The topic of this notebook by Jill Bennett is life in the anthropocene, the present eon, which is characterized by human activities. Derived from geology, the term anthropocene circumscribes an era that began with the industrialization and spans a vanishingly brief time of 250 years, in which, however, a paradigm change has occurred. Its implications have generated some resistance, uttered, for example, when denying that climate change, a decisive trait of the anthropocene, is a man-made phenomenon. The comprehensive change in our understanding of the world has had effects on how we eat, shop, and move around, but it also offers the potential for inventions in the socio-ecological systems: when ecological thinking begins to influence our ways of working, it may eventually lead to a transdisciplinary revolution. Bennett names examples of transdisciplinary processes from the realm of art, such as Amy Balkin’s work Public Smog (2004–ongoing), which incorporates the earth’s atmosphere.

 

Jill Bennett is a writer, researcher and cultural critic based at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, Sydney.

 

Language: German/English