species? Relating to these questions, I present three examples of 5G infrastructure in London and discuss tensions between a focus on material aesthetics and on aesthetic regimes of race (Brigstocke and Gassner, 2021). I point to the central importance of aesthetics to colonial logics that contrast ‘civil’ human beings against undeveloped racial others (Lloyd, 2019), and ways in which aesthetico-political subjects are often conceptualized as active, self-aware and self-reflective agents, separate from objects that constitute what is experienced (Jackson, 2018). Engaging in a playful critique of both market-driven arguments for technology and Eurocentric criticisms of technology, I investigate the boundary between an aesthetics of oppression and emancipatory aesthetics, and develop a speculative aesthetics that politically intervenes in urban narratives that are based on ‘progress’ and ‘speed’.