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a manifestation of actual reality, but one based in a virtual world

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GEM FLETCHER IS A HYBRID CREATIVE EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF ART, PHOTOGRAPHY AND FASHION.

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The cyborgs, biohackers and ‘transhumans’ redefining beauty | CNN

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Photographer David Vintiner’s portraits feature subjects identifying as “transhuman,” including a man with bionic ears and a woman who can “feel” earthquakes.

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“a movement predicated on the conviction that we can and should use technology to control the future evolution of our species. It is their belief that we can and should eradicate aging as a cause of death; that we can and should use technology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and should merge with machine, remaking ourselves, finally, in the image of our own higher ideals”

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How are responsibility and agency distributed in the Anthropocene? Who exactly is the Anthropos that brought about this new geological epoch? Which epistemological foundations have made it possible to exploit and transform planetary flows of energy and materials?

Human activities have reshaped the Earth system so profoundly that we seem to have entered a new geological age. In the Anthropocene, geological and human history are deeply interwoven, making it difficult to separate the categories of nature and culture.

From 2013-2022, HKW has been investigating how the critical planetary transformations of the Anthropocene can be understood, experienced, and shaped. In a multitude of exhibitions, installations, conferences, workshops, performances, and publications, HKW has explored the cultural, socio-economic, and political implications of the new planetary reality.

New transdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge practices that meet the challenges of the Anthropocene have been tested within the framework of the long-term Anthropocene Curriculum project. The website anthropocene-curriculum.org served as a research platform for the international network.

As the Anthropocene at HKW comes to a close in 2022, the Anthropocene Curriculum will conclude as an archive and enter into a new phase as the Anthropocene Commons - an emergent network of researchers, educators, activists, artists, and scientists dedicated to designing transformative pedagogies for collective action in the context of the planetary emergency.

Below is an overview of related projects and publications.

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How are responsibility and agency distributed in the Anthropocene? Who exactly is the Anthropos that brought about this new geological epoch? Which epistemological foundations have made it possible to exploit and transform planetary flows of energy and materials?

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Humanity is in the midst of a global crisis. Economic and technological developments of the last hundred years have made human beings into the strongest driving force of geological and ecological processes - with massive consequences not only for nature, but also for humankind itself. Beyond merely describing this phenomenon, the new conceptual framework offered by the Anthropocene thesis opens up an integrated perspective from which to grapple with this changed reality.

Taking the pioneering Anthropocene Project 2013-14 at HKW in Berlin as a starting point, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, the artist collective The Otolith Group, the research organization Territorial Agency (John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog), geologist Jan Zalaseiwicz, photographer Armin Linke, curator Anselm Franke, and philosopher and HKW Director Bernd Scherer will present a range of artistic and theoretical approaches and concepts.

Listen to the recordings:

Running order

10.15

Registration

10.25

Welcome by Marko Daniel

10.30

Introduction by Bernd Scherer

10.50
Jan Zalasiewicz Defining the Anthropocene
Defining the Anthropocene is an extraordinary challenge. In only centuries, humans have driven geological change without precedent in this planet's 4.6 billion-year history. Understanding this change needs fusion of knowledge of ancient catastrophes and modern humans, within which we might consider the Tate itself - as a remarkable future technofossil.

11.20

Dipesh Chakrabarty The Human Condition in the Anthropocene

This lecture distinguishes between two uses of the expression 'The Anthropocene' as a contested name for current planetary environmental crises and as a rigorous concept, the idea of a new geological epoch that requires scientific ratification. It will ask why contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene caught in the tension produced by the necessity to see humans against very different scales of time: the history of European expansion and the consequent rise of global capitalism, and in the deeper context of geological time. It concludes with some thoughts on the human condition in the Anthropocene.

11.50

Discussion chaired by Bernd Scherer

12.30

Screening of Medium Earth, 2013, The Otolith Group

13.15

Lunch break

14.15

Introduction by Anselm Franke

14.35

The Otolith Group The Earthquake Sensitive as Planetary Subject

How to explore the millennial time of geology in relation to the infrastructural unconscious of contemporary urbanism? In The Otolith Group's Medium Earth, tectonic forces express themselves in boulder outcrops and the fractures of cast concrete. What forms of life emerge in the animation of physical geographies undergoing continental pressures?

