from the introduction:

Should you be invited to think of an infrastructure, maybe you would come up with the example of a bridge, a hospital building, or a system of network submarine cables. The term is broad and a wide range of cases can be mentioned equally. Despite their differences, infrastructures do have certain elements in common: they connect but can also keep parts separate; they allow but can also impede the movement of goods, people or information. Having access to them affects the present and shapes different future/s. Infrastructures tend to be associated with power, sovereignty, and privilege, but they also underline the need for alternative architectures of association and resistance. Lauren Berlant introduces these as “affective infrastructures,” able to accommodate multiplicity and difference and allowing us to be with each other in common, moving beyond relations of sovereignty. Reading Berlant’s positioning as an invitation to imagine, empower, and most importantly—as she clarifies—to desire such protocols and associations, transmediale 2019 initiated the homonymous Study Circle. Artists, scholars, and activists were invited to address related topics and questions before and during the festival.