The promise of communication is intelligibility. The function of communication is knowledge and information transfers. However, the practice of communication must endure the complexities of language, situatedness, culture, medium, technology, power, and constant replication. Even when communication fails to deliver intelligibility, we often resort to more communication to resolve the very same inadequacies of the practice. As a result, communication is trapped in endless loops that ultimately shape how, where, and for whom knowledge transfers take effect.

In this pathway, we embrace the practice of communication as the rehearsal or retracing of a route that leads through shifting epistemic terrains where communication seeks a self-referential promise. We also borrow from the medical genealogy of “practice,” which involves disarticulation and forensic investigation, to examine the folds and paradoxes of the promise of communication. Therefore, this pathway is centered not on the quest for intelligibility but on the process of communication as disarticulation, unfolding, and repetition through instances of knowledge and information transfers that surround the Anthropocene Curriculum project.

We situate this pathway at a point in time when cascading facts, data points, theories, and renderings of the Anthropocene are piling up and obfuscating one another, while its palpable effects are no longer deemed external or global. We call this moment the post-Anthropocene, which relates more to the felt, situated, and concurrent experiences of planetary change. Thus, communicating the post-Anthropocene does not mean speaking a unifying language. On the contrary, the urgencies, concepts, methods, histories, and politics are melded into amorphous objects, and communication very often fails to deliver what it promises: conveyance and intelligibility.

The issue at stake throughout this pathway is not about seeking, arguing, or connecting further evidence. Instead, how do we mobilize the practice of communication away from the tensions of its promises and the making of grand narratives? Several of the items we have included in this pathway expose how the practice of communication within the Anthropocene discourse has become prewired and reliant on methods that replicate authority, remote control, and power inequalities, for example, through the streams of data it feeds. By contrast, what is shared among these projects is an escape route for communication’s totalizing promises, to instead enact inter-epistemic, polyphonic, and disarticulated forms of meaning-making.

Projects like Suelo3.2.1 (Spanish for “soil”) by Ela Spalding and Climate Care3.2.2 by Gilly Karjevsky and Rosario Talevi highlight the need to shift the perspective through which fieldwork and data gathering is conducted. These projects explore overlapping layers of history, unlikely eco-social and material relationships, nuanced scales, and proximity between human and nonhuman communities surrounding a research site. In the process, they bring together unlikely actors and activators of knowledge transfers sharing unassuming eco-social landscapes in urban and rural settings.

Moreover, the invitation to chart a path for this course confronts us with an ever more urgent question: How to navigate these battered epistemological spaces within which communication is called upon to enact interpretation, perform practice, sustain information flows and deliver meaning? Instead of seeking a clearing in a dense space of knowledge and positions that today struggle to find alignment in the Anthropocene discourse, we shall navigate downstream through the muddy waters that many try to avoid. That is why we ask the reader to contemplate the dissonance, as it will soon show us a path for reverberation.

In the essay “Pictured Journeys, Experiences of Descriptions: Tracing Ways Down the Mississippi,”3.2.3 technology researcher and artist Jamie Allen presents us with the first problem: translating distance, experience, and communicating the Anthropocene inward, as a field guide of sorts to navigate entangled physical, historical, and political spaces, and outward, as an evidentiary and analytical object for research and knowledge gathering.

The very project of communication in the post-Anthropocene is that of situating discourses in the fissures and holding together disconnected walls of the architecture of knowledge being created in this curriculum. With this aim, we propose a meandering path that leads the reader to see in different scales and to dwell in multiple spaces at once, as a disarticulated body, and even to cross walls to discover passages where none seemed to exist. The path continues with the process of translating knowledge. In the essay “On the Use of the Word Code by the Kogi Translator,”3.2.4 artist Francois Bucher maneuvers across transversal trajectories of cognition by translating the Anthropocene through the grammars of Indigenous languages and the practices and knowledge of the Sierra Nevada region in the North of Colombia. In his attempt, we are presented with an inverse historical trajectory of the Anthropocene, which prompts Indigenous communities to maintain a state of the world—to care for and sustain existing relations—as opposed to seeking its transformation.

