Benjamin Steininger (Technische Universität Berlin), “Atlas of Petromodernity” (Yale Environmental Humanities)

Benjamin Steininger of Technische Universität Berlin will present on his co-authored book Atlas of Petromodernity (with Alexander Klose), published in an English translation by Ayça Türkoğlu for punctum books, 2024. The Atlas of Petromodernity is many things in one: historical and geographical non-fiction, cultural theory essay, and picture book. In forty-four short essays, inspired by an equal amount of pictorial findings, Klose and Steininger develop a technical, geographical, political, and speculative panorama of the declining era of petroleum modernity. The book is available for free download through open access or for purchase at the publisher’s website: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/atlas-of-petromodernity/

 

The authors stroll through Baku, Rotterdam, and Louisiana, into Manchuria and through the Vienna Basin. They read Bertolt Brecht, technical manuals, and petroculture theory, and they listen to Neil Young. They go to the moon, through refineries and over highways emptied by the COVID-19 pandemic. They confront petrochemistry with petromelancholy, catalysis with catharsis, cosmos with cosmetics. The Atlas of Petromodernity tackles the contradictory ambivalences of a substance that has been vital for our epoch, and whose roles and meanings need to be understood in order to be able to leave this epoch behind. 

 

Douglas Rogers, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Yale, will moderate the conversation.

 

Speaker Bio: 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.

 

This event is generously supported by the Energy Humanities Project and Yale Planetary Solutions.