Tractor Education Camp, Office Tower, Educational Campus, Agricultural Field, Police Academy, Logistics Center, Post Office Packet Center. A mundane array of box-like buildings nestled along fields and cultivations. Yet, something here is different. A rather vibrant stratification not apparent to the naked eye is below ground, in sharp contrast to this lateral monotony. On June 20, 2024, a group of artists, researchers, and students is on its way to begin a day conceived as a “field symposium” on digital matter.¹ Taking the turn, on “Salinengraben” or “salt-works rift” we find the Bruchsal Geothermal Plant. There are some indications: Tanks and pipes penetrate the ground. A yellow sign spells “DANGER” and “CO₂.” Red horizontal tubes arrayed parallel to the floor. Stainless steel valves cut perpendicular to the ground. Further stations connected to plastic grey tubing. A metal container with an unused stock of neon green pipes. Upon closer inspection, piping of all shapes and sizes penetrates the floor of this facility. Scattered, a glimpse of some plastic containers with orange fluid.

INTO THE FIELD

A “field” can be many things: a natural or built physical space, a geographical or social terrain, a research area, an academic discipline, a cultural field structured, for example, by histories, power, institutions. Taking media philosophy, art, and the theory of art and architecture out of the classroom, studio, laboratory, or library, we turn to the Bruchsal Geothermal Plant as a site and situation which assembles materialities, entities, interests, and practices. As such it offers a window, an entry point, to a web of relations that extend to other sites and dimensions.

Further, the place comes with layers and traces of history. In Bruchsal and close-by Ubstadt, street and field names hint at past infrastructures of a once lucrative salt production (including architectures such as canals, graduation works, ovens), which started in the middle-ages, peaked in the eighteenth century and ended in the 1820s due to war, problems in the engineering of waterways, changing laws and taxation as well as the rise of rock salt extraction.² At the site of the geothermal plant the first exploration activities began in 1979, including geophysical and geological surveys. By 1983, the first well was drilled, reaching a final depth of 1,874 meters. In 1985, a second, deeper well followed, but alas the project temporarily closed in 1990 due to its low profit margin. Then, in the early 2000s the interest in geothermal energy returned, in 2009 the current energy plant started operating.

Field philosophy—and we propose here to include the philosophy of art and media—can be “understood as a practice that asks instructors and students to immerse themselves in the environments peculiar to their subject areas.”³ Beyond exclusively learning about, for example, the deep time of media, geontopower, or mineral and animal rights as theories in a textbook, this notion of field philosophy “situates intellectual engagement in the midst of the ‘field’ in question, thus instilling a more experiential and lived form of education.”⁴ Ideally, what is practiced on site is an exercise in not simply “submitting thought to the test of actual experience” as a singular event, but the production of a processual relationship between thought and—always mediated—experience.⁵

Other than engaging in long-termed philosophical fieldwork, however,⁶ we today meet for a symposium, a gathering, a passing moment of learning from others, making propositions, observing, formulating new questions. The symposium adds to the site a temporary forum. Different academic disciplines may turn out to be “places in which different kinds of common sense, different commonplace ideas and different systems of topics, all irreducible to each other, are [being] constructed.”⁷ The experiment to place a travelling symposium on grounds as specific as the Bruchsal Geothermal Plant gathers various disciplines around concrete objects, processes, and practices. Participants bring and posit theories, concepts, or works of art. Beyond shared interests, observations, and concerns, what emerges is the “manysidedness” (Vielseitigkeit) of reality, a “plurality of worlds,” a “plurality of logics”⁸—a plurality of ways of being.⁹

Assembled, standing around a borehole and production well descending 2,500 meters vertically into the ground, are:

LAURA HERRMANN, our host who works on site as a doctoral researcher at the energy provider Energie Baden-Württemberg AG (EnBW) and at the Institute for Applied Materials at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

FABIAN NITSCHKE, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Applied Geosciences at KIT

LARA ALMARCEGUI, artist based in Rotterdam researching through sculptural and conceptual work the materiality of the built environment and the politics of extraction

ANASTASIA KUBRAK, doctoral researcher at the critical media lab at the Basel Academy of Arts and Design FHNW and co-editor of a transdisciplinary book on the cultural histories of lithium¹⁰

The AUTHORS, COLLEAGUES, and the STUDENTS of Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG Karlsruhe), representing our university’s transdisciplinary curriculum, connecting media art and design with scenography, theory of art, and media philosophy

