Technosphere × Knowledge
Presentations, talks, demonstrations, film / Apr 14–16, 2016
A new component of the Earth system is emerging today, comparable in scale and function to the bio- and hydrosphere. It is driven by the intertwining of natural environments with vast socio-technical forces and increasingly diverse technological species.
Technosphere × Knowledge, the second event of the Technosphere (2015-19) project, marked the launch of the Anthropocene Campus: The Technosphere Issue, an eight-day teaching and learning experiment, in which new forms of knowledge production and dissemination were tested and the implications of the technosphere examined.
Technosphere × Knowledge investigates the interlacing between this technosphere and current modes of knowledge production — how both condition, sustain, and multiply each other. Without modern science there is no technosphere, without the technosphere there is no contemporary knowledge. On the one hand contemporary knowledge allows for the theoretical understanding and technical mastery of energy and matter and thus the existence of a technosphere. On the other hand it is the technosphere that arranges, shapes, and propels current knowledge, for example, through data pooling, institutionalized evidence production, and the anthropotechniques of learning and comprehending. Three evenings critically investigate exemplary practices and modes of what might be termed “technospherical knowledge,” its reciprocal facilitation and stabilization, its self-fulfilling prophecies and dead-ends, its urgency and utopian potential. It examines means to speculate about an unknowable future, questions the metrics and measures of juridical evidence, and entrains alternative techniques and practices of knowing, sensing, and experiencing.
- projectPeter L. Galison, Sander van der Leeuw, Claire Pentecost, Sebastian Vehlken
The Scenario Mode
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.
Communicating, Film, Storytelling, Teaching, Engagement, Adaptation, Big data, Calculation, Complexity, Contingency, Computation, Deep time, Disaster, Governance, Games, Policy, Radioactivity, Scenario, Waste
- projectKeith Breckenridge, Melanie Gilligan, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Brian Holmes, Susan Schuppli
Truth Measures
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.
Conversation, Intervention, Reflection, Storytelling, Teaching, Adaptation, Complexity, Computation, Ethics, Governance, Knowledge infrastructure, Infrastructure, Representation, Model, Scale, Environmental Justice, Waste, Violence
- projectJeremy Bolen, Roman Brinzanik, Sasha Engelmann, Deborah Haaksman, Rebekka Ladewig, Alex Martinis Roe, Melanie Sehgal, Bronislaw Szerszynski, John Tresch, Hendrik Weber, Andrew Yang
Wisdom Techniques
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?
Communicating, Conversation, Intervention, Sensing, Storytelling, Teaching, Aerocene, Adaptation, Anthropos, Care, Consensus, Cosmologies, Disciplinarity, Embodiment, Habits, Knowledge production, Knowledge transformation, Scale, Scenario, Wisdom
- projectcontinent., Jamie Allen, Paul Boshears, Alice Cannava, Bernard Geoghegan, Lionel Ruffel, Adania Shibli
Knowledge × Sharing
Communicating, Intervention, Reflection, Storytelling, Consensus, Education, Equality, Knowledge transformation, Wisdom, Adaptation, Care, Aesthetics
