Mining Conversations invites you to join its sixth online session The Futurepasts of … Iron. The monthly online series critically reflects and discusses extraction and energy landscapes, across geographies and temporalities—up to this moment in which resource regimes more than ever shape economic, societal and environmental realities planetarily and locally in very unequal ways.

Mining Conversations invites you to join its fifth online session The Futurepasts of … Shale Oil and Gas. The monthly online series critically reflects and discusses extraction and energy landscapes, across geographies and temporalities—up to this moment in which resource regimes more than ever shape economic, societal and environmental realities planetarily and locally in very unequal ways.

Mining Conversations invites you to join its fourth online session The Futurepasts of … Petroleum. The monthly online series critically reflects and discusses extraction and energy landscapes, across geographies and temporalities—up to this moment in which resource regimes more than ever shape economic, societal and environmental realities planetarily and locally in very unequal ways.

Mining Conversations invites you to join its third online session The Futurepasts of … Lithium. The monthly online series critically reflects and discusses extraction and energy landscapes, across geographies and temporalities—up to this moment in which resource regimes more than ever shape economic, societal and environmental realities planetarily and locally in very unequal ways.

Mining Conversations invites you to join its second online session The Futurepasts of … Forests. The monthly online series critically reflects and discusses extraction and energy landscapes, across geographies and temporalities—up to this moment in which resource regimes more than ever shape economic, societal and environmental realities planetarily and locally in very unequal ways.

Mining Conversations is a monthly online discussion series dedicated to how knowledge practices on local and planetary scales shape the energy landscapes we see today, whether influenced by past or present extraction practices. Each session connects different perspectives to better understand the social, material, technological, and environmental forces at play.  The series seeks to provide the needed space for cross-practice, international and reflective conversations about mining among artists, academics, activists, and other persons interested in mining.

Starting from a review of the Orbis Spike hypothesis, this essay by the Anthropocene historian Franz Mauelshagen compares the early modern “Agrarian Acceleration” during the Little Ice Age with the material world of the twentieth century.

How can an archaeology of the present address molecules as driving elements of the “Great Acceleration”? Benjamin Steininger contends that the apparatus of catalytic chemistry has triggered a cascade of accelerations which lead to the Anthropocene.

We live to burn and we burn to live. Artist Matthew C. Wilson pieces together the pyrogenic deep time of rifts, violent changes that also always produce new possibilities.

What is the sound of the Lower Mississippi, a “superhighway” through which huge proportions of exported goods from the US are shipped every day?

As an effect of human intervention, the former prairie of the Mississippi region has been turned into agricultural farmland. But what are the energy-based effects of land use changes?

How can we encounter ourselves in the Anthropocene? A study in the deconstruction of cows and an introduction to “The Lost Crops of America” project.

This seminar brings concepts of time, layers, and sediment into close contact with the human sciences, the arts, and Pierre Part, a community who live according to the movements of the River.

The relations between extraction, synthesis, and exploitation, and the effects of commodity dependencies across scales are explored in this seminar, by mapping commodity flows and energy cycles in the Mississippi basin.

What can we learn about care and processing emotions from soil cultivation?

The year 1948 serves as an aperture through which we can rethink the history of the now; the decisive moment when the heap of fragments left by the fury of two world wars began to reassemble into new forms of technological, scientific, and cultural order that inform our contemporary situation.

Hydrocarbons plunges into the complexities and contradictions of the oil era and thereby into the molecular basis of the technosphere. Interweaving film scenes with a variety of visual and research materials, as well as the “sounds of oil,” the session explores the speculative cultural genre termed “petro noir,” examining the geopolitical-industrial complex that drives petrochemistry and, by consequence, mobility, consumption, waste and adventure.

Geologist and oceanographer James Syvitski maps how human modification of the world’s hydrological system continues to accelerate, how deltas are starved of sediment due to dam building, and how wetlands are lost and coasts retreat.

In the course of its productive and consumptive functions, the technosphere transforms energy, materials, and information. It uses energy in part to transform information, while information guides the metabolism of energy.

“Now you’re sounding even weirder than Peter Haff.” The gloves are off! A lively dispute about the usefulness of the Technosphere concept in general.

By whom and where was the information digested, processed, prepared, and served that went on to become Peter Haff’s legendary Technosphere Paper? An Investigation.

If the technosphere is a condition of the Anthropocene, we ought to acknowledge the dangers of making technology seem “natural.” Critical discard studies can help us make visible the violence that has gone into making the technosphere.

This micro-publication looks at the city of Chicago as a site of origin for materials, particles, and social relations that define the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene.