Vast Machineries and Black Oceans: Midst and (Infra)Structured Unreliability

Midst is a semi-improvised sci-fantasy podcast, which is promoted for its unreliable mediation via three anonymous voices. The three narrators weave their story of a frontier planet caught between two contrasting sides of a fictional cosmos by continuously omitting descriptions, changing details, contradicting their statements, and questioning each other’s authority. The uttered word is presented as flexible and bound to shift, bend, and be entirely negated, along with everything that can be assumed about Midst’s fictional world. This paper will inquire how such a podcast can nonetheless produce a cohesive narrative by identifying and exploring infrastructural formations that permeate the auditive experience. It will suggest that its various forms of infrastructures are essential means of meaning-making, that work with and through Midst’s innate heterogeneity and paradoxes.