Let’s cut through some so-called solid-to-liquid interfaces¹¹ here in the Upper Rhine Graben. Indeed, under this floor, there is lava. The presence of lava is felt through underground hot water which it heats: Deep geothermal fluids with high saline content circulate among rock formations underground mingled with radionuclides; a result of chemical processes between solids and fluids, in other words, hot water and “host” rocks. You can blame all this to faults: we are situated in a subterranean boundary invisible to the eye: The Rhine Valley is a rift valley, here a big crack in the earth’s crust caused by stretching of tectonic plates. Along its edges are boundary faults taking the form of fractures, where the earth has shifted. One such fault runs along its eastern side, right at Bruchsal. Geologists draw conceptual cuts, giving us the anatomy of the earth, its layers, and corresponding epochs. One such cut here, starting from below going upwards meets these rock-material assemblages:

CRYSTALLINE BASEMENT
PERMIAN
BUNTSANDSTEIN
MUSCHELKALK
KEUPER
JURA
EOCENE
OLIGOCENE
MIOCENE
PLIOCENE
QUATERNARY

There is also naturally occurring radioactive material, aka NORM.¹² NORM can be a problem in geothermal facilities: Radionuclides build up on the extractive infrastructures; pipe linings, heat exchangers, or filters can be potential hosts. Already in 1985, an investigation began on the radioactivity levels of the facility. Checks on safety are performed every year. The Bruchsal infrastructures operate on top of a large natural reservoir where water reaches 130°C. The saline fluid content is characterised by high mineralisation: numerous minerals, heavy metals and gases dissolved within in with an acidic pH value.

Billions of years ago, magma cooled and solidified here creating igneous rocks. The basement is magma, and is the reason for the existence of radionuclides. 

URANIUM, ZIRCON, TITANITE, MAGNETITE, THORIUM, they are all here. SANDSTONE, GRANITE at the basement.

LITHIUM: A VOLATILE MINERAL

A pilot project operating in Bruchsal since 2021 focuses on a different mineral present in the geothermal brines: Lithium. A metal at the heart of portable consumer electronics, it enters the history of technology. While other minerals are built into semiconductor devices and learn to compute, lithium together with cobalt allowed the digital age to become mobile. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, resulting from research beginning in the 1960s, were introduced to the market in the birth year of the World Wide Web: 1991.¹³ Their efficiency soon allowed mobile phones and laptops to emerge. Welcome to the age of networked communication, computing, and media consumption. Lithium embodies time, movement, and heat: Together with advancing data transmission technologies and the miniaturisation of computing components, lithium-ion batteries played a key role in the transformation of contemporary societies. Allowing electronic devices to enter every corner of public and private life—and thus helping to blur work-leisure boundaries—it accelerated communication, and mobility, or maximised the reach of “hot”—inter-passively captivating—media.¹⁴ With the recent emergence of e-mobility as well as renewable energy production, the global demand for lithium-based power components again rose exponentially. An average of 10 kg of lithium is built into one car battery. Even larger lithium-based systems store energy surplus from wind and photovoltaic sources, feeding electricity back into the power grid during peak demand periods.¹⁵ Sun, wind, lithium metal oxide. Helping to liberate human energy consumption from weather dependent production rhythms and uncertainties makes the lithium-ion battery an essentially modern technology: a buffer. The weather changes, human life continues unaffected.

With the need to power the energy transition, global demand for lithium has rapidly increased and is expected to rise further.¹⁶ Yet, while lithium technologies help to address climate change, mining in lithium-rich countries creates economic opportunities at the cost of destroying delicate ecosystems in the Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia), the Salar de Atacama (Chile), and other regions of South America, Australia, or China.¹⁷ Lithium then turns out to be a conflict mineral, its production evaporating the livelihoods of marginalised, often indigenous, people. An ethical dilemma confronts us: “How can we exploit the planet to save it?” But: Is this truly a dilemma or a false binary, an informal fallacy? Whose interests hide behind the homogenising “we” and which other options are available?¹⁸ These concerns seem tied to deceivingly distant geographies. Can we read the geothermal water ascending in Karlsruhe’s vicinity as a messenger substance which brings, alongside its minerals, urgent and difficult questions up from deep down below the surface of familiar landscapes?

The aspiration of the project in Bruchsal is to co-produce lithium and energy from geothermal brines, both in greenhouse-gas-neutral processes. Compared to lithium production that either turns deserts into evaporation basins or breaks ground open to extract solids, this is a micro-surgical intervention into a landscape. At the depth of the reservoir, porous rocks filled with water had to be fractured in a fracking-type method before the plant began operating.¹⁹ Over ground, the production well feeds into a main pipe carrying water to the heat exchanger. From the pipe exiting this facility, a smaller tube separates, entering a standard-size construction trailer, white, one door, three windows—a laboratory on site, a small pilot plant, no photos allowed. The process developed here in a collaboration between the Institute for Applied Materials at KIT, the energy provider EnBW and other partners is called DLE, Direct Lithium Extraction. A feasible method had to be developed, tested, and tailored to the site-specific physical and chemical conditions of the geothermal reservoir.²⁰ What we see through the container windows is an apparatus with multiple pipes in various diameters, mostly vertically aligned, some valves, outlets, some opaque instruments, some tubes.

