An initiative that explores the entangled histories of a multiplicity of Anthropocene narratives.

Since 2019, Science Gallery Bengaluru (SGB) has conducted multiple public engagement programmes around the Anthropocene.

Published in 2022, this experimental guide to Venice forms a new, illuminating and disturbing mosaic of the water city and its Lagoon.

Provoking a paradigm shift in academic research, public policy, and social engagement through collaborations with scientists and artists.

Matthew C. Wilson traverses ancient prehistory to speculative futures, meditating on the chancy throughlines that make up the world as we know it.

What alliances and common questions can help to work toward a science of partnerships, especially in processes that include more-than-human entities?

How do different forms of societal organization and land use over the centuries affect the environment on local and planetary levels?

Researchers study an ice core from one of the fastest-warming places on Earth—revealing key data on Antarctica’s environmental history.

Lakes, seas, estuaries, and wetlands provide important archives of humanity’s reconfiguration of life in the Anthropocene.

Artists Nina Canell and Robin Watkins recover the deep-time aquatic past of the limestone environment that formed the island of Gotland and delineate the temporal entanglements between ancient life creation and modern-day living.

Starting from a review of the Orbis Spike hypothesis, this essay by the Anthropocene historian Franz Mauelshagen compares the early modern “Agrarian Acceleration” during the Little Ice Age with the material world of the twentieth century.

Geographer and writer Adam Bobbette describes the reciprocal and porous relationship between society and geology in early twentieth-century Java, and Julia Adeney Thomas argues that the novelty of the Anthropocene lies in the shift from local geology to the chronicling of the Earth system

Constellating three documents that mark a story of changing hopes for a better future, historian Julia Adeney Thomas advocates to recognize the immaterial power of ideas that gave birth to the Anthropocene.

Christoph Rosol sketches out the marriage of paleoceanography with isotope chemistry in the middle of the twentieth century, part of a synchronism between the onset of the Anthropocene and the emergence of the technical means of understanding it.

Environmental historian Johan Gärdebo explores the complex history of the relationship between data and the environment.

How are the relationships between state, market, natural environments, and citizens understood? And how does this create or foreclose political and ethical agency?

Simon Turner reflects on the International Chronostratigraphic Chart as both a continual work in progress and a product of centuries of scientific consensus-building.

Catherine Russell invites us into the University of Leicester geology archive and proposes that archives are teeming with potential for new understandings.

Bringing the city and the environments of Venice into focus as the basis for historical and comparative studies on global geo-anthropological processes.

Historian Florike Egmond (University of Leiden) gives a keynote lecture about the historic relationship between humans and water on the Dutch river delta.

As testimonies from disparate times, the experimental publishing collective continent. present excerpts from recorded conversations that are now echoes of a seemingly far gone implicitness and presumption.

Audio reflections on the river that flows south toward Natchez and New Orleans, stirring up relations between chemistry and commodity, labor and industry, plantation and plantationocene.

Riots emerge from voices unheard—reflections on Martin Luther King Jr.’s dictum guide us to sites of uprising and industrial toxicity on Turtle Island, a.k.a. North America.

Explorations of suburbia and its “newly urgent legibility” within US political geography blend into personal reflections on modes of living in the St. Louis region and beyond.

Attuning oneself to the transformations of the Anthropocene is both an intellectual and embodied experience. But how can the embodied experiences be shared, or even communicated, to one another online?

Closing the opening week of The Shape of a Practice, this meal-at-a-distance brought speakers to the transatlantic kitchen table along with so-called invasive species from the US and Germany.

Histories can often be told through the changes in a landscape; about what has changed and come to form, but most of all, what is excluded altogether.

Brian Holmes contemplates how our natural surroundings are suffused with the aftermath of colonial trauma and racial exploitation.

How consideration of the local effects of global dependencies, can help us to reckon with—and change—our role in sustaining often damaging entanglements of commodity flows.

