So Much Heat: Cooling, Humming, and Containing Climate Sensitivities
27. May
Talks by Yuriko Furuhata (McGill University, Montréal), Steven Gonzalez Monserrate (Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main), and Ann-Kathrin Petersen (Climate Analytics, Berlin)
- Tuesday, 27.05.2025, 2-6 pm
- C40.256 & Zoom
- CDC-Workshop
- Registration is not necessary. Please contact Inga Luchs (inga.luchs@leuphana.de) for more detailed information on the individual talks or Zoom access details.
How do we contain heat, cold, and noise in a warming world? Cooling systems hum and leak, pipelines are monitored by satellites for leaks, and data centres generate excess heat that remains underutilized. Urban environments are being redesigned with climate-resilient green spaces as ‘cool islands’, while digital tools – from apps to drones – help visualise and navigate temperature and noise. Yet, the transition to sustainable energy introduces new tensions, as wind turbines (low-frequency noise), heat pumps (airborne or gurgling noise), and data centres face criticism for their sound pollution.
From leaky air conditioners to under-utilisation of waste heat from inner-city data centres (the sheer volume of cooling systems), mitigation is an issue. Zoe Sofoulis calls for a shift from studying “leaky containers” to looking at more “interactive processes of containment”, while Marie-Luise Angerer’s concept of “loss control” (orig. Verlustkontrolle) highlights the increasingly uncontrollable losses in compound climate events (such as California wildfires intensified by high winds and draughts).
As cities adopt cooling strategies and digital tools map temperature and noise, tensions arise between measures and the environment. This workshop explores the problem of heat and noise containment, from thermoception to urban adaptation and quietness as part of our commons and examines how containment practices in digital cultures shape both climate resilience and disruptions in the process.
Moderation: Maren Haffke und Vera Tollmann (Leuphana University Lüneburg)
Yuriko Furuhata is Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University. She is an associate member of the Department of Art History & Communication Studies and a core faculty member of the World Cinemas Minor Program. She is currently completing a new book titled Visual Grammars of Deep Time: Archipelagic Archives of the Anthropocene (under contract at Duke University Press), which examines scientific atlases, photographs, and films of fossils, clouds, snow crystals, and coral reefs in relation to the settler colonial histories of geosciences in Japan, the Pacific, and North America.
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate is a postdoctoral researcher with the Fixing Futures research training group at Goethe University in Frankfurt. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society (HASTS) program. His book manuscript, “Cloud Ecologies”, is an ethnographic study of data centers and their environmental politics in New England, Arizona, Puerto Rico, Iceland, and Singapore. Under the byline E.G. Condé, he writes indigenous futurism and is the author of Sordidez, which received the Latino International Book Award for Best LGTBQ+ Book. His current research project is an ethnography of data storage futures from DNA to digital ‘cuneiform’.
Ann-Kathrin Petersen is a climate adaptation researcher at Climate Analytics. Ann-Kathrin works in the Adaptation and Loss and Damage group of the Science Team, based in Berlin. In her current role, she is developing sector-specific adaptation pathways to support climate-resilient decision-making within the research project SPARCCLE. She holds an M.Sc. in Geography of Environmental Risk and Human Security from the University of Bonn and the United Nations University, Germany. In her studies, she focused on adaptation pathways, natural hazards, and nature-based solutions.