Black Masses (preface to a proposal)

With decarbonization, comes a massive rise in demand for critical minerals essential to the manufacture of digital technologies and energy infrastructures that will power a so-called greener future. This is the “new age of metal,” and instead of moving beyond the current paradigm of resource extraction it signifies a possible intensification of it, giving rise to important geopolitical, cultural, and ecological questions. Emerging within this context is Black Mass, the name given to the polymetallic substance leftover when lithium-ion batteries are recycled—a kind of material afterlife where various metals, each with its own location of origin, are reduced to an indistinguishable dark powder. Black Mass represents the optimistic promise, but also the challenges and paradoxes, of the shift away from fossil fuels: more mining but less greenhouse gases, heavy processing, and therefore waste generation, but also greater potential for recycling and a transition from linear to cyclical material lifecycles. From a century driven by oil to an era based on metal, the earth is once again being reorganized, but what kind of earth is in the making? Black Masses (preface to a proposal) comprises the first installment of research and creative works-in-progress from CRITICAL/MINERAL, a new long-term project which investigates the media, ecology, and logistics of the “new age of metal.” For the run of the exhibition, the Art and Media Lab becomes an experimental space for exploring questions provoked by this developing regime, moving through a series of configurations which inspire geographic, artistic, and collaborative forms of research and practice. Beginning with a period of open studio hours and culminating in a multidisciplinary roundtable discussion and the presentation of a new film, the lab functions as an invitation to engage with one of the most complex and urgent issues of the contemporary moment.