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Infrastructures, Politics and Futures of Artificial Cooling

Cultures of the Cryosphere

The international research project CryoCultures maps and studies the far-reaching impacts of a planet fundamentally reshaped by artificial cooling.
From food to reproduction, from our smart phones to our housing, the cryosphere is the world in which we live.

Read more about our Research

Latest News

Event:Panel Discussion: Suzana Alpsancar at SICP Symposium 2025 Digitale Resilienz (Paderborn, Germany) – in German

Latest Job Openings

Technical University Darmstadt is looking for a doctoral researcher (deadline October 18th)

Workers at the L & H beef slaughterhouse in San Antonio, Texas on June 10, 2008 dissect, sort and separate beef parts. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) inspectors are on site to ensure the beef is processed in accordance with USDA FSIS regulations. (© USDA photo by Alice Welch) © USDA photo by Alice Welch
Advertisement for “Winter Air Conditioning” in the US Ladies’ Home Journal from February 1948, promising "clean filtered air - humidified for health - at just the right temperature - and circulated without any drafts." (© Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain) © Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
The IT Data Center of the Zentralstelle für maschinelle Dokumentation (ZMD) in Frankfurt Main - Niederrad 1970 (© Buonasera, Wikimedia Commons) © Buonasera, Wikimedia Commons
(© USDA photo by Lance Cheung) © USDA photo by Lance Cheung

Sites & Objects

A focus on four regions maps the historic expansion and interdependencies of the planetary cryosphere. Research is anchored within four objects of the cryosphere: beef, air conditioners, data centers, and cryolabs.

Dig deeper into our sites and key objects
Nicola Twilley gives a lecture on Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (© Anne Timm) © Anne Timm

Now available to watch! Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

Nicola Twilley, author of the award-winning book Frostbite, gave an inspiring lecture on how the technology of refrigeration developed and how it impacts our daily life.

Read more & watch
Most photographed and geotagged areas of Paris, France courtesy of the Flickr API. Mouseover to see notes. Red areas are most photographed, blue the least photographed. Circles show the position of individual locations. Because the centre of the city is much more photographed than outlying areas, I've applied a logarithmic scale for the colouring. (© Steven Kay, UK) © Steven Kay, UK

intertanglements Resources & Publication

During our six-year investigation into cultures of the cryosphere we will develop a series of open-access resources and publications.

Find out more

Team People

The project is conducted by seven teams based in leading research institutes: Technical University of Darmstadt, University of Paderborn, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) at University of Duisburg-Essen, and Australian National University Canberra, as well as University of Hamburg, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and Institute for Social-Ecological Research (ISOE).

Get to know our team
EU-Flag: Funded by the European Union | erc logo: European Research Council. Established by the European Commission

Funding

Funding The project is funded under ERC Synergy Grant Nr 101118625 (2024–2030)

ERC Website

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.