Lithium is volatile; it is the least dense metal, in fact the least dense of all elements that are solids at room temperature. The nucleus of the lithium atom verges on instability. Highly reactive, elemental lithium does not occur freely in nature, it immediately corrodes and builds compounds. Thus, lithium is hard to hold on to but easy to catch. Soluble, lithium is present in brines as ions—the particles that bear electrical charges. Ions carry movement in their name coined from Greek: they are the particles that “go,” migrate.²¹ Like lithium-ion batteries, the extraction principle installed in Bruchsal takes advantage of the high reactivity. It relies on ion exchange mechanisms and consists of a lithium absorption-desorption process using a metal oxide.

Earlier, in a laboratory at KIT, the researchers had synthesised a chemical trap to catch the lithium ions in the thermal water: the lithium-ion sieve material, H1.6Mn1.6O4. As you might notice, Mn stands for manganese—lithium manganese oxides show a particularly high adsorption capacity and selectivity. Other experiments use titanium or aluminium instead. Thus, despite being an opportunity for a domestic, comparatively sustainable lithium supply, the extraction from geothermal brine nevertheless relies on minerals mined elsewhere. Images of robots, mining manganese nodules on deep ocean floors pop up in our minds. The researchers share our concern: To minimise the amount of such materials (and energy) needed while maximising the amount of lithium extracted is a guiding problem in the research towards not only an ecologically sustainable but also an economically profitable process, Laura Herrmann explains. Time might be an additional factor: In experiments with geothermal brine the adsorption process takes several hours. Only just caught, lithium needs to be detached again from the sieve material. A range of desorption solutions are being tested. The goal: to keep the sieve as intact and stable as possible for reuse while desorbing as much lithium as possible.²²

Laura Herrmann shows us samples of the intermediate materials and the end product, the salt lithium carbonate (Li2CO3), the lithium salt of carbonic acid, a characteristic white powder, an essential medicine as well as industrial chemical. This is the stuff to be built, after further processing, mostly in China, into batteries. In the battery, lithium ions will move again, now migrating in the electrolyte. During discharge, cations will travel from the negative to the positive electrodes while electrons will flow from anode to cathode through an external circuit. Remember, this is where entropy happens: energy chemically stored in the battery cell will be spent. The electric current dissipates its energy, for example as electricity input to a computing device or media display. Heat here is a by-product: exothermic reaction, Peltier effect, hot batteries, humming ventilators. The rising energy consumption of digital technologies is one reason why the concept of entropy pops up in media theory.²³ Another is its mid-twentieth century transfer to the realm of mathematical analysis—as a probabilistic measure of the degree of information contained within a message.²⁴ Further, the term entropy has been adopted and translated into a description of media related socio-cultural processes, perceived as a dissolution of meaning, coherence, or order, are others.²⁵ The risk of explosion and fire carried by the lithium-ion battery, has over time accumulated layers of literal and metaphorical meaning.

The pilot plant in Bruchsal is a small-scale model of what is to come. At its inception, the aspiration of the project was to produce enough lithium for 20,000 car batteries per year.²⁶ The 2021 vision by EnBW, who is behind the pilot project was even grander: the entire region and its multiple geothermal plants could produce lithium for 200,000 car batteries annually. At the time lithium prices had surged fueled by the electric car industry. A 40 percent increase in Chinese lithium carbonate prices was noted in January 2021.²⁷ In June 2021 lithium carbonate reached approximately 13,500 US dollars per tonne, while lithium hydroxide was around 15,000 US dollars per tonne. Bruchsal produces the former: Lithium carbonate of battery grade. In 2023 then, researchers at Bruchsal estimated that at “a production rate of 50 L/s of geothermal brine and a lithium recovery of 90 percent, lithium carbonate in the order of approximately 1300 metric tons per year could be produced.”²⁸ Zooming out to the whole region, authors of another study estimate that “the deployment of 33 deep geothermal plants in municipalities in the Upper Rhine Graben area in Germany could provide enough lithium to produce about 1.2 million electric vehicle battery packs per year, equivalent to 70 percent of today’s annual electric vehicle registrations in the European Union.²⁹

