The Skeletal Remains of the Nuclear Anthropocene
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. (...)
The Technofossil Record: Where Archaeology and Paleontology Meet
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Traces and Symptoms
What kind of sign is a marker? Jürgen Renn and Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson sketch the dual role of markers as traces in the strata and symptoms of a destabilized Earth System—an interface between natural archives and human societies. (...)
Troubling Sedimentations
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Visualizing the Vibrant Materiality of Place
What insights can artistic research data produce in the scientific analysis of the natural archive? Xandra van der Eijk addresses the value of artmaking with, through, and between the materiality of place in the sediment samples of Sydney Harbour. (...)
Weight of Shadows
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. (...)
Whale Falls, Carbon Sinks
The following essay and mapping exercise on whales reflects on the natural-cultural history of these creatures whose non-human bodies allow for thinking across different aesthetic and epistemic registers. (...)
When the Signal Disappears in the Noise
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? (...)
Mud, Microfossils, and the Anthropocene
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Philosophy of Nature Is Yet To Come!
Researcher Michael Marker gives the first keynote lecture of the State of Nature: Dialogues conference. (...)
The Art of Climate Emergency
For the third keynote lecture of the State of Nature: Dialogues conference, art historian and cultural critic TJ Demos reflects on the art of climate emergency. (...)
We are All Connected: the State of Nature and What We Are Doing to Ourselves
Poet and author Ruth Padel delivers the second keynote lecture of the State of Nature: Dialogues conference. (...)
Venice: City of the Anthropocene
Pietro Daniel Omodeo looks at the water city as a symbol for human-environment relations in the Anthropocene. (...)
Born a Minim
Imagining the satirical intersection between two disparate worlds—field biology research on army ants and working for a machine learning startup. (...)
If a tree falls, and no data is around…
Environmental historian Johan Gärdebo explores the complex history of the relationship between data and the environment. (...)
Notes Toward a Karachi Ecopedagogy
What does it mean to sense, to know, to witness? Artists Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani propose an “ecopedagogy” that awakens us to a network of relationality. (...)
A Mirage Mirror
Artist Felipe Castelblanco and researcher Nishant Shah propose that communication must be freed from its desire for intelligibility and claims to knowledge. (...)
Rewriting Climate Politics
How are the relationships between state, market, natural environments, and citizens understood? And how does this create or foreclose political and ethical agency? (...)