Short Abstract

From an African prism, this panel explores the affinities between image and infrastructure: how platforms, media, urban cultures, and development projects mediate desire, exclusion, belonging, and violence, and how proliferating images, including AI, reshape infrastructures of circulation.

Long Abstract

What is the world of infrastructures and images as it is seen from Africa? What forms of mediation do these two seemingly distant, if not oppositional, realms generate, converge, and condense in the contemporary development of the urban, social, and digital economy? In this proposed panel crossing anthropology, sociology, STS, arts, cultural and media studies, we trace the elective affinity between image and infrastructure, and the experiences of exclusion, displacement, dazzlement, and exposure they bring together. Exploring how, from the African prism, the intangible visible (image) and tangible invisible (infrastructure) can not only redefine, but also herald our material life. Holding an open definition of the two important concepts that nurture different approaches to contemporary socio-economic changes in Africa, we aim to map the critical sites of their convergence and divergence, such as the platform economy, film and television industries, urban culture, and media infrastructures. We will discuss the productive power they maintain, the social actions they multiply, the identities and belongings they potentiate, and the violence they reproduce. Relevant questions include but are not limited to:

1. What does it mean when infrastructures and images take the form of one another, such as incomplete large-scale development projects only visible from billboards, or images that encourage the circulation of desire and longing, leading to the transformation of whole consumption cultures and economies of attention in urban Africa?

2. How does the overproduction of images, such as AI slop, reconfigure the very idea of infrastructures as complex, interlinked systems of circulation?

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