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  • 004Sensing

    What strategies can be used to make the Anthropocene legible, and therefore something that can be responded to? This course aims to explore sensing and modalities of perception that reveal what has become abstracted, what is absent, what has been diminished, and what has been lost. Environmental historian Johan Gärdebo investigates how our present-day relationship between data and the environment came about, using the complex history of the Swedish Space Corporation’s satellite mapping of the Philippines in the 1980s to illustrate how all environmental data are a global commons that its users must agree on how to share. From the concrete urban landscape of Karachi, Pakistan, artists Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani ask: who are we in relation to nature? Their pathway explores how sensing and connecting with the land may bring us closer to a process of unlearning a long-standing relationship of domination over it. In the final pathway, behavioral ecologist and architect Matthew J. Lutz examines how in both technological and biological systems, choosing which signals to filter out or tune in is an act of valuing, constrained by the economics of sensing—who decides what is sensed, and for which purposes?