In response to the complicated entanglements of property claims in the Mississippi Delta, Sarah Lewison advocates for witnessing injustice as a way of preparing for repair.

How a “blues epistemology” can establish the critical historical consciousness crucial for determining more just futures in the Anthropocene.

From agricultural slavery to petroleum, the banks of the Mississippi in Louisiana represent an Anthropocenic space characterized by a slow history of extraction.

How acknowledging and engaging with complex temporal clashes can generate coherent responses to the seemingly totalizing notion of the Anthropocene.

Field work undertaken on the Mississippi River dissolves the distinction between field and archive, evidencing not just attempts to alter the river’s flow, but similarly shifting cultural and political dynamics.

In this episode, Treasure Shields Redmond and Saundi McClain-Kloeckner discuss Indigenous presence, water protection and human-environment relations along the Mississippi.

A conversation on the Mississippi and working at a riverboat casino with Marvin Wright and Treasure Shields Redmond.

In this episode, Treasure Shields Redmond and Paul Perkinson discuss how working on and next to the Mississippi shaped Paul’s life.

Treasure Shields Redmond and Eugene B. Redmond are joined by Jennifer Colten to talk about the Mississippi River as a backdrop of life.

An essay collection exploring the past and future infrastructural interventions into the Mississippi River.

What does it mean to be “riverine”? A collage by artist, writer, and activist Shanai Matteson

How can we reach a deeper understanding of the human and non-human histories of the landscapes we are familiar with? A deep time reading of Fort Snelling, Minnesota.

The Anthropocene is a loaded term. In this essay, artist Andrea Carlson reflects on the ideological blindspots of the concept.

Extractive processes have historically shaped the human-environment relations along the Mississippi. In this piece, Morgan Adamson calls for a radical new imagining for the river’s future.

Bruce Braun turns to the underwater ruins of Meeker Dam to look into the histories and continuities of settler colonialism.

How far back dates the cultivation of Maize and how did the practice of maize farming shape the sociopolitical developments in the Mississippi River region?

In this short film, Adrian Pochel, one of the lead organizers of the Chi-Nations Youth Council talks through the group’s work promoting Indigenous rights in the city of Chicago.

How lines of trust—and their ruptures—shape the affective and physical dimensions of both land and territory.

Tracing the role folklore has played—and continues to play—in the quantification and gridification of American landscapes, and the harvesting of worth of all kinds

Since its discovery, perspectives on radioactivity have changed drastically through time. In this piece, physicist Irka Hajdas takes a look into the nuclear past of Weldon Spring, Missouri.

Ancient agricultural practices in the American Bottom were significant in the shaping of the landscapes and foodscapes that exist today.

Deciphering the cosmology of artificial hills—from the Cahokia Mounds to the slag heaps of today.

How have early agricultural practices shaped and altered the environment of the Mississippi? This research project turns to the cultivation of maize to tackle this question.

How did the ancestors of early agricultural crops spread across space? A research project on the influence of animals on human farming practices.

How did the Mississippi River become both cause and register of anthropocenic changes and what do these changes reveal about the Mississippi’s future?

The entire history of American settlement experienced in one afternoon stroll.

How did the agricultural practices of prehistoric civilizations contribute to the environmental conditions of the Anthropocene?

Which kind of ancient crops were cultivated by prehistoric civilizations in eastern North America? Archaeologist Natalie Mueller pursues this question in her research on “lost crops”

In what ways is the Anthropocene embodied in communities and everyday life? An introduction to the conflicting histories of Sauget, Illinois, formerly known as Monsanto Town.

How can we encounter ourselves in the Anthropocene? A study in the deconstruction of cows and an introduction to “The Lost Crops of America” project.

What can the mounds of North America—from temples to landfills—tell us about the history of settlement and the anthropogenic condition we inhabit today?

The impact of fossil fuel emissions on climate change is well established. This research project sheds light on the lesser known origins and history of the petro-industry.

