Anthropocene Campus Melbourne 2018
Debates over the past decade about the existence and start-date of “the Anthropocene”—or, the age of the human—have provided an important prompt for academics, artists, and others to reconsider critically how knowledge is produced and reproduced. What forms of critique, knowledge making, and collaboration are needed to meet the challenges we now face? Anthropocene Campus Melbourne was a four-day campus from September 3-6, 2018, built around four “elemental” seminar streams, keynotes, a plenary panel, off-site events, and a fieldwork day exploring sites inside and outside Melbourne. EARTH, WATER, FIRE, and AIR/FLESH were all explored through seminar meetings, involving guest facilitators and participants in the co-creation of a curriculum.
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Conversations on the Elemental
How can the concept of “the Elemental” inform the ways in which we speak about the Anthropocene?
Conversation, Storytelling, Epistemology, Representation
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Field Trips
How can we know about the Anthropocene? In a series of field trips and workshops, the ACM18 took the concept into the field.
Intervention, Field Work, Knowledge transformation, Education
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Recapitulations
“The Elemental” served as the analytical focal point of the ACM18. But how does the ACM18’s commitment to questions of matter shape and affect processes of knowledge production and reproduction?
Reflection, Epistemology, Knowledge transformation, Complexity
- contributionDavid Kelly
Conundrums on Country
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.
Adaptation, Biodiversity, Ecology
- contributionBriohny Doyle
Dramatizing the Future
How can speculative fiction offer imaginary, narrative, and aesthetic approaches to the Anthropocene? A reflection on this issue.
Scenario, Perception, Ocean
- contributionPatricia Piccinni, Claudia Vickers
Panel talk beween Patricia Piccinini and Claudia Vickers
Artist Patricia Piccinini and synthetic biologist Claudia Vickers discuss novel forms of life and science’s role in shaping conceptions and imaginations of the world.
Human-animal relations, Human-environment relations, Aesthetics, Biodiversity, Agency
- contributionLauren Rickards
Producing the Anthropocene, Producing the Future
A reflection on the ideological underpinnings and modes of thought that have enabled the Anthropocene.
Future, Human-environment relations, Knowledge transformation, Epistemology
- contributionAftab Mirzaei
Pockets: Reflections on the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne
How can we perceive the Anthropocene? A contemplation on the ACM’s explorations through the lens of “atmospheric attunements.”
Reflection, Engagement, Sensing, Aesthetics, Critical materials, Perception
- contributionAllan McKean
Telling time through lagoons of human waste at the Western Treatment Plant
The guiding question of this field report to Melbourne’s sewage treatment plant concerns the temporalities intrinsic to human-made infrastructures.
Waste, Future, Ecology, Pollution
