© Nina Jäger 2016

Apr 14–16, 2016

Technosphere × Knowledge

Presentations, talks, demonstrations, film

Apr 14–16, 2016

A new component of the Earth system is emerging today, comparable in scale and function to the bio- and hydrosphere. It is driven by the intertwining of natural environments with vast socio-technical forces and increasingly diverse technological species.

Technosphere × Knowledge, the second event of the Technosphere (2015-19) project, marks the launch of the Anthropocene Campus: The Technosphere Issue, an eight-day teaching and learning experiment, in which new forms of knowledge production and dissemination will be tested and the implications of the technosphere examined.

Technosphere × Knowledge investigates the interlacing between this technosphere and current modes of knowledge production — how both condition, sustain, and multiply each other. Without modern science there is no technosphere, without the technosphere there is no contemporary knowledge. On the one hand contemporary knowledge allows for the theoretical understanding and technical mastery of energy and matter and thus the existence of a technosphere. On the other hand it is the technosphere that arranges, shapes, and propels current knowledge, for example, through data pooling, institutionalized evidence production, and the anthropotechniques of learning and comprehending. Three evenings critically investigate exemplary practices and modes of what might be termed “technospherical knowledge,” its reciprocal facilitation and stabilization, its self-fulfilling prophecies and dead-ends, its urgency and utopian potential. It examines means to speculate about an unknowable future, questions the metrics and measures of juridical evidence, and entrains alternative techniques and practices of knowing, sensing, and experiencing.

In the framework of 100 Years of Now