Research regarding the significance and consequence of anthropogenic transformations of the earth’s land, oceans, biosphere and climate have demonstrated that, from a wide variety of perspectives, it is very likely that humans have initiated a new geological epoch, their own. First labeled the Anthropocene by the chemist Paul Crutzen, the consideration of the merits of the Anthropocene thesis by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences has also garnered the attention of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars, as well as an increasing number of researchers from a range of scientific backgrounds. Architecture in the Anthropocene: ...

Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this collection explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis. Art in the Anthropocene brings together a multitude of disciplinary conversations, drawing together artists, curators, scientists, theorists and activists to address the geological reformation of the human species. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez ...

It’s unclear how many people still alive today can remember feeling the strange, warm rains that fell over the riverside city of Pripyat on the Ukraine-Belarus border in late April 1986. Pripyat was built in 1970 to serve the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, dedicated to harnessing the mirnyy atom (“peaceful atom”) for the Soviet Union. For the past thirty-six years, Pripyat and a surrounding exclusion zone of inconsistent bounds bridging swaths of today’s Ukraine, Belarus, and a bit of Russia have been off limits to most human beings. In this issue of e-flux journal, Svitlana Matviyenko disagrees with Paul ...

The SDUK broadsheet series takes aim at a broad range of concerns—and this issue, GRAFTING, explores how we come to know, define, and interact with nature, where we see its boundaries and identify its needs, and how we understand its entanglement with culture. Following on the origins of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and in the spirit of publishing, questioning, and problematizing “useful knowledge,” we recognize our readers as curious people who may pick up this publication with certain questions already in mind. Perhaps you are asking, “Where do nature and the city intersect? What does this mean ...

A book of theory, essays, stories, and poems released in association with the exhibition Hyperobjects at Ballroom Marfa, which explores the overwhelming scale of today’s ecological crisis.

HEATHER DAVIS talks about plastic in the United States, discussing its materiality, geography, and toxic histories. Combining feminist and queer theory with chemistry, geology, history, and art, Davis unpacks the constitution of throwaway culture, petrochemical industries, pvc, feminized male bodies, human endocrine systems, multidisciplinary collaboration, mealworms, and mermaids’ tears (also known as nurdles) in order to think through questions of justice, inheritance, and multispecies kinship.

Adrian Lahoud looks at architecture through the analogy of the trap; Heather Davis intimately encounters the molecular; Dehlia Hannah and Cynthia Selin ponder the sartorial implications of a changing climate; Daniel Barber explores the scales of architectural history; and Caitlin Blanchfield reports from the droneodrome.

Heather Davis evaluates alternate futures of carbon sequestration in a review of Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering; Ignacio G. Galán offers some notes on representation and coalition-building in a review of Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution; and Gideon Fink Shapiro recounts stories about ornament in a review of Rayyane Tabet’s Arabesque at Storefront for Art and Architecture.

The Lesson of Zoology first appeared in the trash heap of contemporary Lisbon. While researching the role of Lisbon’s Geographical Society in one of the first planetary colonizations, we happened upon an antiquarian bookshop with seemingly endless piles of natural history lithographs. Among them, The Lesson stood out as an especially compelling meta-image of just what a lesson is—an ordering of nature, by way of presentation, about who intended to possess the earth.