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Giorgio Grappi and Brett Neilson

Extracted from hard rocks and mountains, copper is a tradable metal that occupies a place on the fourth row of the periodic table. Known for its capacity to conduct electricity, the element has become an indispensable component in the manufacture of computing hardware and other electronic equipment essential to logistical operations and today’s capitalism. Our effort is to situate copper in its contemporary conduits of production and circulation, and, in particular within the patterns of mining, refinement, transportation and stockpiling that link its extraction in Chile – the world’s primary copper producing country – to its storage and uses in China – the world’s largest copper importing nation. We trace how the production and circulation of copper has mutated with shifting logistical arrangements that respond to the geopolitical position of China, the financialization of trade in base metals, the rise of business models based in data extraction and workers’ struggles in times of labour precarization. On this basis, we ask what type of politics logistical practices related to the contemporary copper industry embody.

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Katheryn M. Detwiler

In 2003 a stone was placed on the llano de Chajnantor, a high-altitude plateau in the Chilean Andes. This stone designated Chajnantor as the site of one of the most ambitious astronomical projects on Earth: The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). Completed in 2013, ALMA is the $1.4 billion dollar joint project of The European Southern Observatory (ESO), which comprises fifteen European member states, the US National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Natural Sciences of Japan.

Both ESO and the US have been dominant presences in the development of observatories in the Atacama Desert since the early 1960s, when mid-twentieth century European and US astronomy’s southern hemisphere ambitions and shifting post-war geopolitics first took astronomers and site testers to the arid mountains of northern Chile. Chajnantor joins a patchwork of observatory sites in the Atacama operating since the 1960s as non-Chilean territories, with the rights and immunities of diplomatic embassies. From these sites data ‘flow’, as one observatory director put it to me, ‘from photons to petabytes’.

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Orit Halpern

‘Learning from landscapes is a way of being revolutionary for an architect’.

Robert Venturi, Dennis Brown and Scott Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 1972.

How should we rethink the ethical, political, and social impacts of infrastructure? What might one ‘learn’ from landscapes? Taking my lead from the famous architectural and design treatise, Learning from Las Vegas, I want to begin studying these sites as landmarks in a landscape that very well may herald our future. This is a territory that bridges data and matter; both the producer of some of the largest non-proprietary data sets on earth and the provider of many of the very materials that create the information age. In this essay I will argue that these sites collectively form the landscape of a planetary testbed, a petri dish cultivating potential futures of life, politics and technology on both Earth and beyond.

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Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Moving through the Burrabazar district along Kolkata’s Strand the immediate buzz of hustling and trade obscures the crumbling warehouses that line the thoroughfare. According to a popular saying, ‘Everything is available in Burrabazar’. This ethos of ready supply, at least for those who are prepared to haggle (and almost everyone is), comes with an infrastructural and informational layer. ‘Everyone wants to buy cheap and sell dear’, writes Clifford Geertz in a classic article on the bazaar economy from the 1970s. ‘In the bazaar information is poor, scarce, maldistributed, inefficiently communicated, and intensely valued’. What are the material conduits that support this game of information procurement and coveting and what are the historical and political conditions that have allowed it to flourish?

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