The in:visible antenna: invisibility and the visual becoming of mobile communication infrastructures

This article develops the concept of in:visibility to account for the co-presence and mutual implication of the visible and the invisible in mobile telecommunication infrastructures, focusing on the situated frameworks of attention, concealment, and unveiling in which they are embedded. Building on debates in infrastructure studies and visual culture, we suggest that visibility and invisibility do not act as logical opposites but interact in practice through the tension that separates them, sliding into and expressing one another along a generative process. Drawing on four specific movements of in:visibilisation related to mobile phone antennas – camouflage, iconoclasm, a collaborative mapping, and pictorial détournement – we inquire into how every act of making visible generates new zones of invisibility, and vice versa. Across these situations, we show that infrastructural invisibility does not constitute a stable attribute, but emerges as a fluid threshold produced through the situated interplay of perceptual, expositional, and socio-technical arrangements, taking shape over time through processes of emergence instantiated in practice. Methodologically, we show how observation itself performs and modulates these dynamics: rather than yielding clear revelation, infrastructural inversion opens up a field of perceptual turbulence that implicates the analyst in the recursive movements of the in:visible. In this sense, practices such as mapping, datawalking, and imagetic experimentation do not merely document in:visibility, but participate in its production and transformation. In:visibility thus emerges as an analytical operator for studying how contemporary infrastructures become perceptible, contestable, and knowable.