Over the past decade, there has been an enormous increase in scholarly interest in infrastructures as an object of research and a methodological approach, introducing notions ranging from 'infrastructural anxiety' to 'infrastructural friction', 'infrastructural hope', 'infrastructural learning', 'infrastructural power', 'infrastructural publics' and 'infrastructural violence'. The workshop will explore and expand upon two distinct yet interconnected approaches to aesthetics.

1. Aesthetics, understood as the capacity to affect, impact, and engender feelings and emotions. As the artist Tintin Wulia notes, aesthetics in this sense is the opposite of anaesthetics. This results in a focus on how infrastructure is represented, mediated and experienced by publics, addressing questions of style, appearance, disappearance and design.
2. Aesthetics as the perceptibility of things, i.e. a politics of visibility and invisibility (e.g., Rancière’s reactivation of this older sense of the aesthetic); what can be said and enunciated; how secrecy and transparency are constructed; and how publics emerge or vanish but also: what are the borders and boundaries of knowledge and perception and how do infrastructures guide or misguide them.

Possible topics, approaches and questions concern:

• The way in which representations of airline networks, railway systems, hydroelectric installations, power grids, came to connote modernity, progress, liberation, civilization, empire. This raises questions, such as: what political work do representations of infrastructure do today? What can an aesthetic perspective tell us about infrastructure and political rationality?
• The changing ways in which natural and organic elements feature in the aesthetics of infrastructure: from mountains and rivers as sublime objects to be mastered by dams and bridges to tree canopies and green roofs in imaginaries of resilient urban infrastructures.
• How subway maps construct a user, a traveller, making the urban navigable. Hence how design features in the governance and interface of infrastructures.
• How the imagery of cybernetic diagrams (Wiener) became important for reimaging politics and society as ‘systems’ (Parsons, Easton) - technical, looping, self-steering.
• How representations of defense and security infrastructure gave shape to Cold War and subsequent imaginaries of fear, security, nation - eg, missile defence systems, bunker systems.
• How do images of offshore banking, migrant smuggling, drug trafficking, bitcoin feature in our political imaginaries today?
• The aesthetic politics of the secret state.
• Infrastructure as spaces of desire, experience, nostalgia, horror and value - eg, tourism related to ruins (eg, military sites, prison and camp tourism).
• The infrastructural dreams and ideologies of climate change and elite mobilities, retreat and bunkerization, displacement, space explorations and terraforming, and the colonization of ‘uninhabitable’ spaces.

• The work of artists who challenge the way we think about infrastructure and who develop and apply infrastructural methodologies to visualize and represent natural entities, ecologies, hidden past, etc.
• Investigative journalism and the exposure of infrastructures of violence (such as forensic architecture, forensic oceanography).
• A politics of internet and social media forged out of making visible the unseen connections, practices, circulations etc.
• Indigenous struggles and spirited remediations of contested infrastructure like dams and pipelines.
• The visible and invisible roots of colonial histories in infrastructures, for instance financial infrastructures.