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Mineral transformation and resource extraction generate some of the most complex environmental, social and economic problems facing humankind and the planet today. This issue of Transformations explores how scholars in creative arts, the humanities, and social sciences are contributing to the debates and politics of resource transformation and extraction. The complex socio-cultural and environmental legacies of nitrate, lithium, coal and uranium mining are examined across a range of sites in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia. Across these different sites and modes of engagement, what emerges is a very tangible sense of the forces exerted by the activities of resource extraction upon environments [...]
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Algorithms are integral to a digital, networked, automated society. Thrown into the public spotlight by a certain high profile search engine, algorithms are increasingly recognised to exercise agency in practices such as governance, surveillance, online personalisation, medicine, design, high frequency trading, credit scoring and plagiarism. Computational machines make decisions about things, people, places and experiences, and humans learn to address algorithms. Algorithms have inhuman capacities. They do not become distracted, tired, impatient or emotional. At the same time the algorithm’s inhuman abilities can be understood as a desirable improvement on human skills. Algorithms are inhuman forces that bring social, political, [...]