This paper draws together ongoing efforts to recast the materiality and meaning of infrastructures with recent critical and creative engagements around questions of the elemental. In doing so, the paper develops the concept of elemental infrastructures in order to grasp how the elemental is not just a material resource acted upon or transformed by infrastructures but is becoming part of the generative ontology and condition of infrastructural capacities. The argument of the paper is developed via a discussion of recent experiments with contemporary forms of atmospheric media in which different configurations of the elemental, from helium to stratospheric winds, are being worked together in order to shape new infrastructural arrangements. In speculating with these experiments, the paper considers what it might mean to develop an expanded sense of infrastructural value from variations in an elemental commons.
AshJKitchinRLeszczynskiA. Digital turn, digital geographies?Progress in Human Geography.2016. DOI: 10.1177/0309132516664800.
14.
BannerS (2008) Who Owns the Sky? The Struggle to Control Airspace From the Wright Brothers On, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
15.
BarnesJ. States of maintenance: Power, politics, and Egypt’s irrigation infrastructure. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.2016. 35(1): 146–164.
16.
BarryA (2013) Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
17.
Barry R and Chorley R (2010) Atmosphere, Weather, Climate. London: Routledge.
18.
BennettJ (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
19.
BerardiF (2009) The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e).
20.
BergmannL. Toward speculative data: “Geographic information” for situated knowledges, vibrant matter, and relational spaces. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.2016. 34(6):971–989.
21.
BerlantL (2016) The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space34: 393–419.
22.
Bruun JensenCMoritaA. Infrastructures as ontological experiments. Ethnos.2016. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2015.1107607.
CardonaRD (2016) Ambient text and the becoming space of writing. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space34: 637–654.
25.
ChoyT (2011) Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
26.
CohenJDuckertL (2016) Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water and Fire, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
27.
ConnorS (2008) Atmospherics. In: BirdsallCEnnsA (eds) Sonic Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 159–174.
28.
CowenD (2014) The Deadly Life of Logistics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
29.
CresswellTMartin (2012) On turbulence: Entanglements of disorder and order on a Devon beach. Tijdschrift Voor Economische en Sociale Geographie103(5): 516–529.
30.
DeleuzeGGuattariF (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
31.
Durham PetersJ (2015) The Marvelous Clouds: A Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
32.
EdwardsP (2006) Meteorology as infrastructural globalism. Osiris21(1): 229–250.
33.
EldenS (2013) Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power. Political Geography34(1): 35–51.
34.
EngelmannS (2015a) Toward a poetics of air: Sequencing and surfacing breath. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers40(3): 430–444.
35.
EngelmannS (2015b) More-than-human affinitive listening. Dialogues in Human Geography5(1): 76–79.
36.
FlemingJ (2016) Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
37.
GallowayAThackerE (2007) The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
38.
GandyM (2005) Cyborg urbanization: Complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research29(1): 26–49.
39.
GissenD (2013) Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.
40.
GoodyRM (1958) The Physics of the Stratosphere, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
41.
GrahamSThriftN (2007) Out of order: Understanding repair and maintenance. Theory, Culture, and Society24(3): 1–25.
42.
GregoryD (2011) From a view to a kill: Drones and late modern war. Theory, Culture and Society28(7/8): 188–215.
43.
Guattari F (1995) Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm (P Bains and S Pefanis, Trans). Sydney: Power Publications.
44.
GroeningS. Towards a meteorology of the media. Transformations2014. 25: np.
45.
HansenMBN (2012) Ubiquitous sensation or the autonomy of the peripheral: Towards an atmospheric, impersonal and microtemporal media. In: EkmanU (ed.) Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging With Ubiquitous Computing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 63–88.
46.
HansenMBN (2015) Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
47.
HareF (1962) The stratosphere. Geographical Review52: 525–547.
48.
HarveyPKnoxH (2012) The enchantments of infrastructure. Mobilities7(4): 521–536.
49.
HechtG (2012) Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
50.
HermidaA (2010) From TV to Twitter: How ambient news became ambient journalism. Media/Culture Journal13, 2):np.
51.
IngoldT (2015) The Life of Lines, London: Routledge.
52.
JacksonMFanninM (2011) Letting geography fall where it may—Aerographies address the elemental. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space29(3): 435–444.
53.
JohnG (2015) Welcome to the space jam: How United States regulators should govern Google and Facebook’s new internet-providing high altitude platforms. American University Business Law Review4(3): 471–504.
54.
KaikaM (2005) City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City, London: Routledge.
55.
KaplanC (2006) Mobility and war: The cosmic view of US air power. Environment and Planning A38(2): 395–407.
