Tactics&Practice [podcast]

Can We Repair the Climate? Holly Jean Buck works at the interface of environmental sociology, international development, and science and technology studies. In her book After Geoengineering, she takes a deep dive into the envisioning, development and deployment of tactics and schemes for deliberately intervening in the environment, including Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Carbon Dioxide Remo...

An Alternative Earth Benjamin Bratton is an American Philosopher of Technology, known for his work spanning social theory, computer science, design, AI, and for his writing on the geopolitical implications of what he terms “planetary scale computation”. In the conversation with Marta Peirano, he explores the main issues raised in The Terraforming and The New Normal, the speculative urbanism think...

What Does it Take to Change the Future? Kim Stanley Robinson stands as one of today’s most beloved science fiction writers and is a prominent exponent of climate fiction. In his novel The Ministry for the Future (2020), he envisions a scenario where India is struck by a devastating heatwave, resulting in the loss of millions of lives within days: soon after this tremendous tragedy, a climate respo...

To complexify the notion of scale and to expand it, both historically and beyond human perception, allows us to think about scale within different academic, design and artistic vocabularies. Writer and professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, as well as visiting professor at FAMU (Prague) and Winchester School of Art (UK) Jussi Parikka has extensively researched the cultur...

The concept of scale is related to mapping, which is intrinsically related to colonisation and neocolonial military practices. Anthony Downey, Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University), draws a historical line from the development of cartographic devices and photogrammetry in the 18th and 19th centuries to the neocolonial extraction of data throug...

Infrastructures of abnormous scale are the materialisation of neocolonialism. Megabridges, power plants, military bases are means of dispossession, invasion, extraction perpetrated by bigger countries upon smaller sovereign states. Media artists and interdisciplinary researchers Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich have developed a method called “applied demonology”, which combines CGI, mediaeval de...

Alternative community-based data distribution networks on the local scale have emerged in Cuba as a consequence of the economic sanctions imposed on the country in recent decades. German anthropologist Steffen Köhn and Cuban media artist Nestor Siré shed light on the unique materiality and significance of these networks, built to overcome the limitations of internet access in Cuba. In the current...

On the nanoscale, materials can appear as vibrant, lively subjects that can even have political implications. Laura Tripaldi, author of Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), is an expert on nanotechnology who worked in industrial research before shifting her focus on philosophical and theoretical fields. She has been exploring our relationship to technology a...