Description
This seminar engages Interscalar research methods to explore the connections between modern technology and resource extraction in the non-West. In her discussion of the entanglements of mining extraction, technological innovation and toxicity, Gabrielle Hecht suggests that modernity thrives in some places at the expense of others, and that pollution is a central dynamic of the Anthropocene. Throughout the term, we will investigate how design ecosystems and supply chains around everyday designed products co-produce hidden landscapes and spatial imaginaries. Beginning with the counter-cartographies of extraction presented by a range of visual artists and scholars, we will explore how trans-disciplinary (and speculative) research methods might serve as “imaginative ruptures” that point to subversive possibilities of territories, spaces, and social relations. This proposition foregrounds the idea that scales are not only emergent - reflecting different systems of value and measurement, but