Koki Tanaka explains his approach to designing five experimental settings for Where is the Planetary?

What does it mean to live in a city already deemed “unsavable” and why is the contemporary art made in Miami that deals directly with climate change often so innocuous?

How best can organizations reconcile alliance building, promote public discussions on environmental crises and nurture cultural shifts?

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.

Historian Florike Egmond (University of Leiden) gives a keynote lecture about the historic relationship between humans and water on the Dutch river delta.

Taking Venice as a point of departure to collectively reflect on geo-environmental politics in the water city and beyond.

On drawing as a core methodology, not only to record and understand dynamic conditions but also to devise new approaches and imaginaries for New Orleans and beyond.

Jeremy Bolen traces the various human interventions that have shaped Cache River Valley in Southern Illinois, asking what can be learned from this landscape.

How can we develop landscapes in response to the Anthropocene? A reflection on the defunct Upper Harbor Terminal complex.

What are the ideological underpinnings of common notions of “restoration”? Patrick Nunally explores this question on the site of Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary, St. Paul, Minnesota.

A reflection by archaeologist and ethnobotanist Natalie G. Mueller on how sharing meal of long lost plants transformed her research perspective.

In keeping with many of the themes underpinning the Anthropocene River Campus, Eleonora Rohland explains how the question of adaptation so present post-Katrina has a much longer history in NOLA.

The exploratory research project Technosphere 2015–2019 investigated the origins and future itineraries of technological agency in the Anthropocene.

This seminar brings concepts of time, layers, and sediment into close contact with the human sciences, the arts, and Pierre Part, a community who live according to the movements of the River.

The German publication Technosphäre collects contributions thinking through the conditions and evolution of this new Earth system player. Included here are two selections from the book in English translation: the editorial introduction and a conversation between Peter K. Haff and Jürgen Renn.

How can we forge novel ways of human-environment interactions? A field trip to Melbourne’s sustainability center CERES set out to explore this question.

From David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to Berlin’s ruderal ecology: a video report.

The interlacing between knowledge and the technosphere has a very subtle yet decisive dimension: the collectively ingrained practices and routines that are the preconditions for adequately responding to the non-human dynamics of a world in transition. What are the regimes of sense training, ascetic modes of inquiry, and techniques of mental cultivation that let us learn and understand something? What might be needed to reshape and modify these in light of the predicament of the Anthropocene?

Data, evidence, truth—these grades of the factual form an intricate reference system in which current social and juridical knowledge is established and maintained. How is factual knowledge constituted within and through the technosphere? The evening examines how the concept of legal truth and truth finding is bound to the technical production of certainty.

The scenario has become a mode of knowledge of the first order. In fact, “running in scenario mode” seems to be the way in which contemporary existence, through the vision of this exploratory practice and tool, exemplifies learning and researching in and on the Anthropocene itself. This evening deals with the trans-methodical arrangement of scenario building and analysis and its specific formatting through institutional and media-based infrastructures.

How is the technosphere inscribed into individual human bodies? How are they restructured along a complex machinery of instruments, techniques, simulations?

The biosphere has budded off a second global “sphere,” the technosphere, a technology-based system on which humans now depend—and which they find hard to control. Which tools are needed to ensure human survival in the technosphere?

Grasping the Anthropocene demands a sense of deceleration—we need “slow media” that by analogy with the slow food movement, engages with the complexities of a rapidly changing world by slowing down to the pace of a museum visit or engaging with physical or visual objects. 

Plastic is one of the most ubiquitous materials of the contemporary moment. How do we deal with its effects on the health of both humans and animals?

Plastic is a broad and rather deceptive name for a group of synthetic polymers that have become one of the most ubiquitous materials of the contem- porary moment. Composed of long chains of molecules, and derived from oil and natural gas, plastics are incredibly durable. They do not decompose and are predicted to last well beyond human biological time.

To avoid normative assumptions of the model builders being implemented into the models, Canadian ecologist Crawford S. Holling developed the concept of adaptive modeling.