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

Held in June in Foz Côa, June 2021, with the purpose of discussing the need for an EU-inclusive agenda to address the challenges of a rapidly changing planet

From 2022 to 2024, the Earth and Us project will foster and articulate the South and Latin American communities engaged in the Anthropocene debate.

Age of the Earth covers an array of initiatives which aim to think, feel, and act through the troubles of the Anthropocene, fostering South and Latin American perspectives.

Provoking a paradigm shift in academic research, public policy, and social engagement through collaborations with scientists and artists.

An expansive educational and research collaboration through the formation of five river hubs spanning the Mississippi River’s headwaters to the Gulf.

What does the Baltic Sea drill core reveal about microplastics and the difficulty of defining their sources? Part of Unearthing the Present in May 2022.

Catherine Russell invites us into the University of Leicester geology archive and proposes that archives are teeming with potential for new understandings.

Historian Florike Egmond (University of Leiden) gives a keynote lecture about the historic relationship between humans and water on the Dutch river delta.

How consideration of the local effects of global dependencies, can help us to reckon with—and change—our role in sustaining often damaging entanglements of commodity flows.

In response to the complicated entanglements of property claims in the Mississippi Delta, Sarah Lewison advocates for witnessing injustice as a way of preparing for repair.

How a “blues epistemology” can establish the critical historical consciousness crucial for determining more just futures in the Anthropocene.

From agricultural slavery to petroleum, the banks of the Mississippi in Louisiana represent an Anthropocenic space characterized by a slow history of extraction.

On immersive, field-based education and an exploration of the (dis)comforts of an approach Anthropocene River Travelers describe as “being at home-in-the-world.”

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

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.

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.

Over the course of eighty days, this canoe expedition offers an immersive research program on and along the Mississippi River.

Focusing on the limits—and opportunities—exhaustion engenders, in this seminar the difficulties of being out of energy and out of ideas will be related to the challenges posed by 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.

The articulation of risk assessment and management as being at the heart of environmental justice is the focus of this seminar, which explores the paired concepts of risk and equity through lived experiences.

This seminar engages the complicated entanglements of property claims that cut across the social, racial, and ecological landscapes of the Mississippi Delta, as they pertain to the Anthropocene.

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.

The relations between extraction, synthesis, and exploitation, and the effects of commodity dependencies across scales are explored in this seminar, by mapping commodity flows and energy cycles in the Mississippi basin.

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.

Free, online courses which connect people across the globe in an effort to collaboratively produce Anthropocene knowledge.

How has the Mississippi River region been documented, analyzed, and described thus far, and how have these practices set the stage for further research?

The New Orleans Anthropocene Field Campus investigates site-specific processes of environmental change and injustice and develops tactics for interdisciplinary engagement with the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene River School integrates the work of the Anthropocene River Field Stations and transforms the research into an ongoing, collaborative teaching enterprise.

At the “Midway Meeting” in St. Louis, project partners gathered to explore the temporal and topographical multiplicitices of the metropolitcan region of St. Louis.

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

The kick-off event draws together many of the essential themes and concerns of the overarching journey from the headwaters to New Orleans for a public gathering.

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.

By going through the transitions in cell evolution and energy regimes, evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler explains the dynamics behind the formation of the metabolic activity and complexity of our planet.

The arrival of the Anthropocene coincides with the era of political demands for “universal freedom,” as defined by Western philosophers. But whose freedom is this?

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.

Blockchain technologies have become the prism through which ideas about trust and social relationships are technologically negotiated. Sociologist and design theorist Benjamin Bratton explores both the potentials and pitfalls of this technical architecture.

In this lecture, political scientist Nick Srnicek contends that to relieve humans of their dependency on markets, commodity labor needs to be transformed, if not abolished outright.

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.”

Is death actually the antagonist of life? In her talk about seeds that are stored in a permafrost environment at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, historian of science Sophia Roosth suggests that suspending living matter challenges our notions of life.

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?

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.

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.

How have ideas of equity, security and inclusion become central to scholarship of the Anthropocene?

What is revealed through the politics of pace during disasters? What are the dynamics and political illegibility of slow disaster?

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

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.

In this enlightening lecture, sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina elaborates on three developmental stages in technology that enable the global financial market, and the foreign exchange market in particular.

Looking at the cables and antennae that bring the networked data between different trading floors into correspondence, Donald MacKenzie depicts the time-critical infrastructure of automated finance.

With a critical eye to what aesthetics in/of/through the Anthropocene might mean, we will engage with ways that established forms of perceiving might be transformed in the broadest sense—toward new sensitivities of the long now, and the emergent technosphere that conditions our understanding of it.

In order to rearrange our mental landscapes, we must learn not to pull on one end of the thread, but to engage the knot as a whole. Instructions for a complex relationship role-play.

Hurry, there are limited seats! Exploring social stratification and the limits of cooperation with the help of peanuts and musical chairs.

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.

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.

How can we decolonize the disembodied truth-claims of picture making? Instructions for analyzing images using five senses and more.

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.

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.

The interlacing between knowledge and the technosphere has a very subtle yet decisive dimension: the collectively ingrained practices and routines that are the preconditions for adequately responding to the non-human dynamics of a world in transition. What are the regimes of sense training, ascetic modes of inquiry, and techniques of mental cultivation that let us learn and understand something? What might be needed to reshape and modify these in light of the predicament of the Anthropocene?

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.

Scale, metabolism, sensing, agency—this publication introduces some of the concepts essential to the interdisciplinary debate around 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.

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

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.

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. 

An exercise designed to facilitate a more direct, personalized understanding of the ways in which individual humans, nonhumans, and their attendant objects are connected to the large, often abstract concept of the Anthropocene.

A cartographic exercise that broaches a conceptual framework for thinking about possibilities of inclusion under the umbrella of Slow Media.