Drawn Together
In designing and operating large-scale infrastructures, humans tend toward fixity—despite increasingly dynamic conditions, such as those at play in the Mississippi River Delta context. The Anthropocene River Campus seminar “Un/bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability” sought to explore the multi-scalar effects of such human interventions, and how new futures might be imagined that engage and work with these dynamics. To do so, the seminar employed the practice of drawing as its core method (...)
Good River, Bad River, Little River, Big River
“Mississippi” is a francophone adulteration of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Algonquin) name given to the river, indicating something along the lines of how “great” or “big” a river it is. “People are enthralled by it,” Bob Chance, manager of Itasca State Park told the Star Tribune in 2018: “They are amazed that it is that small.” Way down south, the river is an accumulator, full of the life-effluent of an industrialized nation, its cares, concerns, and contaminants. But here, at Lake Itasca, we hear fro (...)
Head Waters at the Headwaters
The United States of America is just under ten million square kilometers in surface area. Its most conterminous landmass is a topology of creases and folds, mountains and ridges, chasms and embankments. These create, among other divides, hydrological continental separations, sloped divisions for watersheds that flow into either the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River or the Missouri-Mississippi complex. These great, tectonic gutters cascade erosive, mineralized waters into the Atlantic Ocean or (...)
Seminar: Archiving
How can we move from the archive (as an institution) to archiving as a practice that sustains many lives (like oral history, dancing, singing, cooking)? (...)
Coordinating Practice
The Anthropocene has a coordination problem. This discussion highlights the many challenges of coordinating projects at different scales, both spatially and temporally. (...)
A Trace, a Breath
Using sensory work, artists explore how the effects of opium relate to colonialist and capitalist extraction, and convey a tale of industry and the Latvian geological landscape. (...)
Case Studies and Seminars: The Shape of a Practice
The week-long The Shape of a Practice event, which took place in October 2020, was a product of a diverse collection of case studies. (...)
The Shape of a Practice 2020
The Shape of a Practice constituted an experiment in negotiating the particularities of context, purpose, and method. (...)
Anthropocene River Campus: The Human Delta short film
Critical insights from and impressions of the Anthropocene River Campus: The Human Delta, which took place in New Orleans in November 2019. (...)
A River Indicts
If a corporation can have rights, then why not the Mississippi River? (...)
Risk & Equity in the Louisiana Anthropocene
On the different manifestations and impacts of the Louisiana Anthropocene, which have been lent somber new resonance in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic. (...)
Specifics of Vulnerability
What can be learned from attuning to the specifics of vulnerability when artificial realities are interrogated? (...)
Check My Pulse
Brian Holmes contemplates how our natural surroundings are suffused with the aftermath of colonial trauma and racial exploitation. (...)
Measuring Loss
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. (...)
Layers of Violence
From agricultural slavery to petroleum, the banks of the Mississippi in Louisiana represent an Anthropocenic space characterized by a slow history of extraction. (...)
Lost Voices
On the shared experiences of those who live along the Mississippi in New Orleans and the Yamuna in Delhi, reciprocal relationships with nature, and the importance of listening in the Anthropocene. (...)
Driving the Limits of Time
How acknowledging and engaging with complex temporal clashes can generate coherent responses to the seemingly totalizing notion of the Anthropocene. (...)
Technosphere Magazine
Exploring the amorphous fabric of technologies, environments, and humans shaping Earth’s critical future. (...)
