12. Synthetic World, Part 1 & 2

Summary:

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Images:

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Slide 1: The Anthropocene arrives as human beings began to radically transform nature into "humanly designed worlds".
Slide 2: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, a very different wanderer from Bosch's Wayfarer.

Slide 3: This timeline of human invention indicates how transformative and disruptive innovations are. The control of fire for cooking approximately 2 million years ago, resulted in smaller stomachs, the invention of agriculture 9,000 years ago, and the industrial use of coal 200 years ago, each changed food production; each produced outcomes that could not be anticipated at the outset.

Slide 4: The new uses of fossil fuels (energy stored away from 300 MYA led to the steam pump, new forms of transportation, and synthetic dies and lethal gasses, mechanized agriculture and wepons, and eventually, dynamos and the production of electricity.

Slide 4: The same principles of difference (hot-cold, high-low pressure, moist-dry air, etc. that produce the form of a tornado are at work in a steam engine, only now controlled to produce "work."

Slide 5: Ferdinand Runge was a German analytical chemist. He discovered the first coal tar dye (aniline blue). Coal tar products include paper chromatography, pyrrole, chinoline, phenol, thymol and atropine. He was the first to notice in 1855 the phenomenon of "Liesegang rings," which resulted in synthetic dies and pigments, and lethal gasses.

Slide 6:The first law of Thermodynamics says that energy is not lost it is conserved, it can change from one type of energy to another. 

Slide 7: The waste product of making coke for steel production, coal tars were the basis for color fast ("better than nature") dies in Germany, that enhanced textile production in Britain, which involved the slave trade to America, which produced cotton to be made in to fashions, which resulted in a new industry, the fashion industry. Industrialization generated a global system linking color, textiles, slaves, and fashion.

Slide 8: Women and Men's fashions promoted the use of copious amounts of fabric, which was good for business.

Slide 9: An early package of die.

Slide 10: Steel making was transformative.

Slide 11: The Industrial Revolution was global has produced a wide-range of disruptions that have radically changed our social environment (from how we fight wars to how we communicate), which continues to impact and disrupt the planet's ecology in unpredictable ways.

Slide 12: Manet, the Railway, 1873. An image of the world to come.

Slide 13: Manet, A disruption of the order of our "creative universe,"was transforming how we relate to each other.