Reading the Anthropocene Ocean
How do tropes and images of a changing ocean operate in a larger system of cultural sensemaking? Killian Quigley collects a range of threads to map the disfiguration and deformation of an anthropocenic biosphere that swells below the sea’s surface. (...)
Silurian Harvest
Artists Nina Canell and Robin Watkins recover the deep-time aquatic past of the limestone environment that formed the island of Gotland and delineate the temporal entanglements between ancient life creation and modern-day living. (...)
Small Agency in the Nuclear Anthropocene
Through the case of the nuclear accident at Palomares, Spain, historian of science Xavier Roqué shows the importance of local actants and scarce resources in registering and understanding Anthropocene-scale phenomena. (...)
Some Recovered Taxonomic Fragments
A twenty-second century taxonomy was recently retrieved from a drive in a sealed server room in a flooded area of London. Specialists recovered some intact fragments allowing a glimpse into some aspects of the final stage of late modernity. (...)
Tailings and the Onset of a Chilean Anthropocene
Sebastián Ureta gives a thick description of Anthropocene landscapes where vast, stratified dumps of chemical residues that largely outlive their creators. (...)
The Anthropocene Signal Amidst the Noise
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The Breathable Materiality of Combustion
Air pollution is currently the top environmental killer, but the fleeting nature of atmospheric pollution often keeps it from being observed through a global perspective and being included in the planetary cycles of the Anthropocene. (...)
The Case of Air
Literary scholar Eva Horn unpacks air as an environing medium that has always entangled human life and the environment in very specific ways. (...)
The Critical Environment of the Venice Lagoon
Venice’s critical environment is a paradigmatic case for comprehending socio-environmental history in dialogue with the Earth sciences. (...)
The Japanese Art of Bowing and the Nuclear Anthropocene
Maria Rentetzi shares a personal encounter during a research trip to Hiroshima. What can we learn from the intense humanity inscribed in gestures of respect and apology to the survivors of the atomic bomb, an event at the dawn of the Anthropocene? (...)
The Moment We Visualized the Anthropocene
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The Radioactive Footprint of the Anthropocene
Assessing the effects of artificial radioactivity on human bodies and natural environments has a special place in the history of risk regulation, and has provided a key basis for understanding and defining the anthropogenic danger to life on Earth. (...)
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. (...)