Shapeshifting as Infrastructural Storytelling: Comics about the Taxibot’s Conflicting Narratives

What are the stories we tell about infrastructures and what stories do infrastructures tell (about) us? We propose a paper in a hybrid verbo-visual format, including comic-pages created by Giada Peterle and based on Tina Harris’s keynote at the 2022 GMHC conference, autoethnographic notes, and visuals collected during fieldwork. Through experimenting with graphic storytelling, we highlight examples of infrastructural revelation and concealment, drawing on the figure of the shapeshifter as both a metaphor and a method for mobilising infrastructural imagination. What unites shapeshifters in many of the stories and myths we read is how they are taken up in different ways; how they simultaneously present both the potential to improve human lives as well as produce fear due to their unpredictability. By focusing specifically on the narrative of one shapeshifting infrastructure—the Taxibot, a vehicle designed to cut down on carbon emissions and improve efficiency at airports—we use comics as a research practice for exploring this metaphor and developing a broader understanding of how mobile lives and imaginaries shape infrastructure (and vice versa). We argue that paying closer attention to storytelling can generate new understandings of the uneven nexus between infrastructures and mobile lives, weaving in our understanding of infrastructural im/mobilities.