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Nonorganic Life: Encounters Between Frequency And Virtuality In Antarctica, Su Ballard
Nonorganic Life: Encounters Between Frequency And Virtuality In Antarctica, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
This paper is not about Antarctica at all. In many imaginaries Antarctica exists as a virtualized yet real utopia. It is a place known through material productions that oscillate between the fictional and the scientific. The discovery of the Don Juan Pond lead scientists towards life formed by brine-derived nitrates (a kind of molecular self-organization by non-carbon sources) and onwards to the possibility of life on Mars. If it is autonomous, can reproduce and evolve, it must be life, mustn’t it? Amidst complex computational models, nonorganic matter is not static; it changes and tying it to either nature or culture …
Nonorganic Life: Frequency, Virtuality And The Sublime In Antarctica, Su Ballard
Nonorganic Life: Frequency, Virtuality And The Sublime In Antarctica, Su Ballard
Su Ballard
How do we understand what it means to live on a planet? First, we might examine the qualities of a planet: spherical, rotating around an axis, revolving around a star (in the case of our Earth, the sun). Perceived according to these properties, it becomes clear that certain locations on the surface of this sphere are subject to different conditions of life. For example, due to the rotation of the Earth, most locations on its surface are subject to a 24-hour cycle of light and dark. However, two places, the axis points of the Earth's rotation, experience a vastly different …