Simultaneously speculative and inspired by everyday experiences, this volume develops an aesthetics of metabolism that offers a new perspective on the human-environment relation, one that is processual, relational, and not dependent on conscious thought. In art installations, design prototypes, and research-creation projects that utilize air, light, or temperature to impact subjective experience the author finds aesthetic milieus that shift our awareness to the role of different sense modalities in aesthetic experience. Metabolic and atmospheric processes allow for an aesthetics besides and beyond the usually dominant visual sense.

Design Struggles critically assesses the ways in which the design field is involved in creating, perpetuating, promoting and reinforcing injustice and inequality in social, political, economic, cultural and ecological systems. This book shows how this entanglement arose from Eurocentric and neoliberal thinking. The voices and practices represented here propose to question and disrupt the discipline of design from within, by problematizing the very notions of design. They aim to do so by generating new, anti-racist, post-capitalist, queer-feminist, environmentally conscious and community-based ideas on how to transform design. In this way, Design Struggles strives to forge sustainable, new practices within the ...

Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times offers a critical exploration of the Anthropocene concept. It addresses the urgent geopolitical and environmental questions raised by the new geological epoch. How are we to rethink landscapes, such as river deltas, oceans, or outer space? How can we create spaces for resistance and utopic dreaming? This volume confronts these questions by charting how space and place are constructed, deconstructed, and negotiated by humans and non-humans under conditions of globally entangled consumption, movement, and contamination. The essays in this volume are complemented by artistic interventions that offer a poetics for a harmed planet and ...

Records of Disaster: Media Infrastructures and Climate Change explores how environmental disasters manifest and inscribe themselves in infrastructures. By turning to infrastructures, their logic and functioning, collapse and malfunction, the volume reveals their potential as fragile material witnesses to and of disasters. As climate change is unequally distributed across continuous dynamics and events, time scales and spatial registers, infrastructures can be understood as proxies or seismographs mediating different spatio-temporal layers that make these dynamics tangible. Disaster is made operational by negotiating what is defined as such, and under which geopolitical conditions. What connects melting glaciers and the knowledge from ice ...

With its diversity of possible Umwelten or environments for living things, Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory has been hailed by many readers as the first step toward an innovative, pluralistic conception of nonhuman life. But what is generally ignored is its structural conservatism, its identitarian logic in which everything should remain in its place and nothing should mix, and its proximity to Nazi ideology and politics. By turning the spotlight on these neglected aspects, Uexküll’s Surroundings opens up a new perspective on Uexküll’s Umwelt theory.