How can museums and other cultural institutions better address the increasing volatility and vulnerability in the Earth system? How can museums facilitate observation of human impacts on the atmosphere, the lithosphere, and everything in between? Can such observation become a truly public enterprise?

Join moderator Jason Groves and curators Sara Dean and Etienne Turpin for a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary aesthetic, curatorial, and archival strategies for observing the signals of a new epoch of geologic time informally known as the Anthropocene.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jason Groves is a former Urban Fellow at the Fisher Bay Observatory Gallery and currently an assistant professor of Germanics at the University of Washington. His work explores how literature elaborates the multiple relations between the human and the geologic.

Sara Dean is an architect and designer in San Francisco, and an assistant chair of graduate design at California College of the Arts. Her work considers the implications of emerging digital methodologies on public engagement, urban interface, and related design practices.

Etienne Turpin is a philosopher studying urban systems, knowledge infrastructure, and colonial-scientific history. He is a research scientist at the MIT Urban Risk Lab, and founding director of anexact office, a design research practice in Jakarta, Indonesia.