Link zur Veranstaltung hier, Buch in Herausgeberschaft von Ingrid Scheurmann in Arbeit
80 years ago, World War Two ended in Europe
Blitzkrieg and Shoa, but also liberation, postwar rule of law, and democracy – were enabled by oil and chemical industries of hydrocarbons.
With the end of WW2, global petrochemical modernity entered a new, even more powerful phase. Wartime industries fuelled peacetime consumerism, European reconciliation – and ecological destruction.
Today, petromodern zombie warfare is back to Europe.
More, not less research on geochemopolitics of hydrocarbons with all its contradictions and ambivalences is necessary.
»Beauty of Oil« meets »Guilty Pleasures.« The »Atlas of Petromodernity« at KWI Essen, 13.5.2025, 18:30
Online (Zoom) & Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI), Gartensaal, Goethestr. 31, 45128 Essen
For further information, for the zoom-link (if you can’t make it to Essen) visit the KWI-website
Press the ignition. Hear the combustion engine. Smell the Gasoline fumes. Feel the improbably smooth and bright coloured plastic surfaces of a vehicle’s interior. Ride. Dream. What do you see?
Petroleum has enabled and shaped modern experience. Beauty and horror lie closely together in the petrol age. With their research collective ‚Beauty of Oil‘, Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger trace the deeply ambivalent character of fossil energy and matter through layers of knowledge, politics, arts, ecologies, and everyday lives. Their ‚Atlas of Petromodernity‚ (Santa Barbara 2024, Berlin 2020) maps a panorama of technologies, geographies, histories, and experiences with what is both a chemical energy resource and a cultural drug connected to almost all our epoch’s forms of pleasure and guilt.
»Fischer Tropsch: A Key Principle of Industrial Chemisty in the Anthropocene« – Keynote by Benjamin Steininger at »100 Years Fischer-Tropsch Process. A Central Pillar of Future Energy Systems«, conference at Mülheim Ruhr by DECHEMA, MPICEC, MPIKOFO
It was a pleasure, and frankly also quite an honor, to deliver alongside leading chemists the only keynote lecture by a non-chemist at this big international event at Mülheim//Ruhr on May 5 2025.
These events show how important it is for petromodernity research from the cultural sciences to get in touch and to keep contact to the practitioners of chemistry innovation.
It is important for both sides, since it is us to deliver topics and keywords that chemists interact with their work without noticing, and that otherwise might have not be mentioned at such conferences such as »Anthropocene«, »petromodernity«, »chemical geography«, »chemical cultural theory«, »Chemiewende«, »Geoanthropology«…
To adjust a famous quote: Chemists are the ones that are changing the world in different ways, but it will still take something like philosophers to interpret.
»Ammonia Synthesis: Entering a Ubiquitous Chemical Technosphere« – contribution by Benjamin Steininger to the collection »Roadsides no. 013, Toxic Infrastructures, Spring 2025,« edited by Janine Hauer and Nikolaos Olma
Link to the essay here, link to the journal here (full journal open access)
»Modern Arts as a Key Towards an Understanding of Petro-Modernity« – contribution by Benjamin Steininger to »Aestheticizing Petroleum: An Exploratory Workshop« at Columbia University NYC, March 7, 2025
What by twitter news beeping phones during our workshop turned out as a dramatic day of political threats against Columbia University, started calmly with a familiar book cover in the opening remarks by Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Avinoam Shalem…
See for the program of the workshop (a.o. with a talk by Timothy Mitchell) here
»Beauty of Oil« at Yale, March 3 2025. Benjamin Steininger in conversation with Douglas Rogers
