From the Editors:
At the conclusion of a year that saw rockets screaming across the sky over Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, commitments to a 1.5° C target at COP27 dissipate while fossil fuel companies made record profits, and the trailer for a Hollywood blockbuster about Robert J. Oppenheimer debut with a live countdown to the 78th anniversary of the Trinity test, it seems particularly urgent to mobilize energies against catastrophe. Indeed, the way we imagine ourselves in relation to energy is fundamentally shaped by the dichotomy of utopia and apocalypse—displays of vibrant activity haunted by the specter of wastelands; the heat death of the universe as allegory for climate paralysis and the unconscious of the Great Acceleration. For viable and transformative visions of energy futures we may need to leave the archives of hegemonic progress narratives behind. From the steam engine to fuel cells, modern energy technologies have greased the wheels of extractive capitalism, conjuring dreams of comfort, unfettered mobility, and adventure without the dirt but all the power. Aesthetically, and without doubt politically, techno-utopianism obfuscates its dependence on sacrifice zones, precarious labor, and resource inequality. To overcome this logic of catastrophe entails disrupting the politics of visibility that detach scenes of energy spectacle from sites of leakage, exploitation, and toxicity.
The dispatches collected in this drop seek out remediations of catastrophe that foreground messy landscapes and messy politics in the wake of extractivism. Rejecting the dichotomy of utopia and apocalypse is neither a realist nor a relativist gesture. Rather, it enables strategies of worldmaking that take seriously 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.
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.
Johanna Mehl is a design scholar interested in the larger material and immaterial systems design is embedded in. 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.
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.
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.
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.
