Anthropocene Milestones

What do the Altamira cave, the spinning jenny, the scanning tunneling microscope, the telephone, and the Apollo mission have in common? One, these items and events are on display at the Deutsches Museum, and two, they represent important milestones that have paved the way to a new geological “age of humans.”

Unfortunately, many of the objects representing historical Anthropocene milestones are on permanent display at the Deutsches Museum and cannot be removed. With this in mind, Henning Wagenbreth, a professor of illustration in visual communication at the University of the Arts (UdK), Berlin, and his students bring us closer to these revolutionary innovations by illustrating them in 30 eight-panel comic strips.

This project, completed with the editorial work of Alexandra Hamann, the academic supervision of Reinhold Leinfelder, and professional guidance of Helmuth Trischler, presents in a creative way the increasingly significant geological footprints of humans on the planet. The comics strips were on display from 5 December 2014 until 31 January 2016 alongside the actual objects exhibited at the Deutsches Museum, in cooperation with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, in the special exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands”.

They have also been published in German on the website of the Deutsches Museum and as a book accompanying the Anthropocene exhibition. To read the comics in English, please browse through the Anthropocene Milestones collection in the Multimedia Library of the Environment & Society Portal. The comics have been translated by Oliver Liebig and edited by Iris Trautmann and Marielle Dado.