12/2024
The HUB Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society hosts works, contributions and reactions for a special issue on the theme of “Metabolic Media”, guest Edited by Jamie Allen and Louise Carver. If media are ‘about’ representation, connectivity and relationships, the special issue of the HUB is dedicated to the intimacies, interfaces and connections that can be made with our metabolic condition.
Metabolic processes, at almost every scale, go largely unnoticed through inattention and abstraction: beating hearts, water treatment plants, breathing, policy-making and other infrastructural processes. These “autonomic” processes are unmediated mediations, amongst the most important yet least attended to aspects of lives. We seldom become aware of the myriad exchanges, transfers and transformations of materials and energy that occur, continuously, through environments, between beings and among political entities toward maintaining life and living, extravagance and impoverishment. Creative practices, artistic and design research, media makers and others enlist appropriately myriad ways of making these activities visible, otherwise palpable, changeable and renewed.
A set of peculiar activities characterise metabolic practices: putting plant, animal, or fungi into holes in living bodies or microbial communities of growing media directly in the earth or clay pots; devising elaborate, creative traditions of preparation, feeding ourselves and populations, cooking and eating; farming poultry at a scale that they now make up 70% of the biomass of all birds on Earth; technospheric energetic infrastructures, (solar energy) trade and economic policies entraining productivist agri-cultures, mono-cultures and necro-cultures fomenting revolts and revolting fermentations and full-scale wars. Metabolic integrity, privilege and awareness return to the fore, in particular, when the environments and beings doing all this exchanging start to, rather radically and quickly, change. Anthropogenic transformations of climates and ecosystems force us all, increasingly, to become metabolically aware.
If media are about representation, connectivity and relationships, this special issue of the HUB - Journal of Research in Arte, Design and Society is dedicated to the intimacies, interfaces and connections that can be made with our metabolic condition.