About the Book

“The Atlas of Petromodernity offers us the chance to be a flaneur within its distinctively curated and therefore somewhat realistic world. Enter at your own risk, with the affinity for risk that may well define you, even still.” – Stephanie LeMenager

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, Klose and Steininger develop a technical, geographical, political, and speculative panorama of the declining era of petroleum modernity.

The authors stroll through Baku, Rotterdam, and Louisiana, into Manchuria and through the Vienna Basin. They read Bertolt Brecht, technical manuals, and petroculture theory, and they listen to Neil Young. They go to the moon, through refineries and over highways emptied by the COVID-19 pandemic. They confront petrochemistry with petromelancholy, catalysis with catharsis, cosmos with cosmetics. The Atlas of Premodernity tackles the contradictory ambivalences of a substance that has been vital for our epoch, 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, philosophical, and media-theoretical analysis and artistic and curatorial practice. He published The Container Principle (MIT, 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 a curator working in Berlin (Germany) and Vienna (Austria). He is a postdoctoral fellow at Unifying Systems in Catalysis, a research cluster at Technische Universität Berlin and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He published Raum-Maschine Reichsautobahn: Zur Dynamik eines bekannt/unbekannten Bauwerks (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021), and 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. From 2012 to 2022 he was a regular contributor to the “Anthropocene Project” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 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.

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