Stefan Helmreich

Duke University Press · 2023

In this book, Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, he details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves' materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal.

HKW · 2022

"What is life?" is a question that has haunted the life sciences since Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Gottfried Treviranus independently coined the word "biology" in 1802. The query has titled scores of texts, with Erwin Schrödinger's 1944 book and Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's 1995 volume only the most prominent. In this inventive art-and-science book, the editors curate and comment upon a collection of first pages of publications from 1829-2021 entitled "What Is Life?"