Part of State of Nature 2022, the exhibition New Natures: A Terrible Beauty is Born was a proposition to rethink the world as we know it today.

Tracing socio-political upheavals and technological change in sediment samples from Sihailongwan Lake in northeastern China.

A conversation with Jan Zalasiewicz on the geological Anthropocene research.

Media scholar Adam Wickberg outlines ​​how knowledge about the environment and media technologies ​have always ​evolve​d​ in tandem​; the history of anthropogenic markers can therefore be understood as a process of environing media.

How can an archaeology of the present address molecules as driving elements of the “Great Acceleration”? Benjamin Steininger contends that the apparatus of catalytic chemistry has triggered a cascade of accelerations which lead to the Anthropocene.

Artist Felipe Castelblanco and researcher Nishant Shah propose that communication must be freed from its desire for intelligibility and claims to knowledge.

Abbéy Odunlami and guests discuss climate-induced migration and displacement as pressing issues on the bumpy road towards coherent climate and migration policies in the EU.

How has the technosphere come to shape the Mississippi in its current formation? An excurse by geologist Peter K. Haff

The exploratory research project Technosphere 2015–2019 investigated the origins and future itineraries of technological agency in the Anthropocene.

Listening to the stories and sounds that resonate around the Mississippi can show how ecosystems exist within multiple crisscrossing interrelations.

The role of engineering river systems toward human aims and the consequences this has on multiple scales is the key concern of this seminar.

Science and technology historians Gabrielle Hecht and Paul N. Edwards ask whether the concept of the technosphere is a truly useful tool, simple silverware, or merely a barren gadget for understanding the current and future condition of planet Earth.

Could it be said that with the development of the technosphere, the Earth is currently undergoing a shift to a state of greater activity?

What can we learn about care and processing emotions from soil cultivation?

The German publication Technosphäre collects contributions thinking through the conditions and evolution of this new Earth system player. Included here are two selections from the book in English translation: the editorial introduction and a conversation between Peter K. Haff and Jürgen Renn.

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.

Sound artist Yoneda Lemma discusses her composition Calm can only make it false (Noise Floor), and the techno-political underpinnings of her compositional practice.

Musicologist Amy Cimini discusses Maryanne Amacher’s (1938–2009) unrealized media opera Intelligent Life (1980–), which draws influence from cutting-edge scientific knowledge and popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s.

Musician C. Spencer Yeh pushes speech synthesizers trained to represent Chinese dialects to the threshold of intelligibility and recognition.

What do machines hear that humans cannot? Artist Florian Hecker explores the formal, perceptual, and aesthetic possibilities afforded by custom machine-listening software.

Composer, musicologist, and improviser George Lewis explores the issues that arise in encounters between machine listeners and their biological counterparts.

In Ben Vida’s composition Heteroglossic Riot, software reads text scores, creating an interplay that points to the idiosyncratic possibilities offered by computationally assisted translation.

Composer, musicologist, and improviser George Lewis discusses Rainbow Family (1984), a groundbreaking work that employs proto-machine-listening software to analyze an improviser’s performance in real time, while generating both responses to the musician’s playing and independent behavior arising from the program’s processes. 

Guest curator Stefan Maier introduces WaveNet, Google’s recently released speech synthesizer that is capable of both remarkable realism and abjection through applied machine listening.

Jamie Allen’s writings map the relations, tensions, and collusions between material and knowledge infrastructures and actual and modelled ecologies, and Merle Ibach prepares images to accompany these.

Inspired by the Lena River Delta in northern Siberia, Ksenia Tatarchenko reflects on filmic dramatizations of far-off and inaccessible places, capturing the role Soviet modernity had in establishing interconnection in isolation.

Literary scholar Karen Pinkus puts current polar geoengineering scenarios and their uncertain consequences into context.

In a speculative provocation, researchers Francesco Sebregondi, Alexey Platonov, Inna Pokazanyeva, and Ildar Iakubov ask whether a full-scale, decentralized model of territorial development could be our best option to reckon with an open Arctic Ocean.

Activist and artist Subhankar Banerjee and engineer Lois Epstein depict the threatening environmental impact of an extractivist technosphere.

Researcher Kei Kreutler analyzes the decentralized, consensus-driven decision processes implemented in blockchain technologies.

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?

Borders not only define political law, they also constitute geographic realities built of infrastructure, forging politics into the landscape.

Anthropologist Chowra Makaremi works through the strangely technical choreography of “non-lethal” force and its implementation for detaining people at borders.

Political scientist Kim Rygiel investigates the difficult values that underlie the enforcement of who belongs in a political structure and who does not.

In a filmed conversation, activist Isabelle Saint-Saëns and migration scholar Bernd Kasparek discuss the multiform regimes of border-making and the types of social order being implemented in Europe and internationally.

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?

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.

Hydrocarbons plunges into the complexities and contradictions of the oil era and thereby into the molecular basis of the technosphere. Interweaving film scenes with a variety of visual and research materials, as well as the “sounds of oil,” the session explores the speculative cultural genre termed “petro noir,” examining the geopolitical-industrial complex that drives petrochemistry and, by consequence, mobility, consumption, waste and adventure.

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.

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.

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.

Photographer Hannes Wiedemann depicts the bodyhacking subculture in California, capturing its adherents in their garages and makeshift laboratories.

In this artistic formulation, Florian Goldmann makes popular risk indexes fungible, specifically their conflation of natural disaster with financial disaster.

Social scientists Liv Østmo and John Law explain how threats to the relational practices of the Sámi, who have lived in the Arctic regions of Scandinavia for millennia, complicates the ontology of an entire region.

