Infrastructure in Cultural Studies: Spatiality, Materiality, Affect. Case Study: Kaliningrad Littoral Infrastructure

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of spatiality, materiality, and affect in cultural studies focusing on infrastructure. The task of the project was to find a way to study the environing character of material infrastructures. The stages of the project included a brief study of different models of spatiality and the search for a suitable one, consideration of the conceptual network of infrastructure, fields of its inquiry, and artistic research practices by Ursula Biemann and Allan Sekula. Non-representational theory was used for this work because it allows, depending on the case study, to gather a framework of relevant concepts and methods from different scholarly fields. Thus, in this work, elements of actor-network theory (John Law), mobility paradigm (John Urry), science and technology studies (Zoe Sofia), theory of atmospheres (Jean-Paul Thibaud and Sasha Engelmann), as well as cognitive and affective mapping (Fredric Jameson and Jonathan Flatley) were explored. In the course of the work, it turned out that the container model is one of the potentially interesting directions for exploring the environing character of material infrastructures, due to the variety of its spatial actualisations, as well as those additional concepts that integrate with the container model when it is considered in various research fields.