UChicago Class Visits: Sensing the Anthropocene

The name of the class is Sensing the Anthropocene. The premise of the course is that human beings have radically changed environmental cycles and ecologies and so the course seeks out defamiliarizing senses. For instance, the industrial revolution has fundamentally changed the soundscape. We began to map the soundscape that we can hear here in the Garden of the Phoenix. Seeing that this class is outdoors was definitely a big draw for me. I kind of wanted to do that as an experiment to take myself out of the classroom and see how my body moves through the world while also learning and not just going through daily life. This class ended up being a lot more like visceral I think than like the theoretical classes that I've taken. If you like imagine studying like the way that your muscles move and like your skeletal structures move and like the sinew of that, it's kind of taking that like approach and looking at the entire city. The Anthropocene isn't an official name but is this open question about how do we talk about the acceleration that human activity has placed on planetary cycles. We were really focusing on the sense of listening today, different ways that sound can tell us about the Anthropocene. We're trying to get the students to both perceive those things and then come up with creative methodologies for translating that into experimental books that we're making. Art practice constitutes a species of research. We're trying to learn to produce our own methods out of a direct engagement with nature and the built environment. Part of my learning becomes feeling myself as an insignificant part in this great symphony. It does hit you in a way that you can't really verbalize.