Historian John Tresch looks at the history of modern science from the angle of spiritual athleticism, ascetic practices and epistemic virtues.

What techniques do we use when we navigate between the human voice, governmental law and the concept of justice in the technosphere?

What does it mean to share or feel another’s embodied experience?

How do Arctic infrastructures “live”? And how does their extractive and appropriative logic do service to a rapidly changing world to come?

Literary scholar Karen Pinkus puts current polar geoengineering scenarios and their uncertain consequences into context.

Activist and artist Subhankar Banerjee and engineer Lois Epstein depict the threatening environmental impact of an extractivist technosphere.

Political scientist Kim Rygiel investigates the difficult values that underlie the enforcement of who belongs in a political structure and who does not.

Anthropologist Chowra Makaremi works through the strangely technical choreography of “non-lethal” force and its implementation for detaining people at borders.

Borders not only define political law, they also constitute geographic realities built of infrastructure, forging politics into the landscape.

Creolized technologies can be understood as reasserting the “human” in the technosphere, but theorist and urbanist Elisa T. Bertuzzo argues that this is not necessarily humane.

The story of the Yagán, a low-cost utility vehicle, is one of local craft, misdirected politics, and design on-the-fly.

How did a confluence of telegraphy, shipworms, colonialism, and imported Malay rubber transform the Arabic language into its modern form?

Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz considers the technofossils that far-future archaeologists will find when digging up the landfills of the global experiment called Anthropocene.

The historical precursor to the technosphere concept is Vladimir Vernadsky’s holistic delineation of the biosphere, a grand scheme of entangling living and non-living matter.

In his artistic narration, Nile Koetting cycles through a series of inquiries about free and ubiquitous energy and the spectacle that results.

Photographer Hannes Wiedemann depicts the bodyhacking subculture in California, capturing its adherents in their garages and makeshift laboratories.

In this compositional experiment, a robotic arm, mineral crystals and an interactive landscape co-evolve, producing an ecological space away from human incursion.

Many tropes of Western modernity uphold a binary between race and technology—the former as hyper-organic and primitive, the latter inorganic and hyper-rational.

How has the universal standardization of materials, sizes and processes enabled the technosphere to scale to its present scope?

Media scholar Lisa Parks describes her phenomenological method of understanding what is at stake when we speak about and imagine media infrastructures.

Environmental historian Johan Gärdebo introduces us to the outermost layer of the technosphere, where satellites and their debris now orbit the planet.

Andrew Chubb maps the complex space of maritime East Asia, tying together land rights, historical geopolitics, and the creation of artificial islands that construct it.

The Iranian island of Kish exemplifies how territorial separation can lead to political and economic hubris in the form of a globalized free-trade zone.

Historian of architecture and urbanism Carola Hein investigates the establishment, transformation, and future of the global petroleumscape.

By rejecting the normative concepts we project onto technology, Terre Thaemlitz points toward what other visions of the human might be freed up in the process.

Composer, musicologist, and improviser George Lewis explores the issues that arise in encounters between machine listeners and their biological counterparts.

Musician C. Spencer Yeh pushes speech synthesizers trained to represent Chinese dialects to the threshold of intelligibility and recognition.

How did nineteenth century recipes describing practices of natural dyeing in India come to constitute technologies for green production for the future?

Do cultural ideas order our material worlds and technologies, or is it the other way around?

Cultural scholar Esther Leslie reveals the vexing temporalities of contemporary types of waste.

Could it be said that with the development of the technosphere, the Earth is currently undergoing a shift to a state of greater activity?

Historian of industrial chemistry Benjamin Steiniger describes the technological metabolism that is forging a connection between fossil materiality and humankind.

Architect and food thinker Carolyn Steel provides a powerful prompt for us to move beyond the perils of the modern industrial food complex.

Phosphorus is arguably the most precious of all mineral resources. Without it, all living things would perish, yet it is rare within our everyday environments.

Understanding Australia’s phosphate mining history on Banaba puts into context its current controversial relationship with Nauru and Christmas Island.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the growing dependency of national food supplies on fertilizer has turned phosphorus into a critical resource within geopolitical conflicts.

Starting from the Flash Crash of 2010, artist and theorist Gerald Nestler investigates the problem of information asymmetries in high-frequency trading.

Is a creeping catastrophe insurable? Climate risk researcher Eberhard Faust and disaster historian Scott Knowles discuss calculating the costs of climate-change-related events.

In the current design of large-scale infrastructural projects, the planetary future hinges on a new norm: perpetual prototyping and demoing.

Historian of science Sabine Höhler explores the technoscientific motives and consequences of experimenting with self-contained ecospheres.

Historian of science Pietro Daniel Omodeo unpacks spheres from their context in ancient and early modern cosmology and metaphysical doctrine.

How does the current notion of “spheres” infiltrate thinking about the bio-techno-sphere, which today seems the best descriptive model for our own habitat?

Is there a chemical shortcut for producing social change?

Gender studies scholars Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward question the essentialist and heteronormative assumptions that frame discourses on endocrine disruptors.

What does it take for the life sciences to reflect on themselves and their conceptual models in the era of the technosphere?

Four artists and scholars confront the catastrophe of global warming as the rising sea literally dissolves the Maldives, and the lives that are lived upon them.

Ethnographer S. Løchlann Jain poetically examines how commodities and violence sustain one another in the technosphere.

Experimental collective continent. lead a semi-improvised discussion that hints at the links between the individual and their passions for research.

Who is trusted to take care of others? Feminist science and technology studies scholar Kalindi Vora investigates the relationships between surrogates and commissioning parents.

Researcher Kei Kreutler analyzes the decentralized, consensus-driven decision processes implemented in blockchain technologies.

In what ways have networked labor environments transformed how labor is done, and by whom?