[Air-L] Against Catastrophe: Energy Dispatch Launch

[Michelle Pfeifer]

Dear colleagues,

We are very happy to announce the Energy Dispatch: the second online publication drop on the website of our multimodal research project, ‘Against Catastrophe’<https://againstcatastrophe.net/>.

The aim of this project is to interrogate the concept of catastrophe and explore anti-catastrophic practices to expose the longer-term structural causes and implications of catastrophes and catastrophic thinking, rhetoric, and imaginaries. The focus throughout is on how novel approaches in design, architecture, and technology can open possibilities for navigating a catastrophic world, but also expand epistemic horizons beyond apocalyptic thinking. The project outputs include an edited volume, offline and online exhibitions, and a series of online publications, called ‘Dispatches’.



With ‘Dispatches’ – a short-form, multimedia, online publishing format – we hope to move past the news cycle-based temporality of contemporary catastrophism, as well as traditional academic publishing.

In the second dispatch on “Energy” edited by Johanna Mehl and Moritz Ingwersen<https://againstcatastrophe.net/editorsed> contributors seek out remediations of catastrophe that reject the dichotomy of utopia and apocalypse to foreground the uneasy and ambiguous emplacements of energy, where shifting constellations of power and the imagination, more-than-human ecologies and socio-technical infrastructures continuously intersect. You can read the full editorial statement here<https://againstcatastrophe.net/editorialenergy>.

Contributors:

Kat Austen is a multimedia artist whose sound installations, performances, and sculptural work engages more-than-human relationships to place, resources, and environmentally just futures. Her dispatch introduces her project “This Land Is Not Mine” as a sonic and participatory exploration of identity amidst post-extractivist landscapes in eastern Germany. Read more …<https://againstcatastrophe.net/energydispatchblog/austen>

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist and media maker who specializes in the energopolitics of climate futures. His dispatch considers current energy crises as conditions of “catastasis” and entertains catastrophe as a moment of pathos and transformation yet to come. Read more …<https://againstcatastrophe.net/energydispatchblog/boyer>

Jordan B. Kinder is a media studies and environmental humanities scholar who has written extensively about extractive energy imaginaries and infrastructures in Canada. His dispatch explores the potential for unconventional forms of energy autonomy and resistance amidst the toxic landscapes of unconventional oil. Read more …<https://againstcatastrophe.net/energydispatchblog/kinder>

Johanna Mehl is a design scholar interested in the larger material and immaterial systems design that shape design practices. Her dispatch draws on energy literacy field work in Berlin to ask how environmental design practices might draw attention to the complex histories, politics, and power dynamics of energy infrastructures. Read more …<https://againstcatastrophe.net/energydispatchblog/mehl>

Rhys Williams is an environmental humanities scholar with a focus on energy futures and infrastructure in science fiction and fantasy. His dispatch examines how cultural narratives of solar power generate a poetics of rupture and techno-utopia that belie the underlying continuities from fossil capital to solar capital. Read more …<https://againstcatastrophe.net/energydispatchblog/williams>


‘Against Catastrophe’ is led by Dr. Orit Halpern, Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. The core project team<https://againstcatastrophe.net/ac-team> led by Sudipto Basu is based out of Concordia University (Montreal), MIT, and TU Dresden. With illustrations and design treatment by T.S. Halpern.

‘Against Catastrophe’ is funded by Fonds de recherche du Québec and the Swiss National Science Foundation, and is part of the larger Governing Through Design research cluster.