Conference: Earth Magnitude

Will cute kittens surpass extinction? Kittens. Every chapter in Mark Williams’s talk was intercepted with a headline of a cute kitten. I’m not sure if it has been scientifically proven that the internet generation attends more to a stream of images when it is interleaved with adorable cat pictures, or the kittens were there to illustrate which animals will survive the Antroposcene. Perhaps the epoch of human influence will be dominated by fuzzy pets and supersized chickens? The first session of Sonic Acts 2015 evolved around the theme Earth Magnitude. The opening talk by professor of geology Mike Williams was delivered at a rapid pace, but what can you expect when you make a summary spanning over 3800 million years? Williams presented a series of examples of humans being “global agents of change”. In fact, the human influence around 1950 reached such an impact that geologists decided you can call it a new epoch: the Anthropocene. The human imprint on the planet spans from evolutionary changes, the rate species are extinct and changes of the landscape due to agriculture and brightly lid mega cities. MC Morton “The biosphere is less than a polar bear - ontologically speaking”. Enter Timothy Morton’s framework to think about ecology. Object Oriented Ontology, or just “ooo” if you’re one of the cool people in the know. At least it seems like there’s a bit of a contemporary philosophy crew around Morton, nodding affirming. To add to his street-cred, Morton at some point even turns into an MC, setting off an impressive steam of words describing the infrasound installation by Raviv Ganchrow. Morton is known for the idea of ‘hyperobjects’, phenomena that are distributed in time and space and typically not described as objects outside the triple-o context; for instance the ozone layer. In the epoch of the Antroposece where there’s an “ecological emergency”, these hyperobjects start to impact us - in fact we can’t escape them. Antr-ooo-poscene So how does the Object Oriented Ontology relate to the Antroposcene? An angry listener in the audience shouted that is useless wordplay in a geological context. Although perhaps we both need kittens and hyperobjects to hold on to when we dive into the dark future of planet Earth.