In his essay on the Anthropocene, Peter Sloterdijk contemplated whether we should be surprised by the ease with which this relatively recent discourse on the geological impact of humanity—that he provocatively calls a “synthetic-semantic virus”—has “escaped” beyond the doors of geophysical scholarship into the realm of cultural production.11Peter Sloterdijk, “The Anthropocene: A Process-State at the Margin of Geo-History,” tr. Anna-Sophie Springer, in Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (eds), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015, p. 327; online (accessed 11/12/2015).

Indeed, whether in the form of university seminars and academic conferences, literary works, cinema, or exhibitions, Anthropocene-themed events are currently burgeoning.22Seminars by Heather Davis, “Art in the Anthropocene,” at Penn State University and Jason Groves, “Literature, Film, and Theory for the Anthropocene: New directions in German ecocriticism,” both at Rutgers University, spring semester, 2015. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, for instance, produced a monthly lecture series, “Anthropocene: Life in the Age of Humans.” Anthropocene-themed exhibitions in addition to those mentioned above include: “Anthropocene Monument,” Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” Deutsches Museum, Munich; “Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” Inova, University of Milwaukee. With regards to cinema as a medium of the Anthropocene, see McKenzie Wark (12/10/2014), “Anthropo{mise-en-s}cène,” online (accessed 10/15/2015). Apart from the programs organized since early 2013 by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, film releases of 2014 and 2015 such as Interstellar and Mad Max, and art events such as the Extinction Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery in London, all encourage the impression that even mainstream cultural producers have embraced the Anthropocene thesis as an imaginative inspiration to a similar degree as it has been unsettling in the field of science.

Something that was argued repeatedly at the Anthropocene Campus at HKW in late November 2014 was that dealing with the Anthropocene thesis can produce a destabilizing effect on long-standing concepts, narratives, and assumptions—especially regarding those originating from Western traditions—such as the division between the human and the natural, but also between the sciences and the humanities. One task seems to be to rethink conventional disciplines, developing new or different processes and experimental methodologies, both in relation to how we relate to the legacies of the past as well as regarding how to live on planet Earth in the future.33Edward Wilson makes a strong case for a “more fruitful relationship between Science and the Humanities” in the Anthropocene. See Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014, p. 25.

Speaking as someone engaging with art and cultural history by working in the curatorial field, I have found the Anthropocene thesis an interesting conceptual premise from which to explore the relationship between nature and culture, because it seems that the Anthropocene discourse and curatorial thinking are both susceptible to similar epistemological attitudes. That is, it seems that both share an interest in revealing particular histories as possible stories among others in order to open them up to complex renegotiations. When practiced as a form of cultural research, curatorial work by definition is invested in both creating “narrative spaces” as well as reflecting on their very constructed-ness and contingency.44On the constructed-ness of curatorial projects, see Anna-Sophie Springer, “The museum as archipelago,” Scapegoat, 05: Excess (2013): pp. 242–53, online (accessed 10/15/2015). Furthermore, as curatorial work is concerned with developing constellations of dialog and meaning, naturally it is collaborative and multidisciplinary (two characteristics that crystallized as fundamental for the experience of the Campus, too). This means that, here, content production can never be imagined or practiced without treating its aesthetic, performative, spatio-temporal, visual, aural, poetic, or gestural layers as seriously as the respective themes being addressed. Regarding the Anthropocene debate, I believe that it is this particular sensitivity to the complexity of subject‒object relations that curatorial thinker-practitioners can bring to the table.

Hence, it seems impossible to grapple with the Anthropocene without also taking into consideration the relationship between our technologies and ourselves; between media and knowledge production; as well as regarding disciplinary boundaries, the powerful role of stories, and the tensions between facts and fictions. Media are never innocent, but instead provide powerful filters in and of themselves.

When asked to “filter” the Anthropocene by parsing the narrative and multi-stakeholder layers of a chosen socio-environmental case study in a seminar entitled “Filtering the Anthropocene” (guided by Marco Amiero, Amita Baviskar, and Will Steffen), our spontaneously formed working group therefore decided that a specific set of questions should also be applied to filtering the filter itself. It thus seemed a worthwhile idea to appropriate the visual aspect of our performance-presentation on the relationship of plastic pollution and infertility (entitled “Plastic: Surrogacy in the Anthropocene”) more provocatively than by merely illustrating the series of spoken contributions on the assumed impact of plastic residues on fertility and biological reproduction. Rather than more or less directly repeating or documenting the arguments and statistics narrated by our speakers, we wanted to allow the imagery of our concurrent slide presentation to perform its own communicative character as a filtering device.

A question we asked was: How can we highlight the visual component as one more voice and available apparatus in the collaborative and multiple process of writing-reading-making our (or any) presentation? The slide sequence, therefore, was composed while listening to other group members as they spent around one hour preparing their contributions based on pseudo-researching and collating found scientific information.55I write “pseudo-researching” because, following an extensive discussion guided mostly by open questions, group members spent only around one hour assembling the content we then presented in the seminar by excerpting material from the Internet. Apart from one group member, Heather Davis, whose postdoctoral research is actually dedicated to the detrimental relationship between living organisms and plastics, none of our group members is a specialist in the topic, which helped draw our attention to the filter-as-method. Operating as two methodologically compositional poles, the recited (but in this instantiation, here, henceforth scripted) and the visual articulations of our presentation aimed to open up a conceptual field of tension: a transversal space for creative reflection, association, wonder, confusion, and debate—literally, a filter to both enhance and question the processes of knowledge production and their mediation.

In order to keep this aesthetic gesture simple and comprehensive, one very particular image source was tapped for finding and downloading the pictures shown: the idiosyncratic science books repository of The Reanimation Library, a project founded in 2006 by the New York-based artist Andrew Beccone. A growing book collection, the library consists of several thousand twentieth-century publications whose variegated picture contents remain fascinating visual sources even though their textual information and scientific arguments today might be outdated. By resurrecting such an antiquated archive of illustrated books that would otherwise be discarded, The Reanimation Library thus functions as a vast repository of picture pages from all possible realms of printed human knowledge. Recently moved from Brooklyn’s Gowanus area to the Queens Museum in New York, the library offers scanners and photocopiers as means to encourage users to freely incorporate the material into their own projects and thus to reassemble old content into new constellations. Furthermore, remote users can access a vast digitized image archive through keywords and title indexes on the project’s website, reanimationlibrary.org. For our presentation “Filtering the Anthropocene” we accessed this online content, appropriating images from now old books on subjects ranging from anatomy and health to interior design, tourism, and zoology. Disassociated from their former captions, as the visual strand of “Plastic | Surrogacy,” these images then took on new roles and meanings, however unstable and suggestive.

As Rebecca Solnit aptly suggested in The New York Times, “Addressing climate means fixing the way we produce energy. But maybe it also means addressing the problems with the way we produce stories.”66Rebecca Solnit, “Are We Missing the Big Picture on Climate Change,” The New York Times (December 2, 2014), online (accessed 10/15/2015). Using images from The Reanimation Library to accompany and visually extend our quasi-scientific presentation was an attempt to do just that: turning the process of producing a story into a problem worth reflecting on per se whenever pondering the meaning of the “Anthropocene.”