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I thought these were so incredibly cool. Pottery made from toxic/carcinogenic clay. The size of each vessel corresponds to the amount of toxic materials involved in the production of various consumer electronics such as a laptop or smartphone.

#rare earthenware #rare earth metals #kate davies #liam young #kevin callaghan #unknown fields #toxic waste #commentary on society via pottery!!!#cooper hewitt

Welcome to the Terrordome

The authors write:

Exhibit 2 is the chart the solar industry has been working towards for 60 years. Solar is now – in the right conditions – cheaper than oil and Asian LNG on an MMBTU basis. Yes, we are using utility- scale solar costs in developing markets with lots of sun. But that describes the growth markets for global energy today. For these markets solar is just cheap, clean, convenient, reliable energy. And since it is a technology, it will get even cheaper over time. Fossil fuel extraction costs will keep rising. There is a massive global market for cheap energy and that market is oblivious to policy changes at the NDRC, MITI, the EU or the CPUC.

(via Solar Price Terrordome Chart - Business Insider)

This graph has the best name!

But solar costs have fallen further in the last 5 years since this graph was created. As have the costs of batteries and both will continue to do so.

Here are two short videos from Ramez Naam on the The Future of Energy at Singularity University last year:

The Price of Solar Power Will Continue to Fall | The Future of Energy

(via The Price of Solar Power Will Continue to Fall | The Future of Energy | Singularity University)

The Price of Batteries Will Keep Dropping | The Future of Energy

(via The Price of Batteries Will Keep Dropping | The Future of Energy | Singularity University)

We must remember however the impact that these important battery technologies will have on the environment, people and cultures:

SUMMER 2015_LITHIUM DREAMS

Unknown Fields travel through the energy landscapes of the Bolivian Salt Lakes and the Atacama Desert to see where the city stores its electricity. Here the ground is charged with potential, for buried beneath the mirror of the world’s largest salt flat, the Salar De Uyuni, is a grey gold called lithium, the key ingredient in batteries, a substance in every one of our pockets, in every gleaming device, and every electric car. With their flock of camera drones Unknown Fields have captured the technicolor lithium mine evaporation pools as they stretch across the ancient salt flats. This grey rush territory is also a landscape of Incan mythology and sacred mountains, where a traditional indigenous narrative describes this shimmering white expanse being created from the mixing of the tears and breast milk of a weeping mother volcano who has just lost her lover.

(via SUMMER 2015_LITHIUM DREAMS | UNKNOWN FIELDS)

This is the Salar De Uyuni...

Salar De Uyuni Salt Flat

(via Salar De Uyuni, Bolivia’s Blissfully Beautiful Salt Flat, Is Our Travel Tuesday | Huffington Post)

It is also home to the Salar de Uyuni mine.....

Salar de Uyuni mine

one of the largest lithium mines in Bolivia.[1] The mine is located in southern Bolivia in Potosí Department.[1] The Salar de Olaroz mine has reserves amounting to 3 billion tonnes of lithium ore grading 0.3% lithium thus resulting 9 million tonnes of lithium.[1]

(via Salar de Uyuni mine | Wikipedia)

and looks a bit like this:

LIithium Evaporative Pools

(via LIithium Evaporative Pools | liam young)

I guess the solarpunk question i have is:

Give the above damage to our environment, do we instead get it from space?

#lithium #mining #asteroid #mine #space #space x #bolivia #native peoples #solar energy #solar power #battery #power #batteries #unknown fields #Salar de Uyuni #Ramez Naam #charts #sps!

Unknown Fields Division Rare Earthenware

Electronics manufacturing and supply chain visualizations.

#Unknown Fields #electronics #manufacturing #design #radioactive #china #supply chain

2 days aboard the Gunhilde Maersk © Toby Smith/Unknown Fields

#Unknown Fields #global shipping #container ship #time lapse

Scroll down for a short description of Off Grid - Laser Telecommunications Infrastructure.

#critical engineering #unknown fields

Unknown Fields

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design research studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These distant landscapes - the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine, are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives. In such a landscape of interwoven narratives, the studio uses film and animation to chronicle this network of hidden stories and re-imagine the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures.

Here we are both visionaries and reporters, part documentarians and part science fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.

Previous expeditions include; The Texaco oil fields of the Ecuadorian Amazon; the Galapagos Islands; Area 51 and other US military outposts; A Container Ship across the South China Sea; Madagascar’s ‘wild west’ sapphire pits, The frozen Arctic sea ice, far north Alaska; The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine; Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the gold fields of the Western Australian outback and Rare earth mining in Bayan Obo, Inner Mongolia.

The Unknown Fields Division is directed by Liam Young and Kate Davies

Summer Expedition application

#Unknown Fields #liam young #speculative futures