Vital Infrastructures: The Affects, Power, and Environments of Infrastructural Media

Abstract

Through drawing attention to the media archives created in, around, and about infrastructures, I argue that infrastructures are media apparatuses of the state, controlling the distribution of power through the production of carefully designed films, photographs, maps, and records. Media produced by infrastructural agencies, in other words, works to fuel the terraformation of the landscape while simultaneously changing the way its audiences perceive their environments and selves. As media subjects, dams and sprinklers are no longer only utilitarian objects; when aestheticized by the state, they become spectacular landscapes where dramas, comedies, and epics unfold. I assemble an extensive archive of films, photographs, texts, and other government-produced communications to underscore how infrastructure works as a cultural mediator between humans and the environment, shaping settler colonial narratives of power and redefining human-generated divisions between race, class, and the nonhuman world. While government-produced media make the case for mega dams, highways, and reservoirs as matters of national interest, my research also considers alternative media from the Black American press, folk quilt collectives, architecture, poetry, photography, and film that contest and rewrite the meaning of these infrastructural endeavors.