15.05

Territorial Agency with Armin Linke Anthropocene Observatory

This project combines film, photography, documentation, interviews, spatial and territorial analysis, to form an archive and a series of installations, exhibitions and workshops that trace the formation of the Anthropocene thesis. The Anthropocene Observatory documents in detail the practices and activities - often behind the scenes - of scientific institutions, international and local agencies and research organisations where the Anthropocene is unfolding in its many streams of influence.

16.05

Plenary discussion chaired by Anselm Franke

16.55

Closing remarks Bernd Scherer

17.00

End

Biographies

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Law at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many articles and books including "The Climate of History: Four Theses," Critical Inquiry (2009), The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (2015, forthcoming), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2008;2000), Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (2002), Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (2000; 1989). He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies, and is a Consulting Editor of Critical Inquiry. Chakrabarty is currently working on a book on climate change and on a collection of essays on history's relationship to the present. Chakrabarty was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006. He was recently named the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize for his contributions to global history.

Marko Daniel is Convenor, Public Programmes, Tate Modern.

Anselm Franke is Head of the Visual Arts department at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, where he was part of the curatorial team of the Anthropocene Project and organised exhibitions such as Animism in 2012, and together with Diedrich Diederichsen The Whole Earth in 2013, and Forensis together with Eyal Weizman in 2014. He also was chief curator of the Taipei Biennale 2012 and the Shanghai Biennale 2014.

Armin Linke is an artist working with film and photography, combining different mediums to blur the border between fiction and reality. He is working on an ongoing archive on human activity and the most varied natural and manmade landscapes. His multimedia installation about the contemporary Alpine landscape was awarded at the 9th Architecture Venice Biennale. He is professor at the HfG Karlsruhe.

Territorial Agency / John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog. Territorial Agency is an independent organisation based in London that innovatively promotes and works for sustainable territorial transformations. Its works combine contemporary architecture, urbanism, spatial analysis and extended stakeholder networks. John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog teach at the Architectural Association.

The Otolith Group is an award winning artist led collective and organisation founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002 that integrates film and video making, artists writing, workshops, exhibition curation, publication and developing public platforms for the close readings of the image in the contemporary world. The Group's work is formally engaged with research led projects exploring the legacies and potentialities of artists led proposals around the document and the essay film, the archive, the aural and sonic medium, speculative futures and science-fictions.

Bernd M. Scherer is Director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2006. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. Philosopher and author of several publications focusing on aesthetics and international cultural exchange, Scherer came to the HKW from the Goethe-Institut. Since January 2011, he teaches as Honorary Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Jan Zalasiewicz is a Professor in Geology at the University of Leicester, who has published extensively in scientific journals, focusing on fossil ecosystems. He is the author of four books: The Planet in a Pebble, The Earth After Us and (with Mark Williams) The Goldilocks Planet and Ocean Worlds.

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The Anthropocene Project - Conference at Tate Modern | Tate

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Humanity is in the midst of a global crisis. Economic and technological developments of the last hundred years have made human beings into the strongest driving force of geological and ecological processes - with massive consequences not only for nature, but also for humankind itself.

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The Anthropocene at HKW: 10 Years of Culture and Science in a New Geological Epoch

HKW looks back at ten intense years of exploring the Anthropocene. Starting with a two-year project in 2013, a decade of events, exhibitions, campuses, publications, and research projects have followed the idea that a new earth epoch calls for novel forms of collaborative knowledge making-on-site, online, and in the field.
© HKW, 2022, all rights reserved

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The Anthropocene Curriculum is a global network of initiatives developing and testing experimental and experiential approaches to co-learning and co-producing knowledge in a rapidly changing planetary situation.

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The Anthropocene Project aims to drive awareness around the impact of humankind on the Earth, through scientific reasearch, film, photography, virtual and augmented reality.

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Metaverse is based on the internet and keeps iterative but is still unable to replace the internet.

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politics

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interaction

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human activities

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ecosystem

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explore the relationship between humans and the environment.

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superhuman intelligence

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Philosophical movement

devoted to promoting the research and development of human-enhancement technologies

All aspects of human abilities have improved

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transhumanism

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The most recent period in earth history when human activities impact the earth system.

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Anthropocene

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political speech is increasingly detached from the factual infrastructure.

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Post-truth politics

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Believe the truth we think is true.

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‘the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true’.

2004, Ralph Keyes The Post-truth Era

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‘after the truth was known’

1992, Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine

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Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence, and the director of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles. Since 2008, his works have explored the space among digital and physical entities by creating a symbiotic relationship between architecture, science, technology, and media arts. As an artist and a spatial thinker, he addresses the challenges, and the possibilities, that ubiquitous computing has imposed on humanity, and what it means to be a human in the age of AI.

