By Trent Wintermeier

This essay follows a low-frequency sound looming around exposed communities in a relatively small area of southeast Austin, Texas. This sound is coming from the cooling equipment of four data center facilities. It’s artificial and metallic, the sound, but also disorienting and jarring—immediately recognizable as a low hum that is definitely other-than-human and, thus, machine generated...

By Helen A. Hayes

Canadians across the political spectrum want action on climate change. They’re also increasingly unconvinced that individual action is adequate to address environmental destruction. As a result, activists have taken up this call in protests for “systems change.”

By Marie-Pier Boucher and Alice Jarry

Outer Space and the City: Cohabitation Strategies with Interplanetary Infrastructures of Telecommunications (SSHRC, 2021–2023, University of Toronto/Concordia University) examines the role that telecommunications infrastructures play in shaping urbanization processes (Graham and Marvin, 1996, 2001).

By Anastasiia Gushchina

In 1999, Jane M. Gaines titled her introduction to the sixth volume of the Visible Evidence collection “The Real Returns.” In her essay, she discusses a twisted relationship between turn-of-the-century documentary and the world it is supposed to portray.

By Blair Attard-Frost

I. The Prophecy

The Cult’s priests are conjuring an entity too complex for any of them to comprehend or control. It is an unruly assemblage of lithium mines and dump trucks, of shipping containers and undersea cables…

By Trish Morgan

A field led down to a lake shore. This day had started out with what had become a regular occurrence - a distressing surge of cortisol from the anxiety of the pandemic and a dizzying workload.

By Alis Oldfield

To locate vitalism within the network, we need to go back to the invention of electricity, the life-giving force of the internet.

By Alis Oldfield

In order for the machined internet to be a living, breathing ecology, we need to locate and protect its cultures. In the pursuit of this exchange, this diverse culture, we need an elemental ingredient - water. Water is the stuff of life.

By Alis Oldfield

When we talk of the internet, we often adopt spatial metaphors to discuss sites or domains, and our navigation between them as visits affected by traffic. If we imagine the shape of the internet, we might see maps of interconnected lines and dots, perhaps even stretched across a webbed globe.

By Isabelle Boucher

“Man and Nature bloom anew at Man and His World.”

Montreal is a city animated by a lingering cosmopolitan phantasmagoria, especially its two ‘man-made’ islands, Île Sainte-Hélène and Île Notre-Dame. Built to host Expo 67, a colossal World’s fair resting on dredged soil and urban debris, they became the experimental landscape and socio-technical matrix of the future megacity Montreal dreamt of being.

By Burç Köstem

I’m making what is now my second trip near the Küçükçekmece lake near the Western peripheries of İstanbul. I am with a small group of hikers. We are waiting to cross a ditch that has been dug between Ayşe’s self-built home and an agricultural field that belongs to the İstanbul University over which Kanal İstanbul is planned to pass.

By Assatu Wisseh

The American Colonization Society (ACS) was a group of U.S. statesmen, consisting of Supreme Court Associate Justice Bushrod Washington, former Senator and House Speaker Henry Clay, President Andrew Jackson, Colonel Henry Rutgers, and lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key.

By Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie

Reports and descriptions of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi’s early 20th century facility in Derrygimlagh, Ireland, conjure a science fiction scenario, entangling the traditional landscapes and cultures of Ireland’s western regions with an infrastructural modernity that supposedly never fully “reached” rural Ireland.

By Helen A. Hayes and Janna Frenzel

In April 2022, following an environmental assessment by the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, the Government of Canada approved the Bay du Nord Development Project in the Flemish Pass, an oceanic basin 500 kilometres northeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Text by Laura Pannekoek, Images by Paul Nadeau

In the summer of 2021, Paul Nadeau and I traveled across the country to look for Canadian resource extraction, its infrastructures, and its waste—and found the Canadian rural, with its industrial hopes, and environmental anxieties.

By Laticia Chapman

In 2014 and 2015, I interned on a permaculture-based homestead on an island in the Pacific Northwest. I lived there with eleven other interns, some of whom were new each year and some of whom were returning for a second or third season.

By Darin Barney

In 2019, Canadian-based global financial firm RBC published a report introducing “Farmer 4.0,” an imagined farmer adapted to a “fourth revolution in agricultural technology” that is “all about data.” According to the report, “Farmer 4.0 will need to focus on strategy and systems, leaving past tasks to a new generation of smart machines.” Farmer 4.0 is closely aligned with the emerging paradigm of “autonomous agriculture,” a phrase that refers to increased use of automated sensing and data technologies in farm operations, in order to reduce dependency on the human work and judgment traditionally associated with agricultural production.

By Jacqueline Jenkins

This short provocation was written for and presented in the session “Liveness in a Remote World” at the 2023 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (San Francisco, 5 – 8 January).

Introductory text by Godfre Leung

Theorist Neel Ahuja’s 2015 article “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions” ends: “At the heart of the body and the future lies the corpse.” This evokes a couplet from artist TJ Shin’s video essay Anthropology of a Phytomorphist (2021–’22): “To be diseased is to be alive/To cure something is to make it dead.” These counterintuitive upendings of the life/death binary issue powerful challenges to anthropocentric temporalities and, more broadly, human-centred discourses, behaviour, and infrastructures.

By Jessica Johnston

September 2022

Surry Hills

I walk into Dan’s café, warmed by his smiling face. The brass edges of the American oak bar glimmer in the sunlight while kids with milk moustaches trace their fingers along the white lettering on the windows. I hear the whirring sound of milk steaming, the light pop of the barista tamping the espresso, transforming fine granules into a syrupy elixir that seems to produce a momentary suspension of time and space in which everything is completely alright in the world.