Dis/connection Matters: Natural, Synthetic, and Digital

Abstract

The world is experiencing new relations and transformations between natural, synthetic, and digital substances. Rather than considering these as materially distinct or ontologically separate, this Special Issue of TSANTSA interrogates how they are interlocked in socio-material processes of mediation, transmutation, and valuation. By conceptualizing the specificity of their separateness, the special issue makes possible the comparison and commensuration of their relationship, and to move beyond their essential qualities. What are the boundaries, leakages, or dis/connections between human and digital, natural and artificial, the organic and synthetic matters? Based on ethnographic research in laboratories, gold refineries, bio-tech microbial seeds and digitally-produced natural sounds, human-machine apps and cellular agriculture, each contribution theorizes the mediation, transmutation, and valuation of natural synthetics, the humanness of artificial intelligence, or the materiality of digital elements.

Efficient and Economically Favorable Co-Free Air Electrodes for Solid Oxide Cells

“…2) (12,13). The unstable geopolitical situation of this country, state of its energy and economic infrastructure, as well as artisanal mining, including the toxicity of Co, and reported child labor are the main factors of high supply risk in the nearby future and can potentially violate the sustainable development policies (7,14). Taking into account the price of cobalt, forecasted problems with its availability, and socio-environmental issues, a decrease of Co-content or its full elimination from the components of solid oxide cells is foreseen and, as a matter of fact, will be required.…”