Coining the terms "data painting" and "latent cinema," Anadol has invited his audience to imagine alternative and dynamic realities by re-defining the functionalities of both interior and exterior architectural elements. He tackles this by moving beyond the integration of media into built forms and translating the logic of a new media technology into spatial design. Anadol's site-specific three-dimensional data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many virtual and physical forms. Entire buildings come to life; floors, walls, and ceilings disappear into infinity; breathtaking aesthetics take shape from large swaths of data; and what was once invisible to the human eye becomes visible.

Refik Anadol Studio has pioneered various immersive and interactive art projects around the world since 2014. Launched in 2015, Infinity Room installations are immersive experiences utilizing contemporary algorithms, moving projections, light, sound, and mirrors. They are 3-dimensional architectural immersive environments in which techno-utopian fantasies are created by generative algorithms, experienced by more than 2 million visitors in 56 cities around the world. During his residency at Google's Artists & Machine Intelligence Program in 2016, Anadol began exploring several themes at the intersection of neuroscience, architecture, and AI that later became the building blocks of his iconic Machine Hallucinations series. He then began to merge what he previously called "the poetics of data" in 2012 with his innovative approach to AI and open source archives. In 2016, Anadol discovered an open-source library of cultural documents in Istanbul at SALT Research and realized Archive Dreaming, the first example of "machine hallucinations" presented to the audience as one of the first AI-driven, interactive public installations in the world.

The central question of Anadol's aesthetic and interdisciplinary research inquiries, "Can a building dream?", took the shape of another large-scale interactive installation at WDCH in Los Angeles in 2018. WDCH Dreams was a groundbreaking public performance commissioned in celebration of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's centennial year. Anadol and his team utilized the Philharmonic's 77 terabytes of archival data, to create an immersive exhibition and a week-long AI-driven public art installation projected on the entire facade of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall (WDCH).

In 2019, for ARTECHOUSE's NYC location, Anadol created Machine Hallucination, a data universe of New York City in 1025 latent dimensions by deploying machine learning algorithms on over 100 million photographic memories of New York City found in social networks. Another example of Hallucinations was Latent Being, launched in Berlin in 2019 and commissioned by LAS, interactivity took the project to an unprecedented level of theatric and poetic representation of neural networks in real-time. For this site-specific, immersive art experience in a former East Berlin power plant called Kraftwerk, Anadol transformed the cathedral-like, vast concrete space of the building into a dynamic, temporary, and interactive human-AI ecosystem that operated on biofeedback technology.

Anadol's site-specific audio/visual performances have been featured at other iconic landmarks, museums and festivals worldwide, such as Venice Architecture Biennale, Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Centre Pompidou, Florence Biennale, Hammer Museum, Art Basel, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, The Portland Building, Daejeon Museum of Art, Artechouse, International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal, Ars Electronica Festival, Arc De Triomf, Zollverein | SANAA's School of Design Building, santralistanbul Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul Design Biennial and Sydney City Biennale among many others. Anadol has partnered, and continues to work with, teams at Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, NASA JPL, Intel, IBM, Siemens, Epson, MIT, UCLA, Caltech, Harvard, Stanford University, and UCSF, to apply the latest, cutting-edge science, research and technologies to his work.

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Machine Hallucinations - Space : Metaverse

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Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence, and the director of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles. Since 2008, his works have explored the space among digital and physical entities by creating a symbiotic relationship between architecture, science, technology, and media arts.

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metaverse is that it will create new online spaces in which people's interactions can be more multi-dimensional, where audiences are able to immerse themselves in digital content rather than simply viewing it.

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Refik Anadol "Machine Hallucinations — Space: Metaverse"   

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an immersive art installation

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"regime of truth" is produced by the beliefs and values of a society and the ultimate goal is to achieve "politics of truth"

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‘a quasi-successor state to the mobile internet’.

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“politics of truth”

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Foucault links the notion of truth to the explicitly political notion of regime - “our regime of truth and error”

‘regime’ means here a certain power of separation between truth and error.
(Foucault 1975-76, p. 145; 164)

truth “is produced by virtue of multiple constraints and it induces regulated effects of power”

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the essential political problem for us, today, is trying to change our “political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth”

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Each society creates a “regime of truth” according to its beliefs, values, and mores.