Climatologists have confirmed it is now too late to avoid certain global warming and that a shift to a low or zero carbon economy is thus vital. This implies an urgent transition to renewable energy sources as well as radical adaptive measures, which collide against established industrial monopolies. This episode gathers several geoengineering patent applications, and through these documents presents the history of these emerging technologies and the private interests, actors, think tanks, and corporations behind them. Within the debate of climate change mitigation, geoengineering—the technological management of weather patterns and carbon capture processes—occupies an especially politicized place. It has slowly ...

Scaling is to move across different dimensions: a firm might be scaling down, nearing bankruptcy—its new dimension is to reach rock bottom; a doll house might be a scale model, where dimensions are kept proportional but decreased compared to a real house; a hand touching a map is, to paraphrase Tom Holert, a scaling device, where the graspable dimension of the map makes available the experience of exploring, traveling and possessing lands. For this publication of Taming the Horror Vacui, which includes content from three different sessions in the program, we put the wind and its manifestations through a process of ...

Accattone #6 explores a renewed relationship with land, matter, ‘nature’ and localities against the backdrop of the new climatic regime. Situated at the intersection of architecture, representation and editorial-curatorial practices, the magazine is also permeated by a continuous research on methods and forms of practice. In particular, this issue addresses the use of film-making as a tool to foster and disseminate architectural positions; editorial devices and contents used by fellow little magazines; and the representation of nature in research, artistic and design practices. This issue is based on meetings and conversations that took place over the past year. Driven by ...

This fifth SDUK broadsheet examines the multifaceted meanings of ACCOUNTING in the age of climate change. This issue considers accounting in its colloquial sense, pertaining to investment and economics, but also moves beyond the ledger book to consider what remains uncounted, and what is consciously left out. Throughout this issue, we find slippery concepts, things, and actors that pose a challenge to accounting as a means of representation and understanding. Beginning with economics, one might ask: What are the basic tools and assumptions on which accounting is based? In his ongoing unsettling of fundamental economic concepts, D.T. Cochrane looks at how ...

Writing in 1969, architecture historian Reyner Banham complains about the silence on mechanical services in contemporary architecture discourse, most specifically machines for the making of interior weather. Banham’s book The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment is full of little arguments against the superiority of the visual, that is, the exterior aspect of a building rather than, for example, its fabricated interior weather. His work today comes across as an apology for technology before an era of environmental or social concerns stemming from it. The present publication for Taming the Horror Vacui takes a less polemic yet more critical tone to explore ...

In 2016 the Aerocene Foundation was invited to Exhibition Road for an interdisciplinary artistic project co-produced by members of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group: a partnership of the leading cultural and educational institutions in London, among them Serpentine Galleries, Imperial College London and The Natural History Museum. Between October and December 2016, the Aerocene Foundation activated a collaborative research platform between Exhibition Road members and wider communities by organizing two hackathons and the ‘Aerocene Campus’ in which participants engaged in debates on metabolic, social and environmental dimensions of the Aerocene epoch. During this period, experts as well as developers, designers, artists, ...

In September, unusual flying objects rose above the Olympiaberg, creating astonishment. The Aerocene Festival unfolded impressively within the air above Munich and with it the artistic vision of limitless, pollution-free aerial mobility. From 6-11th September 2019, it was possible to experience the floating sculptures, test the technology in Pilot Courses or predict and undertake virtual flights. Aerocene was initiated in 2015 by the Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno, who works at the interface of art, architecture, technology and science. In the meantime, it has become an international community that seeks to achieve a transformed ecological awareness through artistic action. Aerocene stands for the ...

“…And I was like—yes it is! Part of my broader project as an artist is thinking about how the term climate change can be redefined and expanded to enable people to understand its relevance. So climate change is redefined as an issue of inequality, or social justice, and also urban design and planning. So if I go by that broader definition, I don’t see why I should exclude those things here.” Amy Howden-Chapman in conversation with the Newspaper Reading Club, 2015

In May 2021, Mohamad Amer Meziane published his first book, Des empires sous la terre: Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation (Subterranean Empires: Ecological and Racial History of Secularization). We speak with him about the ambitious work he develops in this book, linking European secularization (and Europe’s definition of what constitutes religion) with colonial extractivism from the first industrial revolution to the alteration of the world’s climate. Mohamad Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He is currently a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion Culture and Public and the Institute of African studies at Columbia ...

In the face of climate chaos, post-truth politics, and growing tribalisms, it’s clear that liberalism’s old structures are unraveling. Drawing on resilience ecology, Stephanie Wakefield suggests we understand such phenomena to be indicators that we are entering the Anthropocene’s back loop, a time of release and collapse, confusion and reorientation, in which not only populations and climates are being upended but also physical and metaphysical grounds. Anthropocene Back Loop takes us on a journey though different responses and manifestations of the back loop, exploring urban resilience infrastructures, post-apocalyptic imaginaries in fiction and critical theory, and a range of everyday practices ...

The Anthropocene Issue is a special series of short videos shot during the “Anthropocene Curriculum,” campus held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, from November 14 to 22, 2014. The program brought together more than a 100 people from various disciplines around a series of workshops, presentations, and talks. It included, among many others, specialists in climatology, geography, law, history of science and technology, architecture, and art to discuss the concept of the Anthropocene. This special series presents the week-long gathering with a set of close-ups, interviews, group discussions, and informal conversations with some of its participants, launched over two ...

The Anthropocene Issue is a special series of short videos shot during the “Anthropocene Curriculum,” campus held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, from November 14 to 22, 2014. The program brought together more than a 100 people from various disciplines around a series of workshops, presentations, and talks. It included, among many others, specialists in climatology, geography, law, history of science and technology, architecture, and art to discuss the concept of the Anthropocene. This special series presents the week-long gathering with a set of close-ups, interviews, group discussions, and informal conversations with some of its participants, launched over two ...