Event
SG - After Comfort and Learning To Go Extinct
Are we conditioned by air conditioning? And how do we go extinct in a good way? Join tonight’s talk show with philosopher Lisa Doeland and architecture historian Daniel A. Barber and find out!
About After Comfort and Learning To Go Extinct
People are strange. Knowing that their energy consumption is a destroyer of worlds, they are unwilling to give up the comforts that come with technological civilisation. We are conditioned by air conditioning, Daniel A. Barber argues. Tonight, we talk about the importance of discomfort when living at the end of the world. What role do architects and designers have in this?
And why should we bother about discomfort when we’re already on the edge of extinction? With Lisa Doeland we talk about the difference between ‘simply’ dying and going extinct, and especially: how to go extinct in a good way? For in the end, learning to go extinct is an ethical question; an impossible question, but at the same time the most important one when facing an apocalypse.
About series The Talk Show at the End of the World
What better way to start the academic year than with the end of the world! We live in times of turmoil; catastrophic climate change, the collapse of human civilisations, and the threat of nuclear annihilation are but a few omens of an apocalypse. But the end of the world is notoriously difficult to wrap your head around - until it happens of course. But then it’s already too late. Join The Talk Show at the End of the World and find (dis)comfort in the talks we’ll be having with a wide variety of guests.
About Lisa Doeland
Lisa Doeland (1982) is a philosopher. She lectures at both Erasmus University and the University of Amsterdam in ethics and in contemporary issues, such as ecology, green ideology, the climate crisis, the Anthropocene and the Apocalypse. In her PhD research she explores the myriad ways in which we are haunted by these things we (call) waste. Drawing on the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan she traces the “spectre of waste” and sketches a hauntology of waste, that forces us to rethink being (ontology) – to be is to haunt and be haunted – and allows us to critically reflect on (eco)modern myths and fantasies, such as recycling without remainders within a circular economy. She is the author of 'Onszelf voorbij. Kijken naar wat we liever niet zien' (2018) and 'Apocalypsofie. Over recycling, groene groei en andere gevaarlijke fantasieën' (2023).
About Daniel A. Barber
Daniel A. Barber is Professor and Chair of Architecture History and Theory at the Technical University of Eindhoven.
His most recent book is Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton, 2020), following A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (Oxford, 2016); his article “After Comfort” (Log 47, 2019) has been translated into four languages and is the basis for the co-edited series “After Comfort: A User’s Guide” on e-flux architecture, which publishes texts, projects and experiments focused on how we will live indoors without fossil fuels. Daniel earned a PhD from Columbia University, and has held fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University, and through the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research on architecture, comfort and sufficiency has been supported by a fellowship at the Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the Universität Heidelberg, the British Academy, and the Guggenheim Foundation.