What we don’t know yet: when we will revisit the site on May 23, 2025, the price of lithium carbonate will be at 9,114.25 US dollars³⁰, a sharp decrease (from 13,500 US dollars per tonne). Then, in the fall of 2025, Tesla’s founder Elon Musk will proclaim the beginning of an end to lithium dependency, shifting his attention to batteries made from aluminum-ions³¹—future extraction might have to move elsewhere. The global battery sector stands in a state of suspension: research hung between desire for a sustainable energy future and the pull of commodity pricing. These forces determine the nature and direction of extractivist activities. We see: When investors, environmental activists, and researchers come to different conclusions about whether or not a project, for example extraction of lithium in Bruchsal, should be continued, they argue on different grounds, bringing different assumptions, terrains, scales, temporalities, and (personal, scientific, economic, or environmental) goals into the equation: “There is a where-from and a where-to for every attempt to be rational. Honoring the place and space of given instances of reason is what affords rationality meaning.”³²

SIDE EFFECTS

At the end of the extraction process, the brine exits the container in Bruchsal and feeds back into the larger pipe running towards an injection well further away. After heat exchange and extraction, the geothermal brine is returning into the subsurface—a bit cooler and with a changed chemistry. What could possibly result from this reinjection?

Someone quotes Octavia Butler who defined science fiction writing as the art of attending to side effects: “In fact, I don’t believe we can do anything at all without side effects—also known as unintended consequences. Those consequences may be beneficial or harmful. They may be too slight to matter or they may be worth the risk because the potential benefits are great, but the consequences are always there. […]  All that you touch/You Change—All that you Change/Changes you.”³³ Thinking with Butler, what could be the unintended consequences here? Clearly, natural hydrology is disturbed. Can this reinjected water contaminate groundwater sources and other microbial life and soil life? We don’t have the answers. The scientists we speak to inform us that they don’t expect any lifeforms at the deep subterranean levels where the waters are injected back. Yet what about indirect effects on connected ecosystems? One study³⁴ that has looked into the impact of reinjecting geothermal wastewaters back into the ground states that: “Contamination of surface and subsurface waters with toxic heavy metals is the most severe environmental impact of geothermal energy. These contamination problems are mainly attributed to flawed well construction, faulty reinjection applications and uncontrolled discharge of waste geothermal fluids to surface waters.”³⁵ We understand that the nature of these operations can have a number of unpredicted and volatile side effects. Further, Nitschke and his colleagues studied potential injection-related decreases of temperature and lithium in the reservoir around the production well—and thus in the extracted brine—over time as a side effect (while processes of lithium recharge in the region are not yet fully understood).³⁶ “And the lithium built into batteries,” one participant asks provocatively, “will it not one day return to earth as poison elsewhere?”³⁷

Only indirectly linked (through funding and attention economies) to the profit-orientation which drives market developments and policies, the researchers and artists present share the conviction that pretending that there are no side effects cannot be an option. Conducting further research and carefully weighing arguments is. Fabian Nitschke depicts geoscience as a discipline which, though devoted to earthly matter, nevertheless studies what is hidden, not yet known—and will remain merely partially known. Methods include punctual observation and the continuous building, negotiation, and adjustment of theoretical models. To the geologist, the drill hole or a natural saltwater source visited later that day, are small “windows” to earthly bodies hidden underground. For those skilled and literate, thermal water mounting to the surface through pipes or natural fissures, carries in its chemical composition information about geological layers hidden deep below. The scientific instrumentarium of geology addresses thermal waters as media transmitting data which can be related to and fed into theories of the earth and models of the past, present, and future of a specific geological body.

In H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness³⁸ the philosopher Ivan Illich describes water as “stuff”—a primordial medium that precedes form, shaping worlds before they appear—and urges us to pay attention to the long, often obscured histories embedded in matter. “Water envelops what exists before space was,”³⁹ he writes, reminding us that the liquid world is not only resource but archive, carrier, solvent of memory. Here in Bruchsal, this notion becomes palpable: geothermal water rises from deep strata, carrying with it trace elements, heat, and lithium ions—material time compressed and dissolved into circulation. This particular fluid does not merely fill space; it generates it, shaping these new technological infrastructures above ground. They seek to filter, harvest, or commodify what it carries. The lithium within this geothermal flow is not separate from Illich’s “stuff”; it is suspended within it: minerals and water co-constitute a new spatial imaginary. Though the terms are not related, their sounds resemble waters of forgetfulness. Lithium and Lethe. The latter in Greek connotes forgetfulness or oblivion. It was also the name of one of the rivers in the underworld, where the souls of the dead drank water to forget any memories of their past life. Early SRAM memory cards held a small lithium battery, now obsolete with the rise of SD cards. Lithium and Lethe, to forget and to remember.

