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.

How can we develop landscapes in response to the Anthropocene? A reflection on the defunct Upper Harbor Terminal complex.

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

The models produced by Little River Research & Design convey an acutely material consciousness of the relentless processes of change that shape the Mississippi River.

How do futures emerge? And how are they understood and produced? An examination on the social function of the process of forecasting.

With the establishment of universal standards around 1948, the world is transformed into a technocratic space of transactions. Theoretical and artistic contributions contour the technical standards of an infinitely circulating present.

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.

Through examining the way hydraulic engineers employ and tinker with computational models for managing water-related risks, science and technology scholar Matthijs Kouw argues for a more reflected stand against such modeling practice.

Data, evidence, truth—these grades of the factual form an intricate reference system in which current social and juridical knowledge is established and maintained. How is factual knowledge constituted within and through the technosphere? The evening examines how the concept of legal truth and truth finding is bound to the technical production of certainty.

Data defines the relationship of the technosphere to itself and the world around it. But where is it? How does it rework the body politic or our biological substratum itself?

Applying transdisciplinary systems models to problems such as climate change or global food supply gives us useful heuristics, while forcing us to think about complexity and witness nonlinear and counterintuitive outcomes.

How can systems thinking help us in the analysis of a wicked problem?

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

GSS is a sophisticated integrated assessment model designed to explore avenues toward achieving sustainability. Can such  models provoke useful thinking about the interaction of social and natural systems?

A critical reflection on the ideology of exponential growth.

To avoid normative assumptions of the model builders being implemented into the models, Canadian ecologist Crawford S. Holling developed the concept of adaptive modeling.

How does it come about that individuals who genuinely desire to live in an ethnically mixed neighborhood nevertheless collectively, against their best intentions, produce a segregated town as they each seek optimal housing for themselves?

Notes on wicked problems and complexity.

A conversation on the history of the 1972 “Limits to Growth” computer model, management systems, Chernobyl, and the geopolitical power of images in the era of mass surveillance.