The artist Julian Charrière artificially remodels a biogeochemical cycle and casts it into a performance of reverse extraction: carbon molecules are captured from the air and turned into diamonds which are then “wastefully” cast into a glacier.

Knowledge of the onset of the Anthropocene is intimately connected to nuclear technoscience on the one hand and to the governance of environmental problems, such as atmospheric pollution, on the other.

Christoph Rosol reflects on the disturbing schism between geoscientific insights and the info-capitalist modus operandi diluting these insights to mere noise. Are we ready to comprehend what the Earth has already recorded?

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.

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

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

A home-built device travels downstream to explore the limits of digital representation and the possibilities of uncertain knowledge.

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.

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.

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

Alternative projections of terrain and its technonatural reality are a powerful tool in fictionalizing the existent. Artist Rohini Devasher envisions the space between landscape, recording technology, and their relationship to our planet.

Historian of science Sabine Höhler explores the technoscientific motives and consequences of experimenting with self-contained ecospheres.

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.

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

Untangling processes of environmental change and extreme environments mediated by and through technology.

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.

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.

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.

Ethnographer S. Løchlann Jain poetically examines how commodities and violence sustain one another in the technosphere.

In his feverish essay concerning the role of these efficient, yet paltry, energy distribution devices called humans, science writer Dorion Sagan exits the Anthropocene in pursuit of epochs, evolutionary constellations and thermodynamic possibilities beyond consensus models.

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.

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.

“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.

Wherein lies the connection between formalization processes and sociopolitical change? An introduction into Felix Guattari’s protocol of organization.

Godofredo Pereira on the Yasuní-ITT initiative and the de-colonial possibilities of techno-scientific practices

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 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.

The Axiomatic Earth describes a condition in which calculation becomes a site of political struggle. Technologies of calculation do not simply present an improved perspective of the world, but a different world altogether.

An essay that explores the concept and implications of feedback, a step that is central to a better understanding of the Anthropocene.