Lithium, however, is not just the “stuff” for batteries. For centuries prior, it has been the “stuff” for healing. As a substance, it has been prominent in the balneotherapy regime: bathing in and drinking mineral-rich waters. Places like Baden-Baden or Karlsbad became prominent bath towns in the nineteenth century. Lithium treatments promoted the mineral as a substance calming the nervous system, inducing patient’s relaxation. Perhaps lithium is best known in its use in pharmacology, notably in the field of psychiatry; starting already in 1859 it began to be prescribed for a range of conditions, including epilepsy and gout. However, its use for depressive and bipolar disorders took off in the twentieth century. Anastasia Kubrak, researcher into lithium as both an extractive and healing substance gives us an overview.⁴⁰

The substance has the capacity to act on human brains: it stabilises moods by balancing brain chemicals—lowering excitatory signals, like dopamine, and increasing calming ones, like GABA⁴¹. It also protects brain cells and supports the growth of new ones.

LITHIUM as activator of brain substances:

GABA

DOPAMINE

SEROTONIN

NOREPINEPHRINE

GLUTAMATE

These substances keep us relaxed.

And then, our everyday technologies (which keep us active).

POWER TOOLS

ROBOTICS

DRONES

NUCLEAR FACILITIES

CELL PHONES

COMPUTERS 

PHOTOVOLTAICS

And so on: they all run on lithium, too. Some carry battery powered algorithms, increasingly finetuned to electrical and biochemical mechanisms in the human brain.

Lithium increases our productivity and can heal our tired bodies and minds. As the authors of Lithium: States of Exhaustion argue: “Since its discovery, lithium has been presented as a cure for the bodily exhaustion brought about by the capitalist economy.”⁴² The problem arises when the substance cannot perform its desired function anymore. When our technological demands increase or our bodies are too exhausted to be cured simply through a bath.

A question emerges: What would become of the bathing architectures and institutions—already under economic pressure in Baden-Württemberg and elsewhere—when they would lose the lithium in their therapeutic waters?⁴³ Like lithium batteries, we again run into matters of obsolescence. The infrastructures built around hydrotherapy—clinics, spas, municipal baths—risk becoming emblems of a therapeutic regime whose geochemical basis has been extracted elsewhere and revalued in different industries.

INTO THE WATERS

In the afternoon of  June 20, 2024, we leave Bruchsal and move on to an open salt spring in Ubstadt. In the eighteenth century, its waters had travelled through wooden pipes to Bruchsal’s graduation works, and much later filled the basins of a small sanatorium.⁴⁴ The former bathing site now seems to be a forgotten back road.

Here, in the high grass of a terrain vague between family homes—with ants biting our legs as we seem to stand in their way to their nest—the impression of being deeply caught up in a difficult situation turns physical. In 1992, Michel Serres imagined humanity as engaged in senseless inter-human struggle, while being fully ignorant of standing “knee-deep in the mud” of environmental disaster, sinking deeper into it with every move.⁴⁵ Are we not still, despite “green” energy projects, trapped, as Serres suggests, in quicksand, “forgetting the world of things themselves, the sand, the water, the mud, the reeds of the marsh?”⁴⁶

In Ubstadt, we look out not for reeds but for wild celery, apium graveolens, a protected species which grows on salty grounds, here on two square meters and in only one other spot in Baden Württemberg.⁴⁷ Meanwhile, artist Lara Almarcegui presents her work on Mineral Rights (since 2015, ongoing) which raises questions of regulation and ground ownership through the artist’s successful endeavour to acquire mineral exploration rights—not as a mining company but as an individual, not to extract but to preserve the ground that contains them. Almarcegui’s art thereby subtly shifts from a thorough engagement with legal procedures through which various nations administer rights to explore and extract to an imagination of the right of a mineral to stay where it is.⁴⁸ Then “knowledge would no longer imply property.”⁴⁹

Fabian Nitzschke in turn compares the known environmental impact of mining here and elsewhere, relates risks and potentials to argue in favor of lithium extraction in Baden-Württemberg. As a geologist, whose scientific discipline ever since its emergence sits between a longing to understand the history and composition of the earth, and mineral exploration, and mining projects, he agrees that the lithium market is essentially driven not by a will to save the planet at all costs but by an attempt to do so while holding on to a specific (post-)industrial, mobile, mostly western, quality and style of life.⁵⁰ Who is willing to give it up?

