The transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene is turning geology into a social science. Researchers and artists grapple with stratigraphic materials and the challenges of in planetary knowledge production.

Held in June in Foz Côa, June 2021, with the purpose of discussing the need for an EU-inclusive agenda to address the challenges of a rapidly changing planet

Conversations on a multispecies approach to pandemics, the Anthropocene concept, and the visualization of knowledge.

What kind of sign is a marker? Jürgen Renn and Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson sketch the dual role of markers as traces in the strata and symptoms of a destabilized Earth System—an interface between natural archives and human societies.

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.

An Interview with indigenous leader Saundi McClain-Kloeckner.

A dynamic virtual landscape served as a venue for The Shape of a Practice.

The Shape of a Practice constituted an experiment in negotiating the particularities of context, purpose, and method.

Parallax Lisboa is an initiative that experiments with novel ways of knowing and teaching in the Anthropocene. Spanning across a broad range of disciplines, the initiative seeks to make the interdependence of anthropocenic processes sense-able.

How does the Anthropocene inform practices of knowledge production? A conceptual treatment of the guiding questions of the project launch of Mississippi. An Anthropocene River. 

Which forms of educational practices are apt to challenge traditional forms of academic knowledge production? A presentation on the River Semester project by Joe Underhill

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

The year 1948 serves as an aperture through which we can rethink the history of the now; the decisive moment when the heap of fragments left by the fury of two world wars began to reassemble into new forms of technological, scientific, and cultural order that inform our contemporary situation.

“The Elemental” served as the analytical focal point of the ACM18. But how does the ACM18’s commitment to questions of matter shape and affect processes of knowledge production and reproduction?

How can we know about the Anthropocene? In a series of field trips and workshops, the ACM18 took the concept into the field.

At the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne (ACM18), participants engaged in a range of lectures, field trips, and workshops in Melbourne and the wider area exploring the theme of “the Elemental”.

A reflection on the ideological underpinnings and modes of thought that have enabled the Anthropocene.

This report reflects on the ACM18’s guiding theme of “the Elemental” and traces how the concept of the Anthropocene relates to problems of materiality.

Recapitulation of the ACM18 with Andrea Ballestero (Rice University), Nicholas Shapiro (University of Toronto/UCLA), Aadita Chaudhury (York University), and Juan Francisco Salazar (Western Sydney University), hosted by Manuel Tironi (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile).

Bernd Scherer discusses how technology shapes human society, calling attention to how algorithmic software modifies our view of the world.

Human culture has been a culture of chance all along. Around 1948, a new configuration of chance practices becomes operative, and high-quality (pseudo-)random numbers have become indispensable for simulating the design of nuclear weapons, calculating the future of human populations, and modeling the climate. How do we recognize the differences or similarities of these two forms of employing chance tools for making predictions?

The unleashing of the technosphere is, above all, the result of activating and operating numerous tiny switches. With the unfolding of information theory, cybernetics, and the microscopic power of the point-contact transistor, the year 1948 represents the material and theoretical starting point for a universal language of 0s and 1s. Contributions from theory and art oscillate between diagnostic and speculative accounts of the bit’s role in our present.

RIHN 13th International Symposium, December 13–14, 2018, Kyoto – Organized by The Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN)

Historian John Tresch looks at the history of modern science from the angle of spiritual athleticism, ascetic practices and epistemic virtues.

Historian of science Etienne Benson describes how the increasingly complex infrastructure of sensing is altering the experience of fieldwork, the persona of the scientist, and the nature of the knowledge that is produced.

Is a different technosphere possible? Exploring this concept from the perpsective of the Aerocene: a nascent, collaborative, speculative vision of the future.

A poetic reflection on co-evolutions towards the Holocene Museum.

From being to becoming: a historical perspective on the dynamics of change.

Tracing shadows—an examination of technological datasets and Romantic concepts in the study area of Berlin-Moabit.

By whom and where was the information digested, processed, prepared, and served that went on to become Peter Haff’s legendary Technosphere Paper? An Investigation.

The Anthropocene presents us with a unique set of epistemological challenges. From this vantage point, convener Bronislaw Szerszynski reflects on the discussions and activities of this seminar.

A look into the history of the globalization of knowledge.

The interlacing between knowledge and the technosphere has a very subtle yet decisive dimension: the collectively ingrained practices and routines that are the preconditions for adequately responding to the non-human dynamics of a world in transition. What are the regimes of sense training, ascetic modes of inquiry, and techniques of mental cultivation that let us learn and understand something? What might be needed to reshape and modify these in light of the predicament of the Anthropocene?

The biosphere has budded off a second global “sphere,” the technosphere, a technology-based system on which humans now depend—and which they find hard to control. Which tools are needed to ensure human survival in the technosphere?

A report on the perspectives and contributions of the seminar on Filtering the Anthropocene. 

The blurring of distinctions between Earth processes and human history requires us to be “transdisciplinary” and sometimes even “undisciplinary” – in order to combine the knowledge base and research capacities of a wide variety of stakeholders.

Developing models is not a purely scientific, detached exercise: during the seminar participants discuss the politics of computer model simulations.

This group exercise involves constructing a fence out of single segments.

An exercise designed to facilitate a more direct, personalized understanding of the ways in which individual humans, nonhumans, and their attendant objects are connected to the large, often abstract concept of the Anthropocene.

A cartographic exercise that broaches a conceptual framework for thinking about possibilities of inclusion under the umbrella of Slow Media.

Reflections on using establishing an Anthropocene library using slow media

If dialectical distinctions between humans and bacteria were dissolved into an undifferentiated anthropocenic nexus, what new questions would emerge? A reflection by Seth Denizen and Jonathan F. Donges.