Irrelevant

The tragedy of this has little to do with new technology as such, or so-called post-industrialism. It stems, it bleeds, not from the fact that science has discovered electronics, but from the fact that everything which constituted the loves of those living here is now being treated as irrelevant.

John Berger. Understanding a Photograph. Penguin Classics 2013.

Searching for scoria

 

 

Calthemite

Anthropocene Flowstone

Matterlurgy Geofictions – MIMA

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The group Matterlurgy led workshops in which their members and participants collected artefacts – from stones to discarded plastic items – in South Gare, the site of the now-closed Teesside steelworks in Redcar. This exhibition features those objects, which are part of a future fossil record, and suggest a geological stratum in which nature and technology are combined

http://www.visitmima.com/whats-on/single/matterlurgy-geofictions/

Adventures in the Anthropocene

One ton of iron produces one ton of slag

Towards the end of the 19th Century the furnaces of Cleveland were producing 2.5 million tons of pig iron a year.

scoriaˈskɔːrɪə

noun

noun: scoria; plural noun: scoriae

1. basaltic lava ejected as fragments from a volcano, typically with a frothy texture.

   “chunks of black scoria”
2. slag separated from molten metal during smelting.

   Origin -Late Middle English (denoting slag from molten metal): via Latin from Greek skōria ‘refuse’, from skōr‘dung’. The geological term dates from the late 18th century.