The art initiative Laboratory for a Radical Suburbia explores human connections to both land and to the environmental impacts of capitalist cycles of extraction, production, and consumption on that land.

The year 1948 serves as an aperture through which we can rethink the history of the now; the decisive moment when the heap of fragments left by the fury of two world wars began to reassemble into new forms of technological, scientific, and cultural order that inform our contemporary situation.

How do futures emerge? And how are they understood and produced? An examination on the social function of the process of forecasting.

How can speculative fiction offer imaginary, narrative, and aesthetic approaches to the Anthropocene? A reflection on this issue.

Human culture has been a culture of chance all along. Around 1948, a new configuration of chance practices becomes operative, and high-quality (pseudo-)random numbers have become indispensable for simulating the design of nuclear weapons, calculating the future of human populations, and modeling the climate. How do we recognize the differences or similarities of these two forms of employing chance tools for making predictions?

Hydrocarbons plunges into the complexities and contradictions of the oil era and thereby into the molecular basis of the technosphere. Interweaving film scenes with a variety of visual and research materials, as well as the “sounds of oil,” the session explores the speculative cultural genre termed “petro noir,” examining the geopolitical-industrial complex that drives petrochemistry and, by consequence, mobility, consumption, waste and adventure.

A collaborative campus hosted by Drexel University, Philadelphia, from Oct 22–26, 2017.

What is revealed through the politics of pace during disasters? What are the dynamics and political illegibility of slow disaster?

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?

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.

If dialectical distinctions between humans and bacteria were dissolved into an undifferentiated anthropocenic nexus, what new questions would emerge? A reflection by Seth Denizen and Jonathan F. Donges.