Intensification - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, John Palmesino, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog

Contributors John Tresch, Michaela Büsse, Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Laura Tripaldi, Kate Crawford, Michael Marder, Geoff Manaugh, Tim Lenton, Raqs Media Collective, and more…

How heavy is a city? The complexity of formulating a response to this simple question ponits to a wide set of transformations that have taken place to what we used to call the city, as well as its backdrop: intensification, construction, destruction, erosion, emission, accumulations, duration, acidification, half-lives, extinction, fossilization… It begins to reveal a new figure in the making with a magnitude of planetary proportions.

Intensification is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale within the context of its seventh edition, “How heavy is a city?,” curated by John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (Territorial Agency).

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17 essays

Uncanny Kin and Earth System Animacies

Anne McClintock

The Anthropocene invites us to rethink cities, not as singular, bounded entities, but as interconnected processes, webbed into Earth system animacies and connective relations with uncanny kin on a planetary scale.

How to Hijack Cities

Emanuele Coccia

After decades of habituation to the idea of automation, the experience of seeing things break, shatter, or disintegrate has become a tragedy or evidence of something diabolical.

Correspondences

Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith

You’ve gone places to bring back the sound of a falling leaf, or the sound of the wind in Harar, or the sound of the wind in a cave in Mexico that's different from any other wind. And these things inspire me to improvise or write the poems or the monologues that I do.

Cybernetics in the Anthropocene

Andrew Pickering

Even when successful, our attempts at lineal control of nature are imperfect and imprecise. This is what we have to expect in dealing with exceedingly complex systems.

The Weight of Things: Exhibitions and Their Materialities

Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás

Exhibitions are not representations of the world, but foundations for developing new scenarios and model potential worlds.

Space, Time, Mass: Interscalar Vehicles for the Anthropocene

Paul N. Edwards

Human institutions appear not merely incapable of applying the brakes to self-destructive trajectories, but actually bound to servitude in the interests of the technosphere.

How to Non-Organize

José-Carlos Mariátegui

After the devastation of World War II, the importance of technological research and development became increasingly clear, not only for achieving success on the battlefield but also to serve as a foundation for new ways of thinking about the future.

Biting Tongue, Biding Time

Raqs Media Collective

In just the last 150 years, the world’s population has grown a little more than 6 times what it did in the previous 900 years. How heavy a dent does that make in time?

Gaia Devices for a High-Energy Solar-Powered City

Tim Lenton

There is an invisible city of CO2 that weighs as much as the visible, manufactured city. That ghost city of CO2 is now spread throughout the atmosphere. Shouldn’t it also be on the scales?

Celestial Detector: Weighing Lives from Below

Geoff Manaugh

Muons are constantly passing through all of us—through our skin and bones, our cars and buildings, through the mountains and landforms around us.

Heavy, Heavenly, Heaving

Michael Marder

Metaphysics is light, perhaps all too light. It abhors heaviness, which it associates with matter.

Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop

Kate Crawford

AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.

Soft Future

Laura Tripaldi

Throughout history, our understandings of technology have acted as a blueprint for conceptualizing the human and the living. This dynamism carries profound implications for how we relate to each other and to the larger world around us.

Anthropocene Territories

Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams

“Territories” is a universally understandable term, relatable to both humans and non-humans; it can be understood by those without a technical background, and yet it is relatable to a range of technical and academic concepts.

Granular Power: The Gritty Politics of Sand

Michaela Büsse

As the bedrock of urban infrastructures, sand is embedded in the very fabric of modern life. Yet, its ubiquity belies its complexity.

The Weight of a Living Thought: City as Cosmogram

John Tresch

The question “how heavy is a city?” at first seems to request an answer in standard units: an estimate of vast piles of construction materials. A moment’s thought, however, makes it a puzzle for Atlas and Archimedes.

Editorial

John Palmesino, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, and e-flux Architecture

Intensification is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa within the context of its seventh edition, “How heavy is a city?,” curated by John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (Territorial Agency).

Subject

Architecture, Climate change, Anthropocene, Science, Cybernetics

Contributors

Anne McClintock Uncanny Kin and Earth System Animacies
Emanuele Coccia How to Hijack Cities
Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith Correspondences
Andrew Pickering Cybernetics in the Anthropocene
Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás The Weight of Things: Exhibitions and Their Materialities
Paul N. Edwards Space, Time, Mass: Interscalar Vehicles for the Anthropocene
José-Carlos Mariátegui How to Non-Organize
Raqs Media Collective Biting Tongue, Biding Time
Tim Lenton Gaia Devices for a High-Energy Solar-Powered City
Geoff Manaugh Celestial Detector: Weighing Lives from Below
Michael Marder Heavy, Heavenly, Heaving
Kate Crawford Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop
Laura Tripaldi Soft Future
Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams Anthropocene Territories
Michaela Büsse Granular Power: The Gritty Politics of Sand
John Tresch The Weight of a Living Thought: City as Cosmogram
John Palmesino, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and e-flux Architecture Editorial

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