How do tropes and images of a changing ocean operate in a larger system of cultural sensemaking? Killian Quigley collects a range of threads to map the disfiguration and deformation of an anthropocenic biosphere that swells below the sea’s surface.

How might critical artistic mapping reveal the relations of power that dominate a region?

In Germany, being labelled as a person with a “migration background” comes with various forms of discrimination. What do people who have lived this have to say about it?

What’s left of “refugees welcome”, the slogan popularized in Europe in 2015? What comes from speaking out in solidarity while having very limited power to achieve political change?

Introduction to the themes of Season 2 of the Field Station 5 podcast, which began during the 2019 project Mississippi. An Anthropocene River.

What does aesthetic regionalism disclose about local effects of the Anthropocene?

A bonus episode on centering Indigenous presence on the Mississippi Landscape.

A conversation on the evolution of agriculture and foodways, and how that has affected representations of landscape, cuisine—and a cracker box.

In the context of the seminar “Anthropocene and the Media,” students of new media theorist John Kim have developed diverse approaches and perspectives of examining the Mississippi River in relation to the Anthropocene.

This project identifies rivers as crucial for investigating representations of the Anthropocene, via the medium of experimental documentary film.

What modes of collecting, representing, and knowing are appropriate to meet the conceptual and practical challenges of the Anthropocene? Which narrative forms and styles can help us to document states of flux and transformation, across multiple scales of space and time?

By rejecting the normative concepts we project onto technology, Terre Thaemlitz points toward what other visions of the human might be freed up in the process.

How can the concept of “the Elemental” inform the ways in which we speak about the Anthropocene?

Sociologist and epistemologist Bruno Latour interprets the disorienting situation we currently face along new lines of representation. Using the shift in cosmological perspective from the globe to the Earth brought about by the two concepts of Gaia and the Critical Zone, Latour reflects on the emergence of a new political subject: the “terrestrial.”

Pluralization is a step towards a democracy of operative language allowing different markers of time, thought, tools, realities, scales, causalities, effects, and categories to coexist and participate in shaping global vocabularies.

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.

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?

Is the Anthropocene an issue of agency rather than representation? How do we create devices for thinking through direct engagement with materials that indicate the challenges which require our participation?

What images do we get if we try to go beyond aiming to depict the Anthropocene as a general phenomenon? How can we and our everyday practice be visualized?

This reflection addresses the realities and politics of “slow media,” using comics to explore how ideals of “slowness” interface with class privilege, consumerism, forms of attention, and counter-culture.

A geological map of Paris, layering the “human” with the “natural”.

How can monstrous occurances help us to sense and imagine the sublime?

Report on the activities and contributions of the seminar on Slow Media. 

A reflection on the Anthropocene thesis as a concept for curatorial ways to address nature–culture relations.

How to exhibit the Anthropocene? The Deutsches Museum Munich takes part in the global debate on this issue with a show presented here by the curator.

Reflections on using establishing an Anthropocene library using slow media

The folding and unfolding of human and non-human life are perturbed and distorted in the Anthropocene in unfamiliar ways. Which tools are adequate to think beyond the myopic orbit of human exceptionalism?