The notion 'affective infrastructures' is used by Lauren Berlant in order to refer to the necessity of building worlds that accommodate multiplicity and difference. How can this term be understood, though, when taking in mind technology's continuous mediation? How does it relate to the emerging technologies of empathy and care, to cute robots and personal intelligent assistants? How do contemporary affective infrastructures connect to the neoliberal imperative for self-care and self-optimization? The talk will address these questions while discussing artistic projects and initiatives that use VR or AI as media, and which were presented in the context of transmediale 2019, or in the recent web residencies program 'Engineering Care' by Solitude & ZKM. With reference to the possibilities but also the limitations of these technologies, the aim of the talk is to open a discussion on the instrumentalization and commodification of care, and to also highlight the potential for the development of non-sovereign and non-gendered systems and radical affective infrastructures.