Reinhold Leinfelder on “The Anthropocene”
Reinhold Leinfelder, Affiliated Carson Professor as of 2012, speaks about his research concerning the Anthropocene.
Reinhold Leinfelder, Affiliated Carson Professor as of 2012, speaks about his research concerning the Anthropocene.
Fiona Cameron, Carson Fellow from August 2011 until March 2012, talks about her research on ‘Museums, Education, and Climate Change’ at the intersections between science, technology and nature.
What does it mean to live in the Anthropocene? What are our responsibilities in a world where the boundaries between nature and culture are no longer clear? How do we visualize and teach the challenges of the future? The articles in this issue of RCC Perspectives reflect upon the ethics, aesthetics, and didactics of an “Age of Humans.”
Museum exhibitions offer a unique space for creating a three-dimensional experience of the systemic interconnectedness that characterizes the Anthropocene, as well as encouraging reflection and participatory discussion. The Deutsches Museum has decided to tackle the challenges of this new age head-on and become the first museum to create a major exhibition on the Anthropocene. While curating an exhibition, we also tackle the question of how to “curate” the planet in its literal sense of taking care of it and curing it.
As agents of knowledge and appropriators of technology, exhibitions (and most notably museum exhibitions) have played an important role in the early twentieth century, when gas and electricity, the quintessential modern energy sources, aimed to oust wood, coal, and peat while simultaneously competing intensely with each other.
Ecoartspace is a nonprofit platform providing opportunities for artists who address the human/nature relationship in the visual arts.
Libby Robin compares two major museum exhibitions on climate change that rely heavily on the IPCC models: Uppdrag Klimat (Mission: Climate Earth), at the Royal Natural History Museum in Stockholm (Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet), Sweden; and EcoLogic, at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
Libby Robin discusses animals in museums, and how taxidermy has changed from art in the service of science to the backbone of art itself, both in museums and beyond.
Libby Robin discusses the implication of Sir Colin MacKenzie’s initiative to collect Australian marsupials.
This article briefly retraces the history of a Florentine botanical museum as a reflection of changes in people-plant relations.