Understanding the changing human-Earth relation of the Anthropocene by combining research on technology, media, and political ecology with activism and front-line environmentalism.

An initiative that explores the entangled histories of a multiplicity of Anthropocene narratives.

How do we connect pollutant markers demarcating the Anthropocene with the exploitative and unequal anthropogenic-economic-industrial systems that created them?

An in progress digital publication resulting from the artistic installation presented at HKW by Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke with the scientists of the AWG.

Taking place in 2024, Anthropocene Campus Latin America event will create an experiential space for collective change, learning, and creation.

This travelling exhibition, co-produced by the ZKM, Karlsruhe and Goethe-Institut Mumbai, invites visitors to engage with the critical situation of our planet.

The search for the coordinates, overlaps, convergences, and tensions that arise when myriad cosmologies converge around a common intent.

The search for a common planetary practice becomes tangible, as the five research questions are linked to a series of activities.

In an experimental setting designed by artist Koki Tanaka, scientists, scholars, and artists share various perspectives on planetary practice.

In the fall of 2022, AC initiatives from around the world came together to envision a transformed future for the long-term collaboration of the network.

Koki Tanaka explains his approach to designing five experimental settings for Where is the Planetary?

Where is the Planetary? curatorial statement

Where is the Planetary? is a collective search for models of living together on Earth.

What is the new geological epoch made of? Unearthing the Present connected the geological analysis of the present with a discussion of the changing scope for social and political agency.

Imagining the satirical intersection between two disparate worlds—field biology research on army ants and working for a machine learning startup.

A contribution collaboratively authored by members of the Anthropocene Curriculum team, that attempts to think dialogically “on curricula.”

Whatever moment the river might invite us to, it is a thick moment, a moment in motion. Audio piece and notes to the listener.

Closing the opening week of The Shape of a Practice, this meal-at-a-distance brought speakers to the transatlantic kitchen table along with so-called invasive species from the US and Germany.

Space for studying Anthropocene-related changes can occur intentionally, through institutions and other projects, but it can just as easily occur by accident.

Some of the most interesting work on the Anthropocene takes place in between places, in between disciplines, and even in between the lines.

How do materials from different forms of research communicate with each other?

The Shape of a Practice constituted an experiment in negotiating the particularities of context, purpose, and method.

Exploring the amorphous fabric of technologies, environments, and humans shaping Earth’s critical future.

A reflection by archaeologist and ethnobotanist Natalie G. Mueller on how sharing meal of long lost plants transformed her research perspective.

Through a series of conversations Temporary continent. track the different guises the Mississippi has taken, interviewing those who live and work with the river.

What can the Mississippi River Valley teach us about how to read the planetary shifts of the Anthropocene through its local waterways and landscapes?

The Mississippi’s touristically designated “source” remains a fixture on maps of North American territory and collective cultural consciousness, as this text, video, and audio post explores.

There is no one correct way to listen to the river; there are multiple listenings, and multiple rivers.

This text is excerpted from an ongoing project looking at the relationship between Blackness and the Mississippi River.

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

An animated guide to life in the Mississippi mud.

The end of mankind is almost over: a short film on de-colonized futures.

How can the Anthropocene be analyzed in its site-specific manifestations? And how can such knowledge be produced collaboratively? A documentary on the knowledge strategies of the first Anthropocene Field Campus.

The Open Seminar will direct collaborative attention to the many scales and types of systems that interlace and synergize to produce anthropocenics on the ground in particular locales and vernanculars.

The St. Louis Field Campus aimed at creating situated, place-based perspectives of the Anthropocene, while building new modes of collective knowledge-production and action.

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

Temporary continent. maps the unstable tributaries of contributions and reflections arising from the research procession down the river.

The Anthropocene River Campus: The Human Delta synthesized the downstream Mississippi within a week-long field research and educational event at Tulane University, as well as sites in and around New Orleans.

A sculptural comment on our apathetic frivolity in the face of climate catastrophe. 

A multi-scale map of the Mississippi watershed around St. Louis for the “river rats” of the Anthropocene.

Using artistic underwater recordings, Listening to the Mississippi asks listeners to experience the river through sound.

Essays from members of the AWG and other researchers discussing some of the crucial aspects that make the Mississippi River an icon of global Anthropocene transformations.

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.

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.

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.

What are the implications of using one’s voice to improvise with a neural network? Composer Jennifer Walshe and artist Memo Akten create an artificially intelligent duet partner.

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.

How did nineteenth century recipes describing practices of natural dyeing in India come to constitute technologies for green production for the future?

Tracing thoughts on the inhuman found in ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts up through recent functionalist theories of mind, artist and theorist Anil Bawa-Cavia calls for a new, diagonalized notion of reason distinct from that of logos still employed by humans.

Using the slime mold Physarum polycephalum as a many-headed case in point, artist Jenna Sutela delves into the petri dish that is cognition.

In this compositional experiment, a robotic arm, mineral crystals and an interactive landscape co-evolve, producing an ecological space away from human incursion.

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.

What does it mean to share or feel another’s embodied experience?

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

What does it mean to become aerosolar? Field notes from Berlin

Becoming an embodied researcher requires training.

How can we envision future life-forms? With the help of an overhead projector and paper cutouts we enter the anthropocenic version of Plato’s cave.

Petroleum is a dark, thick distillation of mosses, bones, bodies, and beings condensed over time together. What was it anticipating? Did it expect to be discovered and extracted in such a relative instant?

If you need to close your eyes, you may. If you need to leave the room, you may. If you have to leave the exercise, you may. An Exercise in not doing doing.

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 might sound be used to translate nonhuman intelligences and systems into understandable forms? Speculative visions and imaginative states for the extension of the sonic arts into them realm of the Aerocene.

A reflection on the educational experiments and epistemological perspectives of the seminar on geo-politics.

2027 once was the year when the first manned space-travel mission to Mars were planned. This film recalls the past of this mission: Biosphere 2, a closed self-sustaining environment experiment held in 1991 in the Arizona desert.

The Anthropocene remains peculiarly flat and colorless when it comes to concrete images, which are lacking cultural nuance and historical depth. New imaginaries and imaginations are needed to engage with alternative futures of infrastructure and anthropogenically altered landscapes.

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.

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?

The blurring of distinctions between Earth processes and human history requires us to be “transdisciplinary” and sometimes even “undisciplinary” – in order to combine the knowledge base and research capacities of a wide variety of stakeholders.

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

Grasping the Anthropocene demands a sense of deceleration—we need “slow media” that by analogy with the slow food movement, engages with the complexities of a rapidly changing world by slowing down to the pace of a museum visit or engaging with physical or visual objects. 

The Anthropocene compels us to re-think our modes of knowledge production. A statement on the necessity for radically interdisciplinary modes of research.

This group exercise involves constructing a fence out of single segments.

A visual essay on the remains of VEB Elektrokohle after its demolition

Reflections on using establishing an Anthropocene library using slow media

If dialectical distinctions between humans and bacteria were dissolved into an undifferentiated anthropocenic nexus, what new questions would emerge? A reflection by Seth Denizen and Jonathan F. Donges.