ABSTRACT
In tracing lithium's agency across telescoping scales of battery, body, landscape, and cosmos via foot, camera, conversation, cartography, and design speculation, an even more entangled narrative emerges. As electricity is best understood as a stream of electrons, the key to maximizing a battery's energy-storing potential is to cram as many electrons into the smallest and lightest container possible. Neuroscience, for instance, has shown how the brain's "neurons (parts) connected by synapses (connections) excite and inhibit each other's firing (interactions)." Lithium is naturally found in the human body, commonly consumed and embodied in trace amounts through drinking water and a number of foods. The model zooms in, visualizing a proportionate decrease of water levels in a nearby laguna. Like the Carnaval Sampedrino evoked in opening this chapter, the land's energies, its agency, be they mallkus, geysers, brine shrimp, or lithium, are to be desenterrados, unearthed, released and lived amid as a rich, tangled, living knot of life.
