A dispersed selection of activities related to my ongoing interest in de-extinction and cryopreservation (of both nonhuman and human material) within a context of planetary coldness.

To counter the destructive outcome of global heating, conservationists are increasingly turning to frozen safeguards as a way to preserve the DNA or genetic material of threatened species. This is largely a response to a biodiversity crisis that some ecologists are calling the ‘sixth great extinction’ – the first one attributed to human activity. Putting species DNA and genetic material ‘on ice’ acts to diffuse the fraught immediacy of endangered species conservation and extinction, mute the nagging anxiety that it may be too late, and offer a get-out clause – be that through captive breeding or the potential for de-extinction. This is a strategy orientated not only towards the conservation of species, but also the conservation of time, made possible by the temporal plasticity offered by the freezer – or, more accurately, a cold storage facility for genetic material called a cryobank. Cryobanks are part of a wider process of what scholars are calling ‘cryopolitics’ – the political renegotiation and manipulation of life through coldness.

In the context of de-extinction, freezing becomes even more important. DNA begins to degrade at the point of death, meaning that once a creature dies out, the genetic code of the entire species is lost unless preservative measures are taken. The solution of the cryobank is to safeguard the DNA of endangered species whilst they are still living as a future prospect of extinction-reversal. The materiality of this genetic information suspended by ice crystals configures a cryopolitics of control over death.