Before we leave, we are tasting the spring’s water. A quote by philosopher of science Isabel Stengers comes to mind, pointing out that to 

taste is not to test, to verify claims, and identify frauds. It is to accept the risk of actual encounters, encounters which may mean sustenance or poisoning. Dare to taste if you wish to become able to know: this is not a formula for a conquering enlightenment but for a cautious, relational exploration, and a situated one, as the effects are never ‘objectively’ good or bad, but are not ‘only subjective’ either. They are related to what is at stake in the situation.⁵¹

To our surprise, the water in Ubstadt has no salty taste. What had happened? Is this the effect of rainy days? Did former extraction or building activities disturb the subterranean flow path? What would then become of apium graveolens after all?

On this hot and humid day, the terrain around the once salty spring has a tropical feeling to it; we are sweating. Is it also true that the telephones in our pockets gained weight throughout the day, accumulating distant and near geographies, material processes, human and non-human fates, histories of science and of culture, and most of all: unresolved challenges, open questions?⁵²

The battery of our video camera dies, and we continue to the last stop of the day, the bath of Bad Schönborn with its thermal waters of 43,8°C rising from 637 meters depth, present in it: Natrium 9.760,00 mg/L, Calcium 1.367,00 mg/L, Potassium 447,00 mg/L, Magnesium 145,00 mg/L, Strontium 43,30 mg/L, Ammonium 11,40 mg/L, Iron 3,00 mg/L, Manganese: 0,48 mg/L, Lithium 38,50 mg/L.⁵³

Footnotes

1. “Digital Matters Symposium: The Upper Rhine Graben. An outdoor research symposium on the move between Bruchsal and Bad Schönborn,” June 20, 2024, an event by Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG Karlsruhe), professorship of Digital Aesthetics, Nina Zschocke, https://hfg-karlsruhe.de/aktuelles/20-juni-2024-digital-matter-symposium/, accessed November 25, 2025. The authors would like to thank Laura Herrmann, Fabian Nitschke, Lara Almarcegui, and Anastasia Kubrak for their contributions to the symposium and all other participants for their comments and questions. ↑

2. Walter Carlé, “Die ehemalige Saline zu Bruchsal, ihre geologischen Voraussetzungen, Geschichte und technischen Einrichtungen (Geschichte der Salinen in Baden-Württemberg, Nr. 5),” Berichte der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft zu Freiburg im Breisgau, no. 53 (1963). At the castle of Bruchsal, frescoes originally painted in 1751 by Johannes Zick (destroyed 1945, reconstructed 2008–13) are celebrating Bruchsal’s salt spring and in particular the saltworks realised under Prince-Bishop Franz Christoph von Hutten. ↑

3. Brett Buchanan, Michelle Bastian, and Matthew Chrulew, “Introduction: Field Philosophy and Other Experiments,” Parallax, vol. 24, no. 4 (2018), p. 384, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2018.1546715. ↑

4. Ibid.; Deep time of media: Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media. Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, Cambridge: MIT press, 2006; and Jussi Parikka, Geology of Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015; Geontopower: Elisabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies. A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. ↑

5. Buchanan et al., “Introduction,” p. 385; The authors refer to Paul Rabinow’s reading of Foucault, especially the conception of “philosophy as a site of experience,” Paul Rabinow, The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. 94. ↑

6. An example of thematically related, long-termed philosophical field work: Adam Briggle, “Learning from a Fracking Fracas,” in A Guide to Field Philosophy. Case Studies and Practical Strategies, ed. Evelyn Brister and  Robert Frodeman, New York: Routledge, 2020. See as well the introduction to the same volume: Evelyn Brister, Robert Frodeman, “Digging, Sowing, Building, Philosophy as Activity,” ibid. ↑

7. Pierre Bourdieu, “Fieldwork in Philosophy,” in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson, Cambridge: Polity, 1990, p. 21. Bourdieu refers to Max Weber’s notion of the “manysidedness” (Vielseitigkeit) of social reality. ↑

8. Ibid. ↑

9. “Ways of Being” refers to a book title: James Bridle, Ways of Being. Beyond Human Intelligence, London: Penguin, 2022. ↑

10. Anastasia Kubrak, Lithium, States of Exhaustion, ed. Francisco Diaz, Anastasia Kubrak, and Marina Otero Verzier, Santiago: ARQ editiones, 2021. ↑

11. Lena Eggeling et al., “Impact of Natural Radionuclides on Geothermal Exploitation in the Upper Rhine Graben,” Geothermics, no. 47 (2013), p. 81, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geothermics.2013.03.002. ↑

12. Eggeling et al., “Natural Radionuclides,” p.81. ↑

13. John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2019 for their contributions to the invention of the lithium-ion battery. ↑

