environment

Have you ever heard of radiation breeding? What is the future of food production? What are the consequences of using radioactivity to mutate plant, fruit, and vegetable species? Plant mutation breeding, also called variation breeding, is a method that uses physical radiation or chemical means to induce spontaneous genetic variation in plants to develop new crop varieties. At the end of World War II, atomic gardening began as a campaign to promote the peaceful use of fission energy. Almost 70 years later, in Japan, the Institute of Radiation Breeding boasts the trademark pie-shape of Gamma Gardens and stretches across over 300 feet. To contain spill-off radiation, a 25-foot tall wall surrounds the complex. The lab is currently breeding for fruit color and fungus resistance. But ionizing radiation damages the genetic material in reproductive cells and results in mutations that are transmitted from generation to generation, creating postnatural beings that need to be understood from new post-darwinist perspectives. This and many more complex situations will be discussed during the “New Ecologies: De-centralizing the human through contemporary art” seminar, starting October 17th. All info on our website www.instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org

What is a cloud? How are humans affecting the air, the weather, and the conditions of the skies? How can climate be designed? Who owns an artificial storm? Cloud seeding is a type of weather modification that aims to change the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds by dispersing substances into the air that serve as cloud condensation. Through the artificial creation of ice crystals, weather modification can occur. Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by flying aircraft and seeding them with silver iodide. The hypothesis was that the silver iodide would cause supercooled water in the storm to freeze, disrupting the inner structure of the hurricane, and this led to seeding several Atlantic hurricanes. However, it was later shown that this hypothesis was incorrect. It was determined that most hurricanes do not contain enough supercooled water for cloud seeding to be effective. Such experiments are problematic, as several changes of environmental legislation had to be made to enable these trials. From a postnatural perspective, weather conditions have turned into economic and political negotiations, unveiling the complexity of a new climatic environment in which the movements of storms, clouds, and air currents are modified according to specific interests. A geopolitical story of invisible particles that reshapes the way of understanding climatology. This and many more complex situations will be discussed during the “New Ecologies: De-centralizing the human through contemporary art” seminar, starting October 17th. All info on our website www.instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org