Anthropocene Archives - Public Seminar

A Patch of Moonlight

Darwin’s warning

August 25, 2021 • by Ruth Padel

_____ Rustles of the night in the Nilgiri Hills. I sit behind the low wall of a veranda beside Priya who invited me here, her husband Jean Philippe, and her brother Peter. They are scientists and naturalists. This is what they do every night. I am very lucky to be their ...

Fashion

Masking and Visibility

Performing the pandemic

March 10, 2021 • by Patricia Brien

_____ In his Autumn 2019 collection, Alessandro Michele, creative director of Gucci, sent his models out on the runway covered in clothing and layers of protective gear. He also used many different forms of face coverings and masks (not mouth coverings). He was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism and ...

Anthropocene and Negative Anthropology

Return of Man

July 29, 2019 • by Hannes Bajohr

In contrast to the natural sciences, the question of official adoption plays virtually no role in the humanities, which have taken up the concept of the Anthropocene with relish. Its attraction lies in its omnicompetent radiance: Not only a geochronological coinage, it implies an ontology, a theory of history, and ...

Feature

The Potential of the Queer

On José Esteban Muñoz

February 22, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

“I was a spy in the house of gender normativity.” - José Esteban Muñoz I too have been a spy in the house of gender normativity. This is what I saw: Work, eat, breed. That, in effect, is how production and consumption are supposed to operate. You have to do work in ...

Education

The Possibilities for New Ways of Living

What students help their professors learn about teaching the Anthropocene

December 3, 2018 • by Stephanie Wakefield

1. The Anthropocene designates Earth’s departure from the stable climates of the Holocene and its entrance into a more volatile and unknown operating space as glaciers melt, seas rise, and climates change. As I see it we are living in not only the Anthropocene but more specifically, as I’ve written from ...

The Possibilities for New Ways of Living

Feature

How Does Animation Change our Concept of Life and What Kind of Ethics Does it Require?

A Conversation with Media Historian and Theorist Deborah Levitt

October 26, 2018 • by Deborah Levitt and Bettine Josties

Public Seminar (PS): Deborah, in your recently published book The Animatic Apparatus. Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image you claim that animation is the dominant medium of our time and propose the concept of the animatic apparatus as a dispositif, that is, as a kind of organizing mechanics for contemporary culture. Can ...

How Does Animation Change our Concept of Life and What Kind of Ethics Does it Require?

Feature

Plastics and Fossil Fuels

Follow the History of Technological Systems

October 13, 2018 • by Simon Pirani

Plastics have a history too. David Attenborough’s magnificent Blue Planet II TV series, which last year jolted public anger over plastic waste in the oceans, focused attention on a bunch of materials that hardly existed a century ago. Output of plastics has mushroomed since the mid twentieth century, on the back ...

Feature

For and Against the Anthropocene

A review of ‘Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today’

September 15, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Since the turn of the 21st century, many scientists have been arguing for the designation of a new epoch in Earth's geological history, which they term the Anthropocene in acknowledgment of the impact of humans on the planet's evolution. While not yet officially approved by the International Union of Geological ...

Psyche

The Visibility of Value

Thoughts on the Seen and the Unseen

June 1, 2017 • by Akeel Bilgrami

There is a superstition of modernity which declares that nature contains no properties that are not countenanced by the natural sciences. By “superstition” I mean: no one knows how and when this was proved nor has anyone shown how it helps us to live better. On the presumption that natural ...

Feature

Bruno Latour – Facing Gaia

A GIDEST Video

January 4, 2017 • by GIDEST

GIDEST is a Mellon-funded research institute based at The New School that incubates transdisciplinary research at the intersection of social theory, art, and design. As well as our faculty, artist-in-residence, and doctoral fellows' programs, we run a series of biweekly public seminars that feature both prominent and emerging scholars and ...

Uncategorized

The Stack to Come

On Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack

December 28, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

What I like most about Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015) is firstly its close attention to what I would call the forces and relations of production. We really need to know how the world is made right now if it is ever to be ...

Theory & Practice

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!

September 11, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Asger Jorn is acknowledged to be one of the great artists of the postwar years. Even more impressive in my estimation is his theoretical work. I made the case for this in The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso, 2011). Since then, two collections of Jorn’s writings have appeared in English: ...