Elemental infrastructures for atmospheric media: On stratospheric variations, value and the commons

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.