The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang
Jeremy Bolen, Heather Davis, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang pooled their efforts to lead Sensing the Insensible: Aesthetics In, Through, and Against the Anthropocene, a group seminar at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s (HKW’s) 2016 Anthropocene Curriculum: The Technosphere Issue. In the following conversation, I meet with three of the four conveners to explore how aesthetic and political concerns are embroiled in conceptions of the Anthropocene and how we determine it’s origin. (...)
Aerocene at Understanding Risk 2022
In late November the Aerocene community was invited to fly aerosolar at the Understanding Risk global forum, in Florianópolis, Brazil. Understanding Risk is a global community of experts and practitioners with interest in “disastrology”, the field which studies disasters from all points of view and establishes guidelines for their management. (...)
Interdisciplinary Environmental History: How Narratives of the Past can meet the Challenges of the Anthropocene
A new paper in the journal Annales discusses vital methodological issues for humanities-based historical inquiry and argues that the challenges of the Anthropocene demand interdisciplinary research informed by a variety of historical narratives (...)
ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE
These case study reports focuses on “worst case” scenarios for release of toxic chemicals in settings across California. The reports addresses a series of ten questions that draw out local details in a manner that encourages comparison with other places.
The research has been done quickly (within the constraints of a quarter-long undergraduate class) so is limited to and points to the need for further research and community engagement. The goal is to help build both a body of research on enviro (...)
Anthropocene Commons, 2022 –
Emerging from the Anthropocene Curriculum (2013–22), the Anthropocene Commons is an open network of activists, artists, educators, researchers, and scientists who create shared spaces to imagine and explore transformative pedagogies and research practices for collective action. (...)
Anthropocene Working Group 2009 –
The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is an interdisciplinary geoscience research group dedicated to the investigation of the chronostratigraphic reality of the Anthropocene. The AWG was established in 2009 by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), a component body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the committee that oversees the standards and requirements for the ongoing review and further completion of the geologic time scale. (...)
Shifting Landscapes: Urban Enslavement in Antebellum New Orleans
Students and faculty around the world began to create new virtual and augmented reality projects like Sojourners' Trail - the first interactive, Afrofuturist classroom game. Sojourners' Trail featured a time-traveling framework to explore Black communities at their peak of social and economic vitality, shattering mythologies of intergenerational poverty and dysfunction among African American families. (...)
KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Stockholm 2012–
Understanding the changing human-Earth relation of the Anthropocene by combining research on technology, media, and political ecology with activism and front-line environmentalism. (...)
Mediated Planet: Claiming Data for Environmental SDGs
A research project run by the KTH Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment from 2021-2025 exploring the global environment as emerging through environmental data. (...)
SPHERE. Study of the Planetary Human-Environment Relationship
The historical research project SPHERE focuses on one of the most comprehensive and complex governance issues in the contemporary world: humanity’s relation to planetary conditions and constraints. (...)
Chapter 1: Through the Vast Machine
How does planetarity and its composition shift under conditions of planetary change? (...)
Chapter 2: The Book of the Machine
What happens to our visions of the planetary when everyone has to stay at home, in their little boxes, speaking to other people in little boxes? (...)
Chapter 3: The Committee of the Machine
At what point does the planetary scale outweigh its own usefulness as a tool for apprehension, discernment, and interpretation? (...)
Chapter 4: Developments in the Machine
How do the ways in which planetary thinkers do their work affect how the “planetary” emerges as a concept, and the planet itself (re)emerges as an entity? (...)
Chapter 5: The Machine Did Stop
How can experiences of planetary ethics, politics and aesthetic be shared, explored and learned from, together? (...)
Epilogue
What would it mean to let go of our planet, such that it might come back to us? (...)
Introduction
Changes in global conditions create changes in the practices of global science. Do we have a means of tracing these interrelations? (...)
The Impossibility of a Planet
“The Impossibility of a Planet”, by artists and researchers Jeremy Bolen and Jamie Allen, is an ongoing research and media project that seeks out dialogues with people who compose planetary images, thought, narratives, and models. (...)