Conference Saturday 28 February
Saturday 28 February
10:30 - 18:00
Paradiso, Main Hall
The conference brings together scientists, philosophers, theorists, artists, and researchers to reflect on the theme of The Geologic Imagination. How do we rethink our attachments to the world, our concepts of nature, culture and ecology? How do we conceive of the world? How do we understand the systems and processes of nature, and our intentions and interactions with the planet? How do art and science map and document new insights? How can transformations that occur on a geological scale become something humans can feel, touch, and experience?
Session 7: Landscape Transformation
Saturday 28 February
10:30 - 12:30
Paradiso, Main Hall
Jananne Al-Ani & Rob Holmes & Michael Welland
Humans have built cities, physical infrastructures, roads and railways and electricity grids. Through agriculture humans have changed the face of the Earth dramatically. Humans have also created artificial islands from sand, turned lakes into polders, valleys into lakes, diverted the courses of rivers, and through irrigation made lakes into deserts.
Session 8: Speculative Geophilosophy
Saturday 28 February
14:00 - 15:30
Paradiso, Main Hall
Jeff VanderMeer & Benjamin H. Bratton & Ben Woodard
The geophilosophy of Ben Woodard directs the attention of philosophy to our globe, because it has ‘contoured every aspect of our material, cultural, and noetic existence’. But what is the Earth? Earth does not care for human thoughts and human civilisation. How can we truly imagine the force of the Earth, the nonhuman forces, things that defy human comprehension?
Session 9: The Nuclear Dimension
Saturday 28 February
16:00 - 17:30
Paradiso, Main Hall
Ele Carpenter & Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse
In this panel we look at artistic approaches and responses to the ‘nuclear dimension’, and the imaginings of a future on a geological scale. We have to imagine that the impact of our activities stretches far into a nonhuman future, and, if we take an ethical position, it implies potentially communicating with a future species that lives on Earth… The mounds that store nuclear waste are uncanny monuments to humanity that will outlast the human species as we know it.