fields

Space Debris to House Keys

Part 2 of catching up with the weeks of activity in Melbourne through February.

From Space Debris to House Keys: Reflections from RMIT’s Australian Posthuman Summer Laboratory 2025…

The 2025 Summer Lab is all over, but the conversations and activity continue into this week with the launch of the Planetary Civics Inquiry https://lnkd.in/gZ_FWxrm . Rewinding to the opening of the Summer Lab underlines many ideas that help to position RMIT with PCI. Wendy Steele opened with a keynote that recovered (amongst many things) N.K. Jemisin proposition that “cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like . . . like black holes, maybe.” She described them as tears in the fabric of reality that widen as people “deposit their strangeness”.

Strangeness was extended as Rosi Braidotti and N’arweet Professor Carolyn Briggs began their conversation with an image of Earth but not of the romanticised “blue marble” view, but of the Earth surrounded by the cloud of technological debris – over 2 million pieces of defunct satellites and space waste. Even the moon, she noted, already holds 200 tons of human-made debris: our “lunar Anthropocene” has begun before we’ve even settled there. N’arweet Professor Briggs responded with: “What’s in the heavens is reflected on Earth.” An indigenous understanding that asks us to consider how our actions above mirror our relationships below, challenging us to think differently about our technological and ecological entanglements.

My contribution to the Summer Lab was through the Circular Economy session, and I found myself revisiting work that Chris Elsden and I had developed through software to explore the representation of personal values – our key rings. Being in person at hashtag#testinggrounds allowed me to ask participants to reflect on their key rings as representations of a suite of their human centred services: home, transport, health facilities, workplaces. But what if we decentered the human in this everyday technology? What would our keyrings look like if they prioritised more-than-human relationships? What “keys” would we need to access understanding of country, of other species, of planetary systems?

The next step involved handing out keys for participants to attach to their keyrings to represent whatever kin they would like to be bound to.

Note image of two peoples keyrings bound together after swapping access to each others homes

As Braidotti reminded us, we’re caught in a pattern of “pessimistic computational optimism” – acknowledging problems while assuming more computing power will manage them, even as that computation contributes to the crisis it claims to solve. Perhaps it’s time to look for different kinds of keys.
Deep gratitude to Fiona Hillary and Troy Innocent for curating these vital conversations at RMIT College of Design and Social Context.

hashtag#PosthumanStudies hashtag#IndigenousKnowledge hashtag#SystemicChange hashtag#RMIT hashtag#MoreThanHuman