2017, Allen, Jamie, Houston, Lara, Rosner, Daniela K, Jackson, Steven J.

Like all collaborative endeavors, bringing together an edited collection is about fixing as much as gathering the insights and details (and yes, flaws and limits) of individually or jointly conceived pieces to bring about a larger conversational whole – a drawing forth, or drawing together, of scattered threads and pieces into something considerably messier than a quilt. All the more so when the collection is the result of a generative collaboration, bringing guest editors Lara Houston, Daniela K. Rosner, Steven J. Jackson in conversation with the continent. collective to present this special issue “R3pair Volume”. The conversation of course runs deeper and longer than the 17+ months of engagement among the contributors here. For the last 5, 10, 20 or 100 years (pick your starting point!), a motley and heterogeneous band of thinkers from Europe, North America, and the world have grown suspicious of the stories we tell about objects as stable and therefore rather settled things (whose drama, if any, inheres only at moments of design); and the way these stories render invisible a whole range of human relationships with and to objects that turn out to be central to sustaining the worlds around us, however provisional.

2016, Allen, Jamie

The technosphere is an emergent weft of our geo-systemic fabric. The Technosphere project team of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the para-academic collective and publication group continent. have collaborated here on an unwinding of technospheric matters, ideas and experiences, that we hope you, dear reader, will trace out with us.

2017, Allen, Jamie

It is with warmth, appreciation, and exuberance that continent. presents a new issue which extends the dialogue on the technosphere. "The Technosphere" is Peter Haff's term for the planetary-scale networks of transport, information, energy, and media operating at a scale that we can now compare with geologic and climatic forces. It is a term, aligning with discourses about the Anthropocene, that helps characterise and describe an earth enwrapped and forever reworked by the human modulations and amplifications of matter and energy.

2016, Allen, Jamie, Khaikin, Lital, Linder, Isaac

The street-level sonic cultures, acoustic ecologies and personal interventions available to us have, during this long 20th Century, become proliferated by speakers, microphones, synthesised and recorded playbacks, beeps, buzzes and alarms. Roving gangs of indignant mobile-phone music-listeners disrupt the public transit experience. iPhones chirp out the sound of something called ‘crickets’, creatures many a listener may very well never encounter. Airlines pass on the extravagant levy of ‘noise charges’ to their customers, a kind of psychic and acoustic bandwidth fee. Microwave ovens, automobiles and authoritative ahuman voices chime out an acoustic ecology that is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘cultural’, neither ‘societal’ nor ‘technological’, but something that is a heterogeneous mixture of all of these sources, causes and categories. These are 'acoustic infrastructures', and although human-made, they are naturalised by their ubiquity and always-on-ness, along with our allover, everyday, experience of them.