Atlas of Material Worlds Mapping the Agency of Matter for a New Landscape Practice

1. Uranium. Big Bangs: Metal as Metaphor.

Denise Hoffman-Brandt

2. Lithium. Tracing the Green Energy Paradox across Battery, Body, Landscape, and Cosmos.

Matthew Seibert

 3. Crude. The Bakken Fossil Fuel Frontier.

Collen Tuite and Ian Quate

4. Clay. Spies in the Making: Imperial Oil Economies and the Geographies of Mediterranean Food

Kristi Cheramie

5. Sand. 825 Miles: or, How to Make a Beach

Rob Holmes

6. Mud. And Its Meaning in a Port Town

7. Metabolite. Material as Physical History of a Relationship.

Biography

Matthew Seibert is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia and former co-founder of Landscape Metrics, a visualization studio that specialized in data and design. Beyond his present studies in the agency of nonliving materials, his work employs representation as interrogative and speculative tools, from the employment of game engines as new model systems to study the experience of place, to the intervention within historical trajectories by crafting rich parafictions as both critique and potential future.

“Matthew Seibert’s An Atlas of Material Worlds reorients us by asking us to consider the earth from the perspective of seven materials—uranium, lithium, clay, crude oil, sand, mud, and metabolite—seven nonhuman protagonists whose fascinating stories take us far from home and deep into our own bodies. Through radical cartography, image, and text, Seibert and his fellow landscape architects map out alternative, non-utilitarian, non-anthropocentric ways of thinking and being in our world, that, if we take this new materialist sensibility seriously, may just lead us away from the brink of climate catastrophe.”

Susan Barba, author of geode

"Atlas of Material Worlds delves into the earth’s lithosphere, presenting a series of mineral narratives that animate the so-called inanimate world. Matthew Seibert’s expertly edited and illustrated volume challenges the capitalist extraction enterprise by mapping the very agency of elemental minerals, moving seamlessly across scales from the microscopic to the cosmic. Much like Alexander von Humboldt’s 1845 Kosmos, the atlas seeks to radically redefine relationships between the biosphere and the geosphere, while asserting that we humans are inseparably, fluidly entangled with the vibrant matter of our planet. This timely volume repositions elemental materials as dynamic agents of power, and calls for new materialist assemblages to address our crises of climate, health, and inequity."

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, City College of New York

"This beautiful and insightful collection stretches the idea of the atlas to offer a meditation on the material elements with which we are historically entangled. Just listen to the names of the chapters—uranium, lithium, clay, crude, sand, mud, metabolite—to hear the resonance of industrial worlds in motion. Through a fantastic array of images, maps, and words, the atlas offers stories that need to be told."

Anna Tsing, co-editor of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene

"Seeking to provoke a new worldview through the lenses of politics, philosophy, and science, this edited volume brings together essays about common materials—uranium, lithium, crude oil, clay, sand, mud, and metabolites recovered from environmental cleanup—that provide a springboard for authors to question the animate/inanimate dichotomy. The essays, extensively documented and each with its own bibliography, provide a powerful challenge to readers to reconsider their relationships to the world they inhabit and with which they interact."

M. Nilsen, Provessor Emerita, Indiana University South Bend