Comparing the approaches to radioactive fallout in the US and USSR, Kate Brown retraces the ways in which radio biologists and ecologists assessed and contorted radioactive contamination to study the resilience of ecosystems and human bodies.

Sebastián Ureta gives a thick description of Anthropocene landscapes where vast, stratified dumps of chemical residues that largely outlive their creators.

A River Journey reflection on power, the simultaneously planetary and molecular petrochemical industry, and the petrostate.

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

Since its discovery, perspectives on radioactivity have changed drastically through time. In this piece, physicist Irka Hajdas takes a look into the nuclear past of Weldon Spring, Missouri.

This seminar brings concepts of time, layers, and sediment into close contact with the human sciences, the arts, and Pierre Part, a community who live according to the movements of the River.

This Field Station sets out to engage with the ecologic-economic-technological infrastructures between Kentucky and Illinois and will bring a regionally focused lens to the globally entangled Anthropocene condition.

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River aims to make the Mississippi River Basin legible as a zone of ecological, historical, and social interaction between humans and the environment using novel forms of exchange, research, collaboration, and pedagogy.

How can design reclaim the forms, technologies, economies and logistics of waste streams in the production of urbanism?

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 guiding question of this field report to Melbourne’s sewage treatment plant concerns the temporalities intrinsic to human-made infrastructures.

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 technological dissolution between internal and external conditions for life is manifest in the way seeds are handled. A series of conversations explores the practices and ideologies behind the collapse of modification and mutation. A subsequent performance of micro-processions will conjure historical and current moments of the agro-industrial technosphere.

A field trip to an abandoned Asbestos factory in Ambler, Pennsylvania.

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

Thinking through the multispecies relationships that emerge from contaminated landscapes, postwar rubble, and garbage heaps that may be regarded as “feral technologies.”

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.

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.

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.

The scenario has become a mode of knowledge of the first order. In fact, “running in scenario mode” seems to be the way in which contemporary existence, through the vision of this exploratory practice and tool, exemplifies learning and researching in and on the Anthropocene itself. This evening deals with the trans-methodical arrangement of scenario building and analysis and its specific formatting through institutional and media-based infrastructures.

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?

How did the former Freshkills landfill in New York City, USA, transform into the wild, yet highly engineered landscape of the landfill mounds?

A conceptualization of the human‒nature‒technology nexus needs to examine the uneven geographies and power geometries of the Anthropocene epoch. Satellites are a case in point.

A series of case studies on anthropogenic landscapes