14. McLuhan coined—however somewhat ambiguously—the term “hot media.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964. More recent publications pick up the term with varying understanding and emphasis, for example: Wolfgang Ernst, “Fourier(’s) Analysis: ‘Sonic’ Heat Conduction and Its Cold Calculation,” International Journal of Communication, vol. 8 (2014); Nicole Starosielski, Media Hot and Cold, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021 (politics of heat); Hito Steyerl, Medium Hot. Images in the Age of Heat, London: Verso, 2025 (thermodynamics and machine learning, esp. p. 51ff). ↑

15. Germany’s largest energy storage system to date was completed in spring 2025 in Bollingstedt, Schleswig -Holstein, consisting of 64 containers of large-scale lithium-ion batteries. See: Peer-Axel Koeske, “Größter Batteriespeicher Deutschlands bei Schleswig in Betrieb,” Norddeutscher Rundfunk, June 6, 2025, https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/schleswig-holstein/Groesster-Batteriespeicher-Deutschlands-bei-Schleswig-in-Betrieb,stromspeicher116.html, accessed November 24, 2025; “ECO STOR weiht 103,5 MW-Speicher bei Bollingstedt ein,” ECO STOR, https://www.eco-stor.de/de/unternehmen/news/250605_Einweihung_BOL, accessed November 24, 2025. ↑

16. Ghassan Zubi et al., “The Lithium-Ion Battery: State of the Art and Future Perspectives,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, vol. 89 (2018). ↑

17. Rolando Humire, Cristina Dorador, and Alonso Barros in conversation with Godofredo Pereira, “On the Ground,” in Lithium, States of Exhaustion, ed. Francisco Diaz, Anastasia Kubrak, and Marina Otero Verzier, Santiago: ARQ editiones, 2021. ↑

18. Jonas Köppel and Morgan Scoville-Simonds, “What should ‘we’ do? Subjects and scales in the double-bind between energy transition and lithium extraction,” The Extractive Industries and Society, vol. 17 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2023.101376. ↑

19. Damage overground due to induced seismic activity is a reason for protest and law cases—not in Bruchsal but along related projects. See: Landtag von Baden-Württemberg, “Durch Tiefen-Geothermie verursachte Schäden im Umweltausschuss thematisiert,” landtag-bw (2023), https://www.landtag-bw.de/de/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/durch-tiefen-geothermie-verursachte-schaeden-im-umweltausschuss-thematisiert-419338, accessed November 30, 2025. ↑

20. Laura Herrmann et al., “Lithium Recovery from Geothermal Brine – An Investigation into the Desorption of Lithium Ions Using Manganese Oxide Adsorbents,” Energy Advances, vol. 1 (2022). ↑

21. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “ion,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ion, accessed November 30, 2025. ↑

22. Herrmann et al., “Lithium Recovery,” pp. 882–84. ↑

23. Starosielski points out that “digital infrastructures—data centers, network exchanges, and fiber-optic cables—will drain the planet’s energy in order to create a stable thermal environment—not for people but for information.” Starosielski, Media Hot and Cold, p.1. ↑

24. Ernst, “Fourier(’s) Analysis,” p. 2535–539; Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” The Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3 (1948); Jean-Babtiste J. Fourier, Théorie analytique de la chaleur, Paris: Firmin Didot, 1822. ↑

25. Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, ed. trans. Daniel Ross, London: Open Humanities Press, 2018, p. 41. ↑

26. Alexander Richter, “Pilot Project to Extract Lithium at Bruchsal Geothermal Plant,” ThinkGeoEnergy (2021), https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/pilot-project-to-extract-lithium-at-bruchsal-geothermal-plant-germany/, accessed October 2, 2025. ↑

27. “Benchmark Lithium Prices Rise over 40 percent in January 2021 as LFP Electric Vehicle Demand Goes Back to the Future,” Benchmark Source (2021), https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/benchmark-lithium-prices-rise-over-40-in-january-2021-as-lfp-electric-vehicle-demand-goes-back-to-the-future, accessed October 3, 2025. ↑

28. Lena Kölbel et al., “Lithium Extraction from Geothermal Brines in the Upper Rhine Graben: A Case Study of Potential and Current State of the Art,” Hydrometallurgy, vol. 221 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hydromet.2023.106131. ↑

29. Jann Michael Weinand et al., “Low-Carbon Lithium Extraction Makes Deep Geothermal Plants Cost-Competitive in Future Energy Systems,” Advances in Applied Energy, vol. 11 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adapen.2023.100148. ↑

30. “Latest Update in the SMM Lithium Market,” SMM, https://www.metal.com/Lithium, accessed October 5, 2025. ↑

