Contributors
Kan Likanl000725@gmail.com Kan Li is the co-founder of Metamorphic Zone, as well as a designer and researcher currently pursuing a master's degree at the Architectural Association in London. He has previously worked as an editor and engaged in architectural practice in China. His work explores the intersection of cosmotechnics and architecture within the emerging new climate regime.
Haoge Gan
ganbage@gmail.com

Haoge (Steven) Gan is the co-founder of Metamorphic Zone. He is also a designer, writer, and researcher working across individual, collaborative, and institutional frameworks in Europe and Asia. He earned his Master of Architecture from Columbia GSAPP in 2024. His work traces the intersections of cosmology, technology, and more-than-human agencies, investigating modes of existence within the Anthropocene.
Dr. Catherine Russell
catherine.russell@fulbrightmail.org


Dr. Catherine Russell is a geoscientist at Loughborough University and Louisiana State University, specializing in the impacts of human activity on Earth's surface processes. In 2020, Dr. Russell established the Anthropocene Sediment Network to aid with the interdisciplinary understandings required for a new sub-discipline of geology in "Anthropocene Sedimentary Environments". She went on to be awarded a UK-US Fulbright-Lloyd’s of London Visiting Scholarship in 2022, during which she researched pollutant accumulation in fluvial pathways. In 2023, she received the Roland Goldring Award from the British Sedimentary Research Group for her significant contribution to sedimentology.
Shuhang Cao
sh.cao06@gmail.com


 Shuhang (Clarice) Cao is a researcher and designer pursuing her master’s degree at the Architectural Association in London. Her work focuses on energy and earth transformation in the Anthropocene. As an avid climber and trail runner, she incorporates her experiences and expeditions in mountainous regions with her projects.
Lucia Rebolino
luciarebolino@gmail.com


Lucia Rebolino is an architect and research-based computational designer, currently working as a researcher at Forensic Architecture in London and as a teaching associate at Columbia University GSAPP. She conceives her practice as a space where different branches of science and design can conceptualize, critique, visualize, and provoke new counter-cartography aesthetics. Lucia has also worked at the Center for Spatial Research in New York, exploring investigative projects through data visualization. She has lectured at design schools, including Delft University of Technology, Architectural Association, Columbia GSAPP, and the Politecnico di Milano and Torino. Her writing has appeared in publications such as e-flux Architecture, ETH Delus, and Routledge. She holds a master of architecture from the Politecnico di Torino and a master of science in Computational Design Practices from Columbia University, where she received an award for innovative use of computing media in design research. 
Kristiina Koskentola
kkoskentola@gmail.com


 Kristiina Koskentola is a transdisciplinary artist, PhD. Koskentola's recent work explores processes of knowledge production, polyvocal subjectivity and the agency of multiple co-actors (human and beyond) often through intersecting material and spiritual ecologies as well as socio- and ecopolitics. Transcultural and monistic worldviews, coexistence, and human relationships with our co-beings and environments are at the core of her practice. For Koskentola, collaborative and embodied processes across epistemologies are important form of reflection. They are a tool for mediating, speculating and imagining decentered, more-than-human and dialogic perspectives among the complexities of entanglements, fragilities, and human failure unfolding between immediate, global, and cosmic processes.
Sheer Gritzerstein
gritzerstein@aaschool.ac.uk


 Sheer Gritzerstein is an architectural designer, researcher and educator. Prior to completing her BArch and MArch from the Architectural Association, she worked as a geographical intelligence researcher and educational sailing coordinator. Her work focuses on navigation practices as well as on the architecture and politics of comfort in the Anthropocene.
Kunlin He
kunnlinhe@gmail.com


 Born 1992 in Nanchang, China, Kunlin He currently lives in San Francisco Chinatown, CA. His practice focuses on the production of East Asian cultural knowledge and theories as well as the relationship between migrant literature, modernist studies, pre-modern intellectual legacy, historical criticism and criticism of technology, exploring these topics through his work of painting and writing with various media. Kunlin obtained an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2016 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018. His work has been included in exhibitions at Power Station of Art (2022) Metropolitan Museum of Manila (2022), the National Taiwan Museum of Fines Art (2021), The Drawing Center (2018, 2019), Headlands Center for the Art (2017), Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (2016), among others. He has been selected as the finalist for the 2019 SFMOMA SECA Award, and 2020 Pollock Krasner Foundation Award.




Note Resurrection from the Solar Time

Throughout history, humans have developed various devices and principles to understand, monitor, and even regulate the sun. Sundials, employed for over two millennia, serve as a prime example of how humanity has harnessed the star's movements to manage time and calendars, embedding it into social constructs...



Term Agency

Traditionally understood as the capacity of human actors to act and influence their surroundings, agency has long been regarded as an exclusively human quality—a form of power distinct to human autonomy. "Modern humans" have historically obscured this multiple forms of agencies by maintaining the binary opposition of Nature/Culture, entrenching object/subject distinctions...



Term Anthropocene

The Anthropocene, as a debatable geological epoch, was first proposed by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000. Crutzen argued that the Earth System had undergone irreversible mutations, entering a state where the current epoch Holocene was no longer appropriate...

Term Blackboxing

Blackboxing refers to the process by which objects, scientific constructions or technical works become opaque and obscure due to their own success. When an entity stabilizes, a machine runs efficiently, or a matter of fact is settled, it becomes a "black box"—where focus shifts only to its inputs and outputs, while the complexity within is hidden from view...




Term Composing

In contrast to the ideas of a linear, inevitable flow of time toward universal “progress” in modernity, composition suggests an approach leans towards diverse prospects rather than a singular, unified future. Derived from the Latin componere, “to compose” emphasises putting thing together with care while preserving their heterogeneity...


Term Great Acceleration

In 2019, Jan Zalasiewicz, building on the work of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), modified the group's logo based on a calculated pattern developed by AWG scientist Clément Poirier. The pattern features an almost-horizontal line that abruptly transitions into a near-vertical rise on its right-hand end, indicating the unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere from the earth/ocean system over the past 15,000 years...



Term Institution

Science studies pay close attention to the institutions that facilitate the construction of facts. Traditionally, institutions were seen as stable and autonomous, functioning on the objective nature independently from subjective society and human interactions. However, institutions are dynamic processes, shaped through ongoing mediation and negotiation between a variety of actors...



Term Metamorphosing

Metamorphosis borrows from the term's roots in biology and geology, elaborated into a inherent property of the world itself. While in biology, metamorphosis describes an abrupt change in an animal's body structure through cell growth and differentiation, and in geology (as metamorphism) it refers to the transformation of rock formations due to extreme heat or pressure, this idea applies more broadly to encompass all agents and their subsistence within the world...




Term Network

Unlike the technical sense of network we perceived from infrastructures like: Internet, sewage, subway or telephone lines, networks are dynamic fields where agency is distributed across all participants—human, non-human, technologies, and the active milieu—each actor interacting, influencing, and metamorphosing one another...


Term res extensa

Mind-body, culture-nature, and res cogitans-res extensa—this set of Cartesian dualisms forms the foundation of the Modern Constitution. It separates the world into two domains: nature, governed by objective physical laws (res extensa), and culture, driven by human thought and societal acts (res cogitans). The modern notion of space is closely tied to the Scientific framework of res extensa which forces nature into blackboxing...



Term World-systems

A world-system is not the system of the world but a system that becomes a world. It operates like a matrix of mirrors, each reflecting fragments of power dynamics through a core-periphery divide that obscures the entanglements between nature, society, and knowledge. This divide is not merely geopolitical; it is epistemic, with the core shaping what is seen, understood, and valued...

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