Artifact Earth

The Inaugural Workshop of the Anthropocene Lab at UIC

• Monday, May 09, 2022

  9:00 am - 12:00 pm

  Workshop: Anthropocene Lab at UIC

  Inputs (15-20min each) by:

  John Kim, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota
  Thomas Turnbull, MPIWG, Berlin
  Carlina Rossée, HKW, Berlin

  Response by

  Rachel Havrelock, The Freshwater Lab, UIC

  Experimentation

  A laboratory is a place for experiments. The experiments that are to take place at the UIC Anthropocene Lab (AL) have a distinct object of inquiry: a transformed Earth. The Anthropocene, at its simplest, is a controversial geoscientific term that describes a distinct shift in the Earth’s geological agency: for the first time in history, humankind, in all its differential complexity, has – some argue – become the primary determinant of terrestrial conditions. In effect, the Earth has become subject to unplanned human experimentation.

  At the same time, the practices that will take place at the UIC AL are also experiments, in so far as they will invite collaborations between groups and individuals of different disciplinary backgrounds, ontological perspectives, and positionalities. In other words, as an experimental laboratory, the AL will not only foreground new research approaches, but also open up the doors to the laboratory to invite in new educational practices that challenge the university’s insularity.

  In this first presentation, John Kim will set out his perspectives on experimentation in educational and research practices in the context of his work with the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project and in ongoing collaborative projects connected to it.

  Interdisciplinarity

  Disciplines discipline disciples, or at least they used to. Academic disciplines are a relic of an age in which, in theory at least, human and non-human (natural) agency could be clearly distinguished from one another. This distinction was always illusory. Humans and their environment have always been involved in resonating processes of co-substantiation, one allowing and constraining the other in an iterative process of co-construction. The Anthropocene condition draws our attention to the need for new interdisciplinary approaches that can acknowledge this transforming complex of interrelations and that can offer new ways to study, interact with, and more justly subsist on a transformed Earth.

  In pursuit of inter- or even anti disciplines, the UIC AL will act as a site for experimental forms of research that conventional structures and institutions could not support.

  In this second talk, historian of science Thomas Turnbull will outline how the interdisciplinarity necessary at our current juncture is qualitatively different to that which has come before.

  Culture / Planetary Practices / Knowledge Cultures

  In the Anthropocene, the Earth has become an artifact of human culture. In such a condition, this transformed reality requires new knowledge cultures to collectively interpret and engage with the complex planetary entanglements, interweaving practices across the arts, sciences, humanities and activism. The UIC AL will provide a germinal home for such new, collaborative modes of expression, critique, and commentary. The hope is that the lab can tie together the diverse ways in which a plurality of people are responding to this new condition, reframing its imperatives, and creating the new knowledge cultures that allow reflecting and acting upon it.

  In this third talk, curator Carlina Rossée will recount her experience of over 10 years of engagement with the Berlin-based Anthropocene Curriculum project and will set out a horizon for how this project can be taken forward, adapted, and transformed by others

• 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm

  Presentation by Prof. Braden Allenby

  Presentation by Prof. Braden Allenby, President’s Professor and Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics, School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

• 3:00 pm

  Heritage Garden Tour

  UIC students, affiliated with Latino Cultural Center