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MOBY DICK

melville’s environmental vision The book portrays a sailor who attempts to hunt and kill a white whale in an act of revenge because the whale destroyed his boat and attacked him in a previous encounter. The sailor’s motivation is the belief that the animal attacked him with malicious intent. However, Melville reflects that revenge is a malign act against an animal that only tried to defend itself when it felt it was in danger. This poses the question: when nature hurts man, should man ‘fight back’?

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The Mediterranean nearly dried up.

A cataclysmic flood revived it.

NEW EVIDENCE REIGNITES A LONGSTANDING DEBATE ABOUT HOW THE SEA RECONNECTED WITH THE OCEAN

The Mediterranean Sea’s only connection to the world’s oceans is through a narrow strip of water between Europe and Africa known as the Strait of Gibraltar, as shown here in a image taken from the International Space Station.

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Known as ‘The Ship Beautiful’, Cunard Line’s ‘Aquitania’

(1914 – 1950) was considered one of the most

elegant ocean liners of the time when it set sail in 1914. This image features a beautifully illustrated cross-section view of the ship’s interior.

Ocean liners were strictly organised spaces which reflected social hierarchies. The Aquitania provided

accommodation for 3,230 passengers: with 618 in firstclass, 614 in second-class, and 1,998 in third-class, as well as a crew of 972. First-class passengers occupied the upper, most-spacious areas, while engineers laboured in the boiler room deep down in the hull.

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Floating concrete houses proposed for areas at risk from rising sea levels

British architecture studio Grimshaw and Dutch manufacturers Concrete Valley are developing Modular Water Dwellings that could be built in places at risk from climate change. The floating houses would mitigate the risk of living in places that could be flooded as rising temperatures melting the ice caps. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sea levels could rise as much as 1.10m by the year 2100.

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No one has ever observed a fact, a theory or a machine that could survive outside of the networks that gave birth to them.

BRUNO LATOUR

But what features were necessary in order for objects to perform as “context producers” and long-distance control devices?

Latour identifies three of them: mobility, stability and combinability. The attribute of mobility is related to the object’s capacity to move ... and thus to weave a unity via the articulation of its movement. The attribute of stability refers to the network of relations that define the object and its capacity to perform. As Law suggests, and as Fuller seemed to have already known, “network” and “regional” spatialities are not, on their own, a given. They are mutually dependent; they shape each other. If it’s true that the objects forming a network are “contained”... then it is also true that it would be difficult to define Euclidean space without referring to the syntactical networks and the material practices that make its definition “stable”.

The last attribute Latour cites is combinability, and it refers to the definition of standards for the translation of reality, so that an accumulation of knowledge becomes possible by working at different degrees of abstraction. (AN EXCERPT FROM CONTEXTS IN EXPANSION BY PIETRO PEZZANI)

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