What can the history of slavery tell us about the future of the Anthropocene?

A project on the ephemeral art of carving water.

This seminar engages the complicated entanglements of property claims that cut across the social, racial, and ecological landscapes of the Mississippi Delta, as they pertain to the Anthropocene.

This seminar brings concepts of time, layers, and sediment into close contact with the human sciences, the arts, and Pierre Part, a community who live according to the movements of the River.

The relations between extraction, synthesis, and exploitation, and the effects of commodity dependencies across scales are explored in this seminar, by mapping commodity flows and energy cycles in the Mississippi basin.

The Anthropocene River Campus: The Human Delta synthesized the downstream Mississippi within a week-long field research and educational event at Tulane University, as well as sites in and around New Orleans.

At the “Midway Meeting” in St. Louis, project partners gathered to explore the temporal and topographical multiplicitices of the metropolitcan region of St. Louis.

The kick-off event draws together many of the essential themes and concerns of the overarching journey from the headwaters to New Orleans for a public gathering.

Natchez rests at the intersection of entangled violence of white supremacism and human exceptionalism as they play out on the landscape.

The Upper Delta region is shaped by environmental forces of evolving multiracial identities and inherently global economic forces. Field Station 5 explores the spatial dynamics which formed the contemporary identity of this region.

Public enemy or mascot of a global commons? Tracing the postnatural expansion of the Asian Carp.

A sculptural comment on our apathetic frivolity in the face of climate catastrophe. 

A multigenerational oral history project on the fabric of race, class, labor and the river in St. Louis.

Significant and Insignificant Mounds looks to read two landscapes across one another in order to complicate our understandings of authenticity, meaning, and form.

Corporate personhood has rearticulated how agricultural giant Monsanto operates legally on the landscape.

In the St. Louis region, memories and meanings of millennia of settlement collide. Anthropocene Vernacular investigates how everyday culture has been cultivated in the midst of social, environmental, economic crises.

A traveling seminar on the relations between settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and environmental concerns in the Upper Midwest territory.

What is the relation between large-scale agriculture and biome change? An examination of the infrastructure of the monocrop industry in the Midwestern United States.

This seminar is devoted to collectively discussing this global and ubiquitous entity of the Anthropocene in its social, gendered, and material contexts.

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River aims to make the Mississippi River Basin legible as a zone of ecological, historical, and social interaction between humans and the environment using novel forms of exchange, research, collaboration, and pedagogy.

By going through the transitions in cell evolution and energy regimes, evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler explains the dynamics behind the formation of the metabolic activity and complexity of our planet.

Historian of industrial chemistry Benjamin Steiniger describes the technological metabolism that is forging a connection between fossil materiality and humankind.

What does the practice of gardening enclose about human-plant relations? A field report on the imperial history of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Melbourne.

How does the current notion of “spheres” infiltrate thinking about the bio-techno-sphere, which today seems the best descriptive model for our own habitat?

Historian of science Pietro Daniel Omodeo unpacks spheres from their context in ancient and early modern cosmology and metaphysical doctrine.

This lecture presents a framework for centering the natural world in the writing of history, arguing that without nature historians cannot understand time.

Is the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene a fundamental crisis of modernity?

Is death actually the antagonist of life? In her talk about seeds that are stored in a permafrost environment at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, historian of science Sophia Roosth suggests that suspending living matter challenges our notions of life.

A collaborative campus hosted by Drexel University, Philadelphia, from Oct 22–26, 2017.

The historians’ task in the age of the Anthropocene: Finding hope in Japan?

John McNeill reflects upon the role of historians in the work of the Anthropocene Working Group and the implications for historians of the debates surrounding the Anthropocene.

The technosphere is running in scenario mode. In this introductory lecture, media theorist Sebastian Vehlken picks five exemplary historical scenes to explain how scenario modeling has become a basic function in mediating future crisis.

