Look Up: Climate Change Is Not a Crisis, It’s a Beating
We are ruining the planet to such an extent that it prompted scientists to proclaim the start of a new geological period. The Anthropocene, they called it, emphasising the influence of humanity on the environment. “Influence” is perhaps too soft a term to describe what George Monbiot calls a “full s...
Oikos: The Home As a Cosmogram
Seen in its pure materiality, as a giant rock speeding through outer space, our planet can be examined through the lenses of astronomy, geology, physics and chemistry. If we focus on the thin layer of life on its surface, however, we need to resort to a particular branch of biology, known as ‘ecolog...
Growthocene: On the Origins of the ‘Fairy Tale of Eternal Economic Growth’
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet, I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth...
In Times of Accelerated Change, to What Flag Do You Pledge Allegiance?
When Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, as a way of marking the territory he put a flag on it. After all, it’s human nature to fight for power by creating compelling spectacles, to impose dominance by using symbols as an extension of our thought and vision. We will never know if that spectacle was...
Disco, Donna & Donna
Disco is not merely a genre of dance music, but a complex subculture holding progressive political beliefs. Alongside it’s glittering clothes and sexy moves, disco came to rise in the United States in the 1970s, evolving from the well-known international sounds of Motown, rooted in New York and...
Chimera: The Reality of a Myth
There is a Greek myth that details a creature, or rather, a beast that had the body of a lion with the head of a goat jutting from its back and a serpent’s tail. In the Iliad, Homer described it as “a thing of immoral make, not human.” The creature named Chimera was feared for its hybrid body that...
Form and System – money as design
In 2008, somewhere in the National Bank of Denmark in Copenhagen, the seal on two steel boxes was broken. The contents made up an antiquated crisis package from the Cold War contingency plan, including all the necessary equipment for the production of special emergency money....
Financial and Speculative Design in The Age of Machines
Financial crises are temporal crises. They are created in mechanical circuits by new technologies acting so fast that we cannot perceive them until the damage is done. The speculative design can help us understand the crises by making them visible and in this way open up the future that the mechanic...
Complementary Currency Design Through Debt
Community currencies are based upon cohesion between their members and often aim to circumvent issues related to a lack of monetary supply, particularly within more marginalized populations. Based on trust and an aim to secure the local economy, it can be said that these currencies re-frame money as...