How can an archaeology of the present address molecules as driving elements of the “Great Acceleration”? Benjamin Steininger contends that the apparatus of catalytic chemistry has triggered a cascade of accelerations which lead to the Anthropocene.

Architect and urbanist Nikos Katsikis describes the assemblage of “operational landscapes” that are tied to the Mississippi basin.

In this episode, Treasure Shields Redmond and Paul Perkinson discuss how working on and next to the Mississippi shaped Paul’s life.

Katharine Ordway, Fall 2018 represents a stationary gesture amid the distanced movements comprising the Listening to the Mississippi project.

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

The entire history of American settlement experienced in one afternoon stroll.

The relations between extraction, synthesis, and exploitation, and the effects of commodity dependencies across scales are explored in this seminar, by mapping commodity flows and energy cycles in the Mississippi basin.

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River aims to make the Mississippi River Basin legible as a zone of ecological, historical, and social interaction between humans and the environment using novel forms of exchange, research, collaboration, and pedagogy.

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.