Across A Flock’s Orbit holds the theses of the 2025 alumni of the Geo-Design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven.

The publication brings together eighteen graduation theses from the Geo-design department led by Metahaven at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Each thesis is orbiting around complex systems—human, ecological, geopolitical, and technological. They are driven by the force of feedback loops, both generative and destructive, and move in relation to one another, never static, always reconfiguring. “Across A Flock’s Orbit” offers a glimpse into how we might begin to relate differently: to land, to history, to each other, and to the systems that govern us, Across A Flock’s Orbit.

This editorial project allows a variety of researchers to enter in composition with each other. It is moving like a flock: not in a straight line, but through clustered constellations, circling across entangled terrains, that form a shared understanding, composing one collective brain.

In my work entitled Chronotopic Fractures, I researched how climate disruption fractures collective temporal systems by focusing on the leap second: a tiny unit occasionally added to atomic clocks to synchronise human-made time with Earth’s rotation. The aim was to trace the leap second’s history and technical challenges and to contextualise it as more than technological and scientific adjustment. It has become the embodiment of deeper tensions between techno-determinist timekeeping, planetary dynamics, and anthropogenic climate change.

Through interdisciplinary conversations and site-focused research in Kiruna, Sweden, and the Paris Observatory, the thesis develops a lexicon investigating “glaciotemporality” melting ice becomes both a recorder and victim of ecological transformation: melting irreversibility and the arrow of time. The leap second’s abolition by 2035 signals a societal shift away from cosmic alignmen. Chronopolitics, techno-feudalism, and economic imperatives are questioned. What are ways of embracing of uncertainty, modes of temporal cognition that oppose profit-driven abstraction?

The work wants to foreground the need to relate differently to time, history, land, technological regimes, and each other.

To read more, here is a link to my work.

Warm thank you to Duncan Agnew, Elizabeth Donley, Christian Bizouard.

Heads of Department
Metahaven

Editorial Team
Thijs Vleeschouwer – Chloé Terrée – Yuhan Fang – Lot Vanhulst – Christos Voutsas

Graphic Design Team
Emma Zerial – Antonia Aschenbrenner – Gigi Totaro – Aleksandra Nazarova – Ache Wang – Kimia Amir-Moazami – Christian Scenini – Céleste Noiz

Production Team
Jasmine Fernandez – Catalina Gomez Alvarez – Andrea Michael – Patrick Chiang – Petr Kroschinsky

Thesis Tutors
Merve Bedir – Margarida Mendes

Thesis Publication Design Tutor
Tatjana Sturm

Copy Editing
Kaye Cain-Nielsen

Typefaces
Lucette – NaN Druid – Ronzino – Director

Supported by Design Academy Eindhoven.