What we call “technology” today involves intensely concentrated metabolic processes, ingesting and transforming energy and materials on a planetary scale. Techno-metabolism also concentrates and compresses time. Its temporalities include Earth's deep past (fossil fuels, minerals), the Holocene epoch since the last ice age (dawn of agriculture and urban civilization), the 18^th-20^th century Industrial Revolutions (fossil-fueled capitalist expansion), and the Great Acceleration (1950-present, with globalized trade, industrial agriculture, rapid climate change and environmental degradation). The Anthropocene epoch – with humanity as a new geological force – now appears likely to consume, as well, the future of human civilizations. 

All scientists and scholars of the Anthropocene wrestle with temporality: how to represent time scales, how to project uncertain futures, how to balance urgency (time is running out) with hope (time enough for change and renewal). The human experience of time varies not only across cultures and lifeways, but within the lives of individuals, from first awareness of time passing to the sense of fleeting life in old age. Accelerating technological change has powerfully affected how we manage, use, and experience time. As for political life, fractures have grown for many decades between the slow temporality of deliberative institutions and the frantic scrabble of technological change.

This workshop, open to scientists, scholars, and artists, will ask how we can hold and communicate multiple temporal and spatial scales. How can we re-imagine time and temporality for an accelerating Anthropocene? How can we re-think relations between time, technology, and energy? 

A handful of resources to provoke discussion:

• Kurzgesagt, Time: the History and Future of Everything (video, 7 minutes)
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh. One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax. The Mandel Lectures in the Humanities. Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2023. 132 pp.
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (January 2009): 197–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640. Attached.
• Koselleck, Reinhart (translated by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Sean Franzel). Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2018. Translated from German. Two chapters attached.