LancioneMMcFarlaneC (2016) Infrastructural becoming: Sanitation, cosmpolitics, and the (un)making of urban life at the margins. In: BlokAFariasE (eds) Urban Cosmpolitics: Agencements, Assembles, Atmospheres, London: Routledge, pp. 45–62.
58.
LarkinB (2013) The politics and poetics of infrastructures. Annual Review of Anthropology42(1): 327–343.
59.
LathamAMcCormackD P (2004) Moving cities: Rethinking the materialities of urban geographies. Progress in Human Geography28(6): 701–724.
60.
LeszczynskiA (2015) Spatial media/tion. Progress in Human Geography39(6): 729–751.
61.
MacauleyD (2010) Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas, New York, NY: SUNY Press.
62.
McCormackD (2008) Engineering affective atmospheres on the moving geographies of the 1897 Andrée expedition. Cultural Geographies15(4): 413–430.
63.
McCormackD (2013) Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
64.
McCormackD (2014) Atmospheric things and circumstantial excursions. Cultural Geographies21(4): 605–625.
65.
McCormackD. Piloting the Aerocene. The Aerocene Newspaper,2015. A publication accompanying Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene Installation at the Grand Palais, Paris, 09 December.
66.
McCulloughM (2013) Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
67.
MartinC (2011) Fog-bound: Aerial space and the elemental entanglements of body-with-world. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space29(3): 454–468.
68.
ManningE (2016) Weather patterns, or how minor gestures entertain the environment. In: EkmanUBolterJDiazLSondergaardMEngbergM (eds) Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture, London: Routledge, pp. 48–56.
69.
MerrimanP (2016) Mobility infrastructures: Modern visions, affective environments and the problem of car parking. Mobilities11(1): 83–98.
70.
MerrimanPJonesR. Nations, materialities and affects. Progress in Human Geography.2016. Epub ahead of print 18 May 2016. DOI: 10.1177/0309132516649453.
71.
MoraisR (2015) Sky high, skin seep: Dark technologies of mediation. CTheory. 9–15. np).
72.
Näser-Lather M and Neubert C (eds) (2015) Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural Practices. Brill Rodopi: Leiden and Boston.
NullJ (2013) The ubiquitous radiosonde. Weatherwise66: 20–25.
76.
Packer J and Crofts Wiley S (eds) (2011) Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. London: Routledge.
77.
ParikkaJ (2015) A Geology of Media, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
78.
Parks L and Starosielski N (eds) (2015) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
79.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos A (2015) Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere, London: Routledge.
80.
Philippopoulos-MihalopoulosA (2016) Withdrawing from atmosphere: An ontology of air partitioning and affective engineering. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space34(1): 150–167.
RickertT (2013) Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
83.
RobertsT (2014) From things to events: Whitehead and the materiality of process. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space32(6): 968–983.
84.
SaracenoTEngelmannSSzerszynskiB (2015) Becoming aerosolar. In: TurpinEDavisH (eds) Art in the Anthropocene, London: Open Humanities Press.
85.
SerresM (1995) Angels: A Modern Myth, Paris: Flammarion.
86.
SerresM (2008) The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, London: Athlone.
87.
SerresM (2012) Biogea, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal.
88.
ShapiroN (2015) Alter-engineered worlds. The Aerocene Newspaper. A publication accompanying Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene Installation at the Grand Palais, Paris, December.
89.
ShellerM (2015) News now: Interface, ambience, flow, and the disruptive spatio-temporalities of mobile news media. Journalism Studies16: 12–26.
90.
SimoneA (2015) Passing things along: (In)completing infrastructure. New Diversities17(2): 151–162.
91.
SimoniteT. Project loon: Billions of people could get online for the first time thanks to helium balloons that Google will soon send over many places cell towers don’t reach. MIT Technology Review.2015. Available at: www.technologyreview.com/s/534986/project-loon/ (accessed 07 March 2016).
92.
SloterdijkP (2009) Airquakes. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space27(1): 41–57.
93.
SloterdijkP (2011) Bubbles: Spheres 1, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
94.
SquireR (2016) Rock, water, air and fire: Foregrounding the elements in the Gibraltar-Spain dispute. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space34(3): 545–563.
95.
StarSL (1999) The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist43: 377–391.
96.
Starosielski N (2015) The Undersea Network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
97.
StephensAC (2016) The affective atmospheres of nationalism. Cultural Geographies23(2): 181–198.
98.
StewartK (2014) Road registers. Cultural Geographies21(4): 549–563.
99.
ThornesJ (2008) Cultural climatology and the representation of sky, atmosphere, weather and climate in selected art works of constable, monet and eliasson. Geoforum39: 570–581.
100.
ThriftN (2008a) The material practices of glamour. Journal of Cultural Economy1: 9–23.
