The crucial question for us is how the index, or the pointing finger of artistic critique, can transform what it indicates. To make that happen will require a method of analysis and representation that can respond to three fundamental challenges in the very perception of the technosphere.

The first challenge has to do with sheer physical dimensions. A technosphere on the scale of planet Earth is too big to see, and, for most people, too big to even conceive. Thus, we need a conceptual technique for moving through the scales of the technosphere, from specific sites and singular machines to planetary networks. The second challenge is temporal. The technosphere has evolved across civilizations, from the Great Pyramids to the walk on the Moon. How can anyone grasp this span of history? To become fully aware of climate change means becoming vulnerable to tragic processes extending far beyond any individual lifetime. Yet at the same time we have to distinguish the aspects that shape the character of human environments today. So we have to make the arrow of geological time into a dart aimed at the heart of politics. The third challenge is contained within the very notion of the technosphere as developed by Earth systems scientist Peter Haff. If the technosphere is an autonomous entity, then how can we really isolate any kind of governance or human agency conditioning its development? Are we not facing the ineluctable operations of what Marx called an “automatic subject”—an alien power, a God Machine? How can human beings talk back to the technosphere?

The Anthropocene Campus has been conceived as a model for the transformation of research and education in the face of a “wicked problem”—that is, a problem whose resolution depends crucially on how it is framed. By reframing the usual approach of axiomatic neutrality, we think that a rigorous and quantified research program can be developed with respect to a home territory, where the researchers hold public roles, professional commitments, and existential stakes. Our preparatory work has therefore focused on an investigation of the metropolitan region of Chicago, with the aim of generating outcomes in the local region as well as at the Berlin campus. The core idea of this seminar is to respond to the fundamental perceptual challenges by using art, cartography, and social science to create a composite image of the technosphere on a metropolitan scale. Based on the Chicago example, we will invite participants to join both plenary debates and small-group discussions of analytic and representational strategies, so that everyone can develop methodologies of engagement for their own technospheric context.

Chicago is a city of staggering extent, where you can stand on the slag heaps that the steel mills left behind and look out at the skyscrapers that they created. It is a city whose historical arc from mid-nineteenth-century wetlands to twenty-first-century industrial metropolis offers a kind of compressed human geology, anticipating the almost instantaneous urbanization currently underway in Asia. It is also Chicago that gave birth to the modern derivative, a computational device that is, arguably, the single most powerful instrument of governance within the technosphere. The metropolitan area embodies the dynamics of what has been coined “the Great Acceleration,” marked in the geological record by the radioactive isotopes released in 1945 by the first atomic explosions. This is the era when the innovations of corporate technoscience began overwhelming the great forces of nature.

To introduce the metropolitan scale, we offer brief presentations on three “trigger domains” in Chicago, in which the technosphere has gained concrete presence. The first of these is in industrial agriculture, which has spread from local factories across the Western hemisphere, recently attaining its genetically modified form.

Three Trigger Domains in Chicago

Grain production lies at the heart of Chicago’s derivatives markets, which remain decisive for global production today. The second domain is in real estate, which in the birthplace of the skyscraper has become a key financial asset, inseparable from the intense racialization of urban boundaries—and, therefore, from “white flight” by automobile to the suburbs. The third is extreme energy extraction, which implodes on the city from distant sites such as the Alberta Tar Sands, via the pipelines, oil trains, and refineries that power all the mobility on the roads and freeways. In these three domains, we constantly encounter slippages of scale, from the local to the global, from the uncomfortably close to the impossibly gigantic, and back again. We also encounter hierarchical domination over both people and nature, in patterns that go back to the European colonization of the New World. What is it like to exercise power? How does climate change make one the victim of it? Although seemingly external, the Anthropocene landscape is actually inside the observer, at the heart of a highly ambiguous subjectivity. To understand how governance takes place in this landscape, we need to focus on what is now a ubiquitous condition: human beings immersed in cybernetic networks. We’ll take the local example of a video gamer who becomes a financial trader. The research of our colleague Karen Knorr has revealed many correlations between the cyborg condition of the gamer and the lived practice of financial traders whose speculative bets fuel the capital markets that drive today’s accelerated global development. The quasi-automatic character of financial governance is made literal by so-called algorithmic trading, where the wagers are placed by high-speed computers while the human agent merely oversees operations, hallucinating his own power. If the material development of the technosphere is now largely coordinated by speculative investment and trading, then we need to inquire into the specific dynamics of the financial markets, particularly at the levels of perception, deliberation, and action.

On the one hand, the markets seem to continually turn inward, focusing on a densely articulated, symbolic world of their own making, following the logic of “autopoetic” or self-constructing systems. On the other hand, they continually look outward, as “allopoetic” systems, scrutinizing and struggling to control the extractive, industrial, and commercial sectors whose fluctuations they crucially depend on. What is the relationship between autopoetic and allopoetic functions? How do they maintain a dynamic equilibrium? What has the internal dialogue of finance contributed to the new phase of the Great Acceleration that opened up with the globalization of the 1990s? And why is this technospheric governance so ungovernable by any other force, whether social or natural?

The conclusion of the seminar takes a self-reflexive turn back to research and education. Our local investigation focuses on the University of Chicago, where initial experiments with nuclear fission were carried out during the Second World War, and where the theories of quantitative finance and of human capital were elaborated in the 1960s and 1970s. More generally, it is clear that the institution of the research university lies at the heart of the modern innovation systems that have produced the Great Acceleration. Like finance, the military, communications systems, or the legal establishment, the university plays a directive role in socio-ecological development. Therefore, we need to see it as a part of the Anthropocene landscape, and to take it as an exterior object of our study. Yet here we also want to turn inward, to point the finger at ourselves, and at the model that is being proposed by the Anthropocene Campus. What kind of autopoetic process are we involved in? How does the research university maintain its own dynamic equilibrium? And what is its relation to the current development of technoscience? Do the institutions of education and research only hallucinate their power? Or can they meet the challenges of climate change?

The place one inhabits is an example, an index. It is the visible tip of a massively invisible object known as the technosphere. By restaging the exploration of Chicago city, we hope to hold an uncanny mirror to the experience of those who join us in Berlin. The goal is to develop engaged methodologies for research into the local scale of the Earth systems phenomena. In the best of cases, seminar participants can then invite others to “meet the technosphere”—and start learning how to govern it—in their own home environments.