Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene highlights a fundamental fracture in contemporary culture between what we know and how we act. In the public sphere, this contradiction can be summarized by the overwhelming sense of apathy in the face of growing complexity and crisis. In scholarship the Anthropocene has been tied up with the experience of the unthinkable­­ by thinkers including Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, and Amitav Ghosh. Yet, the current COVID-19 pandemic — which as a crisis also exemplifies the human impact on and reshaping environments – challenges the pervasiveness of the key concepts of abstraction and unthinkability. Instead, the pandemic has turned the Anthropocene into a concrete, intensely lived, globally shared experience. In doing so, the pandemic asks us to reflect on and, more importantly, experiment with the borders between material and digital spheres and the shifting experiences they currently render.

In September 2021, the 25th Digital Research in Humanities and Arts conference invited contributions and interventions that focus on such transfers and interactions between digital and natural environments. »Digital Matters« took on the challenge of exploring new material and multi-species agencies, forms of embodiment, and interactions between the Performing Arts, the Humanities and the Natural Sciences that engage the sense of relationality and expanded scale the Anthropocene affords. We welcomed contributions that created a sustained encounter between designers, hackers, performers, artists, and philologists to examine how these emerging ways of communicating and creating proximity and solidarity across distance can shape new responses to conceptualizing life in and beyond the Anthropocene. We aimed to generate new perspectives on any of these three interrelated spheres:

1. What do we make of the various encounters between digital and embodied materialities across the cultural, creative, and scientific spectrum?

2. How do we make perceivable the invisible dimension of environments in our cultural practices?

3. How do we create new forms of agency to match the altered realities of the Anthropocene?

The conference was organized by Cluster member Dr. Christian Stein and Dr. Lindsey Drury and Dr. Ramona Mosse from the Cluster of Excellence »Temporal Communities«.

Please find more information on the conