Artificial cooling fundamentally shapes the world in which we live. Since the onset of the Cold War, cooling and freezing technologies have become increasingly vital for a wide array of everyday practices, from nutrition, health and reproduction to dwelling, telecommunication, scientific research, and economic productivity. A global system of cold storages, cold chains, and air-conditioned spaces has become an energy-intensive yet barely considered planetary infrastructure: an “artificial cryosphere”. Artificial cold has drastically restructured life both on a biological and social level, yet the far-reaching impact of this technology is still largely unexplored and unresearched.

With the ERC Synergy Grant Project “Cultures of the Cryosphere – Infrastructures, Politics and Futures of Artificial Cooling” (2024–2030), we set out to understand how the planetary infrastructure of cooling is deeply interwoven in cultural practices, constituting historically and locally specific “cryogenic cultures”. In this talk, we will introduce the genesis, tasks, and ambitions of the research project and discuss how we can critically analyze – and identify alternatives to – our increasingly fraught love affair with artificial cold.