Markers – Material Delineations of the Present

Whether microplastics in bodies of water and organisms, the introduction of neobiota into new environment or the accumulation of radionuclides from nuclear weapons tests, every anthropogenic marker has a political, technological and ecological history behind it.

Developed from the online publication Anthropogenic Markers, eight sessions in three stages examine how a particular chemical or biological fingerprint becomes a demarcation for the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene.

Researchers of the Anthropocene Working Group, humanities scholars and artists provide insight into the practice of “Anthropocene forensics.” The talks explore the data analysis methods and dating techniques employed to separate the individual signal from the noise as well as the laboratory practices that lie behind the chain of evidence for the Anthropocene.

1: Environmental Markers to Chemical Violence

With Lesley Green, Michelle Murphy, Simon Turner
3–4.30 pm
Lecture Hall

How do we connect pollutant markers demarcating the Anthropocene with the exploitative and unequal anthropogenic-economic-industrial systems that created them? Does using contaminants to define a global change at the geological scale help to understand that pollution does not simply go “away”? And that all planetary occupants are now archives of pollution?

2: What’s So Micro About Plastics?

With Kat Austen, Juliana A. Ivar do Sul, Jérôme Kaiser, Joana MacLean
3–4.30 pm
Auditorium

The rapid dissemination of plastics through the air, aquatic bodies and oceans has created a microplastic-containing sediment layer over the last decades. Which refined analytical techniques are necessary to measure it? What does the Baltic Sea drill core reveal about microplastics? And what does it say about the difficulty of defining its sources and socio-political entanglements?

3: Mud, Materiality & Microfossils

With Stephen Himson, Allison Stegner, Mark Williams, Matthew C. Wilson
3–4.30 pm
Exhibition Hall 2

What are the processes and scientific procedures behind the research into microfossils? What does the transformation of neobiota from materiality to a data set reveal about disrupted ecosystems, globalization and extinction? And how is this captured by modern research architectures?