Paper short abstract:

This presentation offers a preview of Feral Atlas, an interactive website co-curated with my colleagues Anna Tsing, Alder Keleman-Saxana and Feifei Zhou. Feral Atlas brings art, science and the humanities into dialogue to offer a description of the more-than-human Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation offers a preview of Feral Atlas, an interactive website co-curated with my colleagues Anna Tsing, Alder Keleman-Saxana and Feifei Zhou. Feral Atlas brings together more than sixty field-based observations from scientists, humanists, artists and indigenous activists to offer a description of the more-than-human Anthropocene. Through these reports, the atlas constructs a method. This method asks researchers to hold their attention to the scene where infrastructures create feral dynamics.

This talk will focus on the artful play of form and content through which Feral Atlas orchestrates its argument. Plastic bags, radioactive woodchips, cane toads, deadly plant pathogens, underwater noise, water hyacinths: these and other feral entities lead users through a website designed to reveal unexpected connections and moments of reflection, while simultaneously attempting to destabilise the sense of mastery that digital technologies have trained us to expect. By bringing together art and science, combining moments of affect and empirical observation, Feral Atlas refracts new ways of seeing the Anthropocene—so helping us to recognize how certain humans and non-humans are co-creating our current earth crisis, while encouraging us to pay closer, careful attention rather than simply turning away in horror.