31. Adnan Rasheed, “Elon Musk Announces Tesla’s NEW Aluminum-Ion Super Battery with 15 Minute Charging,” Vocal (2025), https://vocal.media/wheel/elon-musk-announces-tesla-s-new-aluminum-ion-super-battery-with-15-minute-charging, accessed November 25, 2025. ↑

32. Dotson discussing Audre Lorde: Kristie Dotson, “How is this Paper Philosophy?,” Comparative Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1 (2012), p. 22, https://doi.org/10.31979/2151-6014(2012).030105; Buchanan et al., “Introduction,” p. 387. ↑

33. Octavia E. Butler, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” Essence, vol. 31 (2000), p. 166. In this passage, Butler quotes from her speculative fiction novel Parable of the Sower (1993). ↑

34. Niyazi Aksoy, Celalettin Şimşek, and Orhan Gunduz, “Groundwater Contamination Mechanism in a Geothermal Field: A Case Study of Balcova, Turkey,” Journal of Contaminant Hydrology, vol. 103, no. 1–2 (2009), p. 13. ↑

35. Ibid., p.13. ↑

36. Valentin Goldberg et al., “Challenges and Opportunities for Lithium Extraction from Geothermal Systems in Germany—Part 3: The Return of the Extraction Brine,” Energies, vol. 16 (2023), https://doi.org/10.3390/en16165899. ↑

37. A study focused on recycling realised in Karlsruhe: Oleksandr Dolotko et al., “Universal and Efficient Extraction of Lithium for Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Using Mechanochemistry,” Communications Chemistry, vol. 6 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-023-00844-2. ↑

38. Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985. ↑

39. Ibid. p. 6. ↑

40. For further reading into lithium’s various states, refer to the publication which Kubrak co-edited: Francisco Díaz, Anastasia Kubrak, and Marina Otero Verzier (eds.), Lithium: States of Exhaustion, Rotterdam: Het Nieuwe Instituut; Santiago: Ediciones ARQ, 2021; on the history of the drug see also: Walter A. Brown, Lithium: A Doctor, a Drug, and a Breakthrough, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, pp. 71–88. ↑

41. GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain; it helps calm down brain activity by slowing down or blocking certain nerve signals. This makes it important for reducing anxiety, promoting relaxation, and preventing the nervous system from becoming overexcited. ↑

42. Quote from abstract: Díaz, Kubrak, and Verzier, “Lithium. States of Exhaustion,” Nieuwe Instituut, https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/projects/lithium/publicatie-lithium-states-exhaustion, accessed December 5, 2025; esp. Marina Otero Verzier, “Introduction,” ibid.; Anastasia Kubrak, “From Burnout to 7Up: On Bathing and Mining Grounds,” ibid.; Byung-Chul Han, “Healing as Killing,” ibid. ↑

43. On thermal baths, their culture and reasons of obsolescence refer to Lydia Xynogala, Take Care: Mineralization, Hydrochemistry and the Environments of Greek Thermalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (doctoral thesis, ETH Zurich, March 24, 2024), ETH Zurich Research Collection, https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000673683; see also: Lydia Xynogala, “Geopathologies: The Birth of the Hydroclinic,” e-flux Architecture (2025), https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/treatment/647323/geopathologies-the-birth-of-the-hydroclinic/, accessed January 5, 2026. ↑

44. Carlé, “Die ehemalige Saline zu Bruchsal,” pp. 72–73, 82–83. ↑

45. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, p.1. ↑

46. Ibid. ↑

47. Die Versuchsanstalt des JKIP: “Apium graveolens (Echter Sellerie),” Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, https://www.jkip.kit.edu/garten/140.php, accessed November 24, 2025. ↑

48. On “geontopower” as a set of discourse, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife (e.g. minerals) see: Povinelli, Geontologies. ↑

49. Serres, The Natural Contract, p. 38. ↑

50. Köppel, Scoville-Simonds, “What should ‘we’ do?”; related questions are raised by: Unknown Fields (Liam Young, Kate Davies), The Breastmilk of the Volcano. Bolivia and the Atacama Desert Expedition, London: ACTAR, 2016. ↑

51. Isabelle Stengers, “Aude Sapere: Dare Betray The Testator’s Demands,” Parallax, vol. 24, no. 4 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2018.1546718. Stengers traces the epistemological shift from universal to situated knowledges. See also Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (1988). ↑

52. Referring to Avery Gordon’s use of the term, batteries—as most technologies and other industrial products—can be experienced as “haunted.” Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. ↑

53. “Die Lambertus Quelle,” Thermarium Bad Schönborn, https://www.bad-schoenborn.de/Heilquelle, accessed November 24, 2025. ↑