Digital futures: Aesthetic stability and the fictional infrastructure of hyderabad's special economic zones

In Hyderabad, digital videos help produce a "fictional infrastructure" for Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Expanding the concept of "infrastructure as spectacle" to encompass projections of unbuilt and even purely imaginary infrastructures, this article examines how digital online videos and 3D computer-generated imagery (CGI), are the standard means of representing future infrastructures and promoting new developments in the Indian IT sector. Building on Gilbert Simondon's view on "beauty," I suggest that the aesthetic stability necessary for a technology to operate can also be supported by its fictional creation as something imagined and futural. The videos analyzed here create the aesthetic stability necessary for future infrastructures in Hyderabad's SEZs: the feelings of comfort, safety, cleanliness, efficiency, predictability, and integration sought after by potential investors and workers.