Climate Sensitivities: Aesthetics and Politics of Heat

• Symposium
• 29-30 October 2026
• Leuphana University of Lüneburg
• Centre for Digital Cultures
• Libeskind building, C40.501

In a warming world, the politics and aesthetics of thermal control have become unavoidable. How is heat perceived, mediated, and governed? The symposium “Climate Sensitivities: Aesthetics and Politics of Heat” approaches heat not as a mere physical fact but as a media-cultural phenomenon: an object of thermal mediation and a politically contested resource. Bringing together perspectives from sound studies, visual studies, and the broader environmental humanities, the symposium asks what becomes perceptible when we attend to thermoception alongside seeing and hearing, from infrared imaging and satellite data to the acoustics of overheating data centres and the uneven distribution of heat in the city. Drawing on Nicole Starosielski’s notion of thermopower, the symposium examines how regimes of temperature management organise bodies and environments, expanding zones of thermal privilege and thermal harm. It tracks how air conditioning has shifted from a luxury to a sociotechnical system on which we increasingly depend and how thresholds of survivability and liveability reframe what counts as a habitable place. From a climate-justice perspective, it asks how thermal comfort might be reimagined as part of the commons rather than a private privilege.

Building on two workshops held at Leuphana within the research focus Climate Futures in Digital Cultures, the symposium consolidates an emerging conversation on thermocultures and thermal politics and, for the first time in the German-language academic context, establishes a shared framework for the media-ecological study of heat.

Keynote: Nicole Starosielski

Lectures by Stefan Höhne, Lana Uzarashvili, Laliv Melamed, Daniel Wolter, Su Yu Hsin, Ignacio Farias, Noa Levin, Kent Chan, Amelie Buchinger, Kathrin Köppert, Florian Sprenger, Benjamin Sprick & Katharina Alsen, Paul Heinicker & Merle Ibach & Patrick Salz 

Detailed Programme:

Thursday, 29 October 2026

10 a.m.
Welcome 

10:30 a.m.–11:30 a.m. – HISTORIES OF CLIMATE CONTROL
Stefan Höhne (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen), “Surviving Comfort – Imagined Futures of the Cryosphere”

Lana Uzarashvili (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), “Creating Heat in an Icebound Empire: Soviet Technologies for Artificial Climates and Mediated Landscapes.”

11:30 a.m.–11:45 a.m. Coffee Break

11:45-13:00 – SENSING HEAT: TRANSMISSION AND REFLECTION Laliv Melamed (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), “Towards Penetrative Aesthetics: The Subsoil and the Logistics of Audio-Visuality”

Daniel Wolter (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), “Heating Trees and Cooling Samples: Environmental Sensing as Thermo-Spatial Practices” 

13 p.m.–14 p.m. Lunch

14 p.m.–15:15 p.m. – SILICON AND SUNLIGHT
Su Yu Hsin (Artist, Berlin/Taipei), “Contested Heat: Solar Cell, Integrated Circuit, and Post-Extractive Futures” 

15:15 p.m.–15:45 p.m. Coffee Break

15:45 p.m.–17:00 p.m. – URBAN HEAT
Ignacio Farias (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), “Elemental Urbanism: Wind, Water, and the City as a Critical Zone”

Noa Levin (Università della svizzera italiana), “Thermal Communities and a Network of Warmth”

17 p.m.–17:30 p.m. Snacks

17:30 p.m. –INFRASTRUCTURE IMAGINARIES
Keynote Nicole Starosielski (UC Berkeley / University of California, Berkeley), “Undergrounding the Cloud: Subsurface Heat and the Geothermal “Gold Rush”” 

Friday, 30 October 2026

10 a.m.–11 a.m. – SOLAR MEDIA
Kent Chan (Artist, Amsterdam/Singapur), “Casting Weather“

Amelie Buchinger (Akademie der Bildenden Künste München), “Casting Weather and the Techno-Mythologies of Remediating Solar Futures”

11 a.m.–11:15 a.m. Coffee Break

11:15 a.m.–12:45 a.m. – BIOPOLITICS
Kathrin Köppert (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), “Sweatbox AI. Thermal Violence and Metabolic Media Aesthetics of Heat”

Florian Sprenger (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), “Calibrating Bodies to Heat: The Biopolitics of Thermal Comfort Standards”

12:45 p.m.–13:45 p.m. Lunch

13:45 p.m.–15:15 p.m. – SENSING AND FEELING - ECO-INTIMACIES
Benjamin Sprick & Katharina Alsen (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg), “Gonna Make You Sweat. Towards Thermoceptive Theatre Studies”

Paul Heinicker (Fachhochschule Potsdam) & Merle Ibach (Hochschule der Künste Bern) & Patrick Salz (Design engineer and musician, Basel) – Sensing Gaia research collaboration, “How does heat diagram? Planetary Diagrams Beyond the Visual”

15:30 p.m. Final Remarks

The symposium Climate Sensitivities is organised by the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University and contributes to the key subject area ‘Climate Futures in Digital Cultures’ as part of the ‘Embracing Transformation’ research programme. For further information and the programme, please visit the symposium website.

Conceived by Maren Haffke and Vera Tollmann, Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC), Leuphana University. 

With organisational support from Malin Hocke.

Please email to malin.hocke@stud.leuphana.de if you would like to register for the symposium.