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Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Petroleum has enabled and shaped modern experience. Beauty and horror lie closely together in the petrol age. With their research collective ‚Beauty of Oil‘, Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger trace the deeply ambivalent character of fossil energy and matter through layers of knowledge, politics, arts, ecologies, and everyday lifes. Their ‚Atlas of Petromodernity‚ (Santa Barbara 2024, Berlin 2020) maps a panorama of technologies, geographies, histories, and experiences with what is both a chemical energy resource and a cultural drug connected to almost all our epoch’s forms of pleasure and guilt.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alexander Klose works and lives as a cultural researcher, curator, and publicist in Berlin, Bremen and Halle (Saale) in Germany. He is a research group leader at the European Center for Just Transition Research and Impact-driven Transfer at Martin-Luther-University Halle. He published The Container Principle (MIT, 2015) and curated, among others, On Becoming Earthlings: Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge #18 (Musée de L’Homme, Paris, 2015), Precognitioning Post-Oil NYC (1014, New York, 2021), and Petromelancholia (Brutus, Rotterdam, 2023).
Benjamin Steininger is a cultural and media theorist, historian of science and technology, and a curator working in Berlin (Germany) and Vienna (Austria). He is a postdoctoral fellow at the research cluster “Unifying Systems in Catalysis” at Technische Universität Berlin and at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (Jena). He published Raum-Maschine Reichsautobahn: Zur Dynamik eines bekannt/unbekannten Bauwerks (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021), and wrote a dissertation on industrial catalysis as a key concept of the 20th century. From 2012 to 2016, he initiated and led a participatory research and collection project on 100 years of oil and gas industry in the Vienna basin, from 2012 to 2022 he was a regular contributor to the “Anthropocene Projects” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin. In 2017, Klose and Steininger founded the collective Beauty of Oil to explore the complexities and contradictions of petromodernity and to conceptualize a Critique of Fossil Reason.
Information
Speakers
Alexander Klose, Martin-Luther-University Halle
Benjamin Steininger, TU Berlin
Moderation
Stefan Höhne, KWI
Participation
This is a public event and participation is free of charge. There is no registration necessary.
Participation via Zoom
For online participation (Zoom) use the following Link at the given time.
Organizers
Organized by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in cooperation with ERC Cultures of the Cryosphere.
Information on participating / attending:
Date:
05/13/2025 18:30 - 05/13/2025
Event venue:
Online (Zoom) & Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI)
Gartensaal, Goethestraße 31, 45128 Essen
45128 Essen
Nordrhein-Westfalen
Germany
Target group:
Journalists, Scientists and scholars
Email address:
Relevance:
transregional, national
Subject areas:
Cultural sciences, Environment / ecology, Geosciences, Language / literature, Social studies
Types of events:
Presentation / colloquium / lecture
Entry:
04/17/2025
Sender/author:
Helena Rose
Department:
Pressestelle
Event is free:
yes
Language of the text:
English
URL of this event: http://idw-online.de/en/event79146
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