Levees and dams form the fluvial geography of the technosphere. Landscape architect Richard Hindle shows how patents have historically catalyzed the establishment of these formations.

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.

Creolized technologies can be understood as reasserting the “human” in the technosphere, but theorist and urbanist Elisa T. Bertuzzo argues that this is not necessarily humane.

Gerda Heck demonstrates how Pentecostal churches have become powerful infrastructural actors that hold together mobile communities between Africa and Europe.

While the vast macro and micro scales of the technosphere can be difficult to grapple with, so too is the complexity of its many interactions. The artists Andrew Yang and Jeremy Bolen propose a modest attunement exercise to counter this inaccessibility.

How does the human body fit into technospheric conceptualizations of performance, efficiency, and optimization?

Tokyo University researchers demonstrate the explicit interfaces between the human somatic niche and the technosphere.

In a series of videos, texts and audio, artist Claire Tolan depicts how the ASMR subculture works to connect people in intimate auditory ways over the internet, providing therapy for the alienations and isolations the digital world created.

What techniques do we use when we navigate between the human voice, governmental law and the concept of justice in the technosphere?

What should we make of the “fire walls” between the real and the virtual? Anthropologist Lucy Suchman attends critically to the imaginaries that are realized in the the figuration of places and bodies simulations.

Keith Breckenridge recognizes a particular mode of capitalism currently developing on the African continent: population registries based on biometric identification technologies that serve as a credit risk scoring tool for financial firms.

Petrol generators are an essential part of the energy supply in Nigeria. Brian Larkin explores the consequences of these generators and their parasitical relationship to more formal infrastructures through the presence of noise and pollution.

Following the gravestone of a young Jewish woman used as the ballast for a ship, Laleh Khalili maps the infrastructure of imperialism and its relation to logistics to create an image of the technosphere as it expands geographically along its many ports.

Experimental collective continent. lead a semi-improvised discussion that hints at the links between the individual and their passions for research.

Sasha Engelmann and Jol Thomson guide us into the depths of Antarctica’s ancient ice, where ghost-like neutrinos cast electromagnetic showers, or cascades, as they chance to interact with the Earth.

Phosphorus is arguably the most precious of all mineral resources. Without it, all living things would perish, yet it is rare within our everyday environments.

As environments increasingly become computational so does computation become environmental. Jennifer Gabrys shows how the instrumentation of the planet with sensor devices produces specific forms of concretizations that have a life of their own and contour the earthly space anew.

Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz considers the technofossils that far-future archaeologists will find when digging up the landfills of the global experiment called Anthropocene.

Writer Rana Dasgupta follows the data paths of the technosphere from the rural crafts cultures of India into new cultures of global desire, with stops at Facebook and in Hollywood, formulating two universal machines—technology and commerce—which he sees as a global technomarket.

Environmental historian Johan Gärdebo introduces us to the outermost layer of the technosphere, where satellites and their debris now orbit the planet.

In his artistic narration, Nile Koetting cycles through a series of inquiries about free and ubiquitous energy and the spectacle that results.

The historical precursor to the technosphere concept is Vladimir Vernadsky’s holistic delineation of the biosphere, a grand scheme of entangling living and non-living matter.

In his coining of the term “technosphere,” geoscientist Peter Haff attempts to describe the physical properties of a human-technological system that takes on a role equivalent to the biosphere or hydrosphere.

Philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli investigates the curious history of the phantom limb syndrome and how it chronicles the confluence of war trauma research, neurology, cybernetics and the philosophy of mind.

One cardinal source of the trauma induced by the technosphere is sonic: the ubiquity of anthropophonic vibrations passing through our environments.

In the course of its productive and consumptive functions, the technosphere transforms energy, materials, and information. It uses energy in part to transform information, while information guides the metabolism of energy.

“Now you’re sounding even weirder than Peter Haff.” The gloves are off! A lively dispute about the usefulness of the Technosphere concept in general.

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

Technology can no longer be regarded a tool as it rather presents an integral part of our social world today. An introductory reflection on the seminar by Daniel Niles.

What are future decision-makers learning at college today? And how will it effect the direction the Anthropocene is taking? Making the case for a change in the teaching of economics.

How can we grasp the immense physical and temporal dimensions of the technosphere and why should we isolate the human agency within it? An argument for taking a metropolitan perspective.

What forms of futurity, speculation, and life do algorithmic intermediations produce? To explore this it seems expedient to focus on “smartness,” a term legitimating—as in the “smart home”—the increased introduction of computation in social life.

How is the Technosphere governed? And how could it be governed otherwise? One way to tackle these issues is by looking at cybernetic finance—showing how a complex system can be overtaken by an excess of self-reference.

If the technosphere is a condition of the Anthropocene, we ought to acknowledge the dangers of making technology seem “natural.” Critical discard studies can help us make visible the violence that has gone into making the technosphere.

This micro-publication looks at the city of Chicago as a site of origin for materials, particles, and social relations that define the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene.

How is the technosphere inscribed into individual human bodies? How are they restructured along a complex machinery of instruments, techniques, simulations?

Within the technosphere, earth becomes energy, people become populations and space becomes sphere. But how to make visible this network of flows coursing through our bodies?

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

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?

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.

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?

An edited transcript of a debate addressing the dynamical, co-evolutionary nature of the technosphere, its quasi-autonomous status, and the political stakes involved.

Plastic is one of the most ubiquitous materials of the contemporary moment. How do we deal with its effects on the health of both humans and animals?