An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in collaboration with the fundamental
In the 150 years since its construction by the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements has become both a ubiquitous and iconic expression of scientific thought. In its tidy arrangement of substances, identities, atomic weights, and other properties, it illustrates the project at the heart of the chemical sciences: to understand the universal structures that define life’s elementary matter. As Michelle Murphy has argued, this same “functionalist bent” leads to the problematic governance of chemicals as discrete entities, obscuring the complexity and inequity of our respective entanglements with toxicity and its infrastructures. In this talk, I present a series of experiments that revisits the Periodic Table and its promise to make “the elemental” knowable. Titled An Anthropogenic Table of Elements, these experiments were developed in collaboration with fellow ECR colleagues, Timothy Neale (Deakin University) and Courtney Addison (Victoria University of Wellington), and have taken the form of a curated collection of online essays, a parlour game, a visualisation tool, and most recently, an edited book collection. In each iteration we asked scholars, artists, activists, and others to take an ironic stance towards the functionalism and naturalism of the chemical sciences by inviting them to nominate materials, beings, forces, and other entities which they considered elemental to our present anthropogenic moment.
I begin with a brief overview of the Anthropogenic Table of Elements project before introducing some of the stories and elements we have collected over its various iterations. Some authors have nominated “traditional” elements (e.g. carbon, lithium, strontium), tracing how they have moved and morphed across time and place, revealing their complicity in anything-but-natural circuits of power. Some have applied the label of the elemental to different entities entirely (e.g. sperm, cement, testosterone), making the case that objects that may seem ancillary are actually also the germ of other politics and material realities. I will then end with a short reading from the edited book collection of my own nominated entity, speculative element I call “the elements-to-come.”
Thao Phan is a Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making and Society and the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. She is a feminist technoscience researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She has researched and published on topics including: the aesthetics of digital voice assistants like Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home; ideologies of ‘post-race’ in algorithmic culture; and AI in popular culture. She is also the founder and convenor of the Australasian STS Grad Network (AusSTS).