Using ethnographic material from the largest prayer camp in Nigeria, sociologist and historian of religion Asonzeh Ukah describes the interdependence between religious faith in redemption, prosperity theology, and the (sub)urban infrastructure managed by the camp.

Cultural theorists Claire Colebrook and Cary Wolfe engage in a dialogue about living conditions shaped by anthropocenic activities.

The Iranian island of Kish exemplifies how territorial separation can lead to political and economic hubris in the form of a globalized free-trade zone.

In this essay David Edgerton introduces the concept of creole technology by foregrounding the varied transformations of technologies that attend to locally specific situations and thereby putting actual and derivative use over invention.

Julian Henriques looks at the Jamaican reggae dancehall sound system to explore how this street technology has found creolizing ways to prevail in the neocolonial power struggle between popular culture and Jamaica’s ruling elite.

Andrew Chubb maps the complex space of maritime East Asia, tying together land rights, historical geopolitics, and the creation of artificial islands that construct it.

How did a confluence of telegraphy, shipworms, colonialism, and imported Malay rubber transform the Arabic language into its modern form?

The story of the Yagán, a low-cost utility vehicle, is one of local craft, misdirected politics, and design on-the-fly.

How does the concept of the Anthropocene help to re-evaluate human and non-human agency across sub-disciplines of history?

Deep Time Chicago’ pamphlets delve into the problems, paradoxes and potentials of human and non-human life in a rapidly destabilizing ecosystem.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the growing dependency of national food supplies on fertilizer has turned phosphorus into a critical resource within geopolitical conflicts.

Understanding Australia’s phosphate mining history on Banaba puts into context its current controversial relationship with Nauru and Christmas Island.

Coming to terms with silenced pasts and overlooked narratives. Musings, questions, and anecdotes drawn from encounters in Berlin with unrecognized remnants of Germany’s colonial history.

You as me anything, my answer is the same. An anthem for the pluralization of knowledge.

A look into the emergence of the technosphere concept and its implications for environmental governance.

What triggered the technosphere? This lightning-round presents a visual and aural panorama of events that catalyzed the rise of our contemporary technical worlds.

How did we end up in this world of technological vertigo? This dilemma was the main theme of The Technosphere, Now, a showcase held on October 2, 2015.

“Are we in the Anthropocene?” This publication documents a series of interviews with participants from the Anthropocene Campus in 2014 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).

How does the Anthropocene’s time window relate to before and after? How can futures be understood in relation to the times before when we had no Anthropocene to think with?

How did the former Freshkills landfill in New York City, USA, transform into the wild, yet highly engineered landscape of the landfill mounds?

2027 once was the year when the first manned space-travel mission to Mars were planned. This film recalls the past of this mission: Biosphere 2, a closed self-sustaining environment experiment held in 1991 in the Arizona desert.

The history of forestry management in Germany shows how economic and scientific practices merged to represent the perfect order of nature and state.

A case study on field recordings of the “absence” of a large section of trees that had recently been removed from the site and installed in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, as part of the gallery’s current exhibition

The Anthropocene remains peculiarly flat and colorless when it comes to concrete images, which are lacking cultural nuance and historical depth. New imaginaries and imaginations are needed to engage with alternative futures of infrastructure and anthropogenically altered landscapes.

Field work at the former VEB Elektrokohle Lichtenberg, a site characterized by industrial debris and self-made entrepreneurship

A conceptualization of the human‒nature‒technology nexus needs to examine the uneven geographies and power geometries of the Anthropocene epoch. Satellites are a case in point.

A visual essay on the site of the former VEB Elektrokohle and the Dong Xuan Center Lichtenberg

A visual essay on the remains of VEB Elektrokohle after its demolition

An introduction to the site and history of the Former VEB Elektrokohle Lichtenberg

A reflection on multidimensional and multi-temporal epistemological perspectives required to comprehend and analyze the Anthropocene.