The journey continues with “Dramatizing the Future,”3.2.5 a text in which writer Briohny Doyle brings us to a space of uncertainty, where communication draws from instability and delivers possibility. Here, forecasting becomes a sort of self-referential method that seems concerned with offering insights about the world while reporting on its own capacity to near accuracy. Forecasting turns into a sort of divination, and fiction becomes the passage toward a space shaped by plausibility. It is here where fiction challenges the ethics of the present, while speculation already makes us accountable for the future.

On this path of discovering the maps and roads of communication and its fallacies and fallibility, you are going to encounter the limits of knowing that which we that which we have understood as naturalized forms of knowing and knowledge. The fluidity of our bound metaphors and the collapse of geoterritorial certainty that marks the futility of communication in the Anthropocene finds a poignant articulation in a four-day experiment by artists Maud Canisius and Myriel Milicevic, along with anthropologist and photographer Thiago da Costa Oliveira and sociolegal scholar Xenia Chiraramonte, which shows us the intricacies and nuances and the impossibility of representing a river.3.2.6 What this project achieves by collapsing cartographic methods is likewise accomplished in the collapsing of causal and correlative narrative structures by researchers Timothy Neale, Courtney Addison, and Thao Phan, with their “Anthropogenic Table of Elements.”3.2.7 This work involves playing with the Mendeleevian periodic table to no longer look at the benign building blocks of elemental interactions but rather to see the destructive forms of elementary transactions that shape and form the current and future anthropogenic moment of our planetary futures.

The question of futurity becomes inescapable when thinking through the state and shape of our practices of communication. Perhaps it has to do with the very nature of the question we are asking—communication is a temporal vector, after all—but it is potentially also the only hope we have of breaking up and open structures of meaning-making and meaning giving that have become naturalized in our practices of domination and exploitation. Jennifer Colten and Jesse Vogler, both research scholars, think of the long tail of the present, and the incomprehensibility of its futures, in “Significant and Insignificant Mounds: An Essay.”3.2.8 In looking at the vestiges, traces, archaeologies, and genealogies of mounds, both natural and human-made, they reframe the idea of the future and, more significantly, our roles in making futures: from literalness to signification, and from knowing to elusion. Taking up the language of making meaning of and in the future, science researchers Hugo Ricardo Noronha de Almeida and Anna Aberg offer a recalibration of time itself, in their essay on comics and graphic novels.3.2.9 Addressing the idea of “slow media” and dwelling on the blank space between frames, the meanings that hide in the turning of the page, and the fathoms tucked between the clicks and clacks of digital communication, they explore how time—and thus its orientations and responsibilities—can be reworked by changing the frames through which we see and thus make the world.

As you go through this course pathway, we invite you to interrogate each contribution through a recurring question, which we also ask ourselves over and over in the text: How can communication in the post-Anthropocene enact the practice of its promise? It is a question that we discuss in different modes and forms, drawing from our experiences of the workshop and seminar during The Shape of a Practice. In the recorded conversation “Interview: Communicating,”3.2.10 we (Felipe Castelblanco and Nishant Shah, the creators and curators of this pathway) try and make sense of the multitudinous forms of communication practices, influenced by factors like positionality, location, identity, politics, affect, and embodiment. The conversation is, in many ways, indicative of the discursive and challenging demands of trying to work out the meaning, practice, intention, and destination of communication in the post-Anthropocene.

We cannot prescribe but only propose. We do not seek a definite answer; we can only repeat the question, and in each repetition, in each rehearsal, in each recursion, the question finds new answers, new knowledges, new pieces that connect different approaches and entry points. Thus, through our conversation we connect several archive pieces from the Anthropocene Curriculum and other references selected from other spheres and latitudes. Each time the question is asked, reverberation helps to create even more room in between the epistemic walls where communication holds its promise and enacts a practice.