Liquid power: reading the infinity pool as a global semioscape

Abstract

The analytic focus of this article is the highly fashionable ‘infinity pool’, treated here as a visual-material realization of the cultural politics of super-elite mobility. The article is organized around a three-step analytic structure. First, I demonstrate how the infinity pool is mediatized as a status marker, and thus circulated and normalized. Second, I pinpoint the semiotic and ideological ways the infinity pool emerges as a mediated practice. Third, I examines how the infinity pool is also remediated on Instagram and thereby broadcast anew. Throughout, I evidence my analysis with visual texts drawn from a range of commercial, situated and digital media sources. My primary objective is to show how the infinity pool, as a mediatized, mediated and remediated practice, feeds the global semioscape, that more informal, often banal plane of cultural circulation where images, ideas and aesthetic ideals seed themselves all over the place. In this way, and however frivolous or innocuous infinity pools may seem, they also spread a particularly privileged way of looking at, and being in, the world.