The Atlas of Petromodernity is many things in one: historical and geographical non-fiction, cultural theory essay, and picture book. In forty-four short essays, inspired by an equal amount of pictorial findings, it develops a technical, geographical, political, and speculative panorama of the declining era of petroleum modernity.
We stroll through Baku, Rotterdam, and Louisiana, into Manchuria and through the Vienna Basin. We read Bertolt Brecht and technical manuals, as well as petroculture theory, and listen to Neil Young. We go to the moon, through refineries and over highways emptied by the COVID-19 pandemic. We confront petrochemistry with petromelancholy, catalysis with catharsis, cosmos with cosmetics. This book tackles the ambivalences of a substance that has been vital for our epoch in all its contradictions, and whose roles and meanings need to be understood in order to be able to leave this epoch behind.
About the Authors
Alexander Klose works as a cultural researcher, curator, and publicist, and lives in Berlin. Since his university years at Hannover and Berlin, he has been walking the line between cultural research, philosophical, and media-theoretical analysis, and artistic and curatorial practice. He published The Container Principle (MIT Press, 2015) and curated, among others, On Becoming Earthlings: Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge #18 (Musée de L’Homme, Paris, 2015), Precognitioning Post-Oil NYC (1014 New York, 2021), and Mein Schatz/My Precious (Oberwiederstedt, Germany, 2023).
Benjamin Steininger is a cultural and media theorist, historian of science and technology, and curator in Berlin (Germany) and Vienna (Austria). He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Cluster of Excellence UniSysCat at TU-Berlinand at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin. He published Raum-Maschine Reichsautobahn: Zur Dynamik eines bekannt/unbekannten Bauwerks (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2nd ed., 2021). From 2012 to 2016 he initiated and led a participatory research and collection project on 100 years of oil and gas industry in the Vienna basin and from 2012 to 2022 he was a regular contributor to the “Anthropocene Project” at the HKW Berlin.
In 2017, Klose and Steininger founded the collective Beauty of Oil to explore the complexities and contradictions of petromodernity and to conceptualize a Critique of Fossil Reason.
