Which grounds do we stand on? The stability of a solid ground has long been a cornerstone in art and philosophy, affording certainty and perspective. In the visual arts in particular, the concept of a stable ground is essential for implementing a central perspective, providing a sense of order and orientation. This notion of stability has never been true for everybody and yet these parameters for visual perception are still in place today. In the midst of rapid technological advances, political turmoil, and multiple surging crises, what serves as a secure base for critical thinking? What do the arts, design, and philosophy have to offer? Like the classic childhood game, where falling not only means the game is over, but where one also has to construct the game world itself, The Floor Is Lava seeks to provide tools for navigating the contemporary moment and to make conceivable other worlds we want to live in.

Games, with their rules to be learned and followed, are also seen as conceptual frameworks in philosophy and as reverberating in everyday life: Wittgenstein’s language games, for one, demonstrate how meaning is created through social conventions and practices.¹ This serves not only to highlight how the “rules of the game” determine meaning and our grasp of reality, but also the malleability of language through its social use. In the field of game theory, it is the social which is sought to be conceptualised as the field of rational decision-making. What are the games we play today and what governs our picture of the world, when the figure of the rational actor is undercut by algorithmically instantiated psychotechnologies and when corresponding fantasies of control fall prey to post-fascist endeavours?

While Germany sees an upcoming election bound to reflect the drift to the right that Europe has been undergoing for several years now, the ongoing economic crises have brought forward a regressive ideology through which the relationship with the land and the earth is understood. What seemed unthinkable just a few decades ago—such as the withdrawal from protection agreements that have characterised, at least in part, or at least in institutional discourse, common deliberation among countries in the EU—is once again up for debate. This includes the questioning of climate protection acts in favor of the exploitation of non-renewable energy resources to the benefit of large industries, the rising expenditure on military campaigns against the backdrop of aggressive deterrence policies in border defense, and the questioning of the right to asylum and citizenship for those who do not seem to align with this new course of history. Is there still a safe island to jump onto?

Economically, the element of fire is superseded by oil in the age of petromodernity—the current period in which societies are built on cheap energy and the products of petrochemicals: fuels, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and different forms of plastics. Often overlooked, as it is celebrated as the birthplace of “Informatik” or of electromagnetic waves (Hertz), the city of Karlsruhe itself is the endpoint of the Transalpine Pipeline, which transports crude oil from the port of Trieste over Austria to Karlsruhe as one of the four major oil pipelines in Germany (with a capacity of 43 million tons of crude oil per year), becoming a central node of and emblematic for digital cultures and their material grounds.

Expanding the survey of the elements, the fluidity of lava connects to its watery counterpart: As a projection surface, water has dominated the cultural imagination ever since. It is not only central to climate struggles, its bodies also emerge as “frontiers” where imaginaries of control collide with those of the discovery of the unknown—from the res nullius to underwater (data) pipelines.² Notwithstanding such fantasies, the world at sea has always been media-technologically produced and controlled, be it via binoculars or sonography—a fact often veiled by metaphoric language used to articulate contemporary conjunctures: The talk of (migratory) waves or (data) deluges obscures human agency within these processes.

That mediated spaces are also spaces of political struggle likewise comes to the fore when turning to another “frontier”: the exploration of space. The “space race” today not only re-emerges in the hands of private companies updating Cold War legacies of the 20th century after years of neoliberalism, but also expands on older fantasies of a new home for humanity after having left a scorched planet. The existentialist anxieties and transhumanist ponderings associated with this exodus appear to be symptomatic of an alienation from the material reality of dispossession on a broken Earth.³

In N.K. Jemisin’s sci-fi novel The Fifth Season, cyclical volcanic eruptions on a broken Earth are deliberate acts of resistance against exploitative civilisations and are therefore configured as tools of transformation. Lava flows have been used as metaphors for regeneration, filiation, and commonality by feminist and queer writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, who described the borderlands as volcanic sites of cultural and linguistic eruptions. Volcanic eruptions and the scene of lava covering the Earth’s surface have often been described as a topos of renewal and resistance, linked to the land and ancestry in Latin American and Caribbean literature. In this context, volcanic activity becomes a symbol of defiance against colonisation and environmental degradation, representing not only destruction but also the potential for new forms of life.

All of the above only touches upon some issues we seek to explore in this fourth issue of UMBAU. Offering this tableau, we invite you to take a leap towards new vantage points, to expand the rules of the game, and to bridge the discourses within the university, the arenas of world politics and the scenes of contemporary art and design with their longstanding histories. But the search for a firm conceptual grip and for an incisiveness of theoretical tools and artistic expression is not to be confused with the escapist reassurance refuge-taking in reductionist worldviews can provide. The Floor Is Lava does not seek easy explanations but aims to engage with the complexities the world confronts us with. As such, the figure of the game serves to carve out our own testbeds of possible worlds and to create ways off of shaky grounds in order to gain secure footing—or stay with the eventual imponderability of ambiguity.

UMBAU issue 4, The Floor is Lava, Feb 2025–Jan 2026. Editorial Staff: Paolo Caffoni, Charlotte Eifler, Yannick Nepomuk Fritz, Jule Köpke, Livia Emma Lazzarini.

Footnotes

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 3rnd ed., Repr. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1989 (1953). ↑

2. Bernhard Siegert, Final Frontiers: Eine Medienarchäologie des Meeres. Brill | Fink, 2024. https://doi.org/10.30965/9783846768990. ↑

3. Antonia Majaca, “The Oikos of the Earth, the Nomos of the Black Hole.” e-flux Journal 143, March 2024. Accessed March 11, 2024. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/143/589526/the-oikos-of-the-earth-the-nomos-of-the-black-hole/. ↑