The seminar unfolded in a series of highly stimulating plenary discussions, followed by intermediary sessions in three working groups, and concluding with a brief exercise in creating a timeline for the Anthropocene, which brought into view the different multi-scale and multilayered temporalities embedded in the concept. Highlights from the plenary discussions are available in an edited transcript. The working groups revolved around three basic themes: one that explored directly the concept of the technosphere and its level of autonomy; one devoted to applying the concept of co-evolution through storytelling; and a last that was concerned with analyzing and debating the political and economic structures behind the technosphere and the Anthropocene.

Owing to the formidable cross-disciplinary nature of these discussions, the contributions that emerged directly from the seminar aptly reflect a variety of approaches and formats. One contribution consists in a sheep-shaped measuring tape, used as a technological and standardization tool that enables collaboration and communication and scales down the Anthropocene to something more concrete and tangible. Two seminar participants contributed an academic paper that investigates homeostasis and feedbacks as guiding concepts, in order to compare the Earth in the Anthropocene to a dynamic biological system with its own anthropogenic forms of niche constructions, and to look at the implications between human beings and the planet. The third contribution is a fictional tale exploring the vulnerabilities of the system exposed through a future outbreak of an epidemic in which the distinction between humans and bacteria finally vanishes. Confronted with an undifferentiated anthropocenic nexus in which no boundaries exist, what then remains of the system that is the technosphere, not to speak of an optimized technospheric system?