Caren Kaplan: Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (2018)

“From the first vistas provided by flight in balloons in the eighteenth century to the most recent sensing operations performed by military drones, the history of aerial imagery has marked the transformation of how people perceived their world, better understood their past, and imagined their future. In Aerial Aftermaths Caren Kaplan traces this cultural history, showing how aerial views operate as a form of world-making tied to the times and places of war. Kaplan’s investigation of the aerial arts of war—painting, photography, and digital imaging—range from England’s surveys of Scotland following the defeat of the 1746 Jacobite rebellion and early twentieth-century photographic mapping of Iraq to images taken in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Throughout, Kaplan foregrounds aerial imagery’s importance to modern visual culture and its ability to enforce colonial power, demonstrating both the destructive force and the potential for political connection that come with viewing from above.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2018
Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies series
ISBN 9780822370086, 0822370085
xiv+298 pages
via André

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Technosphere Magazine (2016-2019)

“Exploring the amorphous fabric of technologies, environments, and humans shaping Earth’s critical future.

The technosphere is the defining matrix and main driver behind the ongoing transition of this planet into the new geological epoch of humankind, the Anthropocene. Stemming from the ubiquity of human culture and global technologies, it forms a new and highly dynamic component of the Earth system, amorphous in its gestalt yet powerful in altering the history of this planet and the conditions for life on it. Mobilizing and transforming massive amounts of materials and energy, it is comparable in scale and function to other terrestrial spheres such as the bio- and hydrosphere, with which it connects and intersects. Put differently, it constitutes a form of a higher ecology generated by the cumulative interweaving of technologies and natural environments to the point where both become inseparable.

Manifest since at least the mid-twentieth century with the onset of the “Great Acceleration,” the technosphere has now reached an enormous, not yet determinate potential to alter the surface of the Earth as well as its great depths – from the orbital level to the deep sea. Owing to the capability of a single species to actuate technics that radically transform our planet, the technosphere thus represents a steep rupture and a qualitative shift in the way our planet has functioned for millions of years. How does the technosphere operate? How does it reorganize and re-functionalize the physicality and chemistry of living and non-living matter? And how does it change the ways we perceive the world?”

“Technosphere Magazine maps out specific dimensions, condensations, aggregations, “apparatuses,” problematics, conflict zones, ruptures, and operational failures, through and by which the technosphere becomes visible.” (from Editorial)

Editors-in-chief: Katrin Klingan, Christoph Rosol
Editorial team: Anujah Fernando, Ana María Guzmán Olmos, Nick Houde, Anna Luhn, Christoph Rosol, Johanna Schindler, Mira Witte
Illustrations: Nina Jäger
Publisher Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, 2016-2019
Open access

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Dossiers: Anthropotechnics, Arctic, Borders, Creolized Technologies, Earth, Human, Infrastructure, Land & Sea, Machine Listening, Materials, Metabolic Systems, Phosphorus, Risk Equipment, Spheres, Substances, Trauma, Trust (HTML, updated on 2019-5-30)

Shannon Mattern: Deep Mapping the Media City (2015)

“Going beyond current scholarship on the “media city” and the “smart city,” Shannon Mattern argues that our global cities have been mediated and intelligent for millennia. Deep Mapping the Media City advocates for urban media archaeology, a multisensory approach to investigating the material history of networked cities. Mattern explores the material assemblages and infrastructures that have shaped the media city by taking archaeology literally—using techniques like excavation and mapping to discover the modern city’s roots in time.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015
Forerunners: Ideas First series, 5
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License
ISBN 0816698511, 9780816698516
xvi+51 pages

Review: Nicholas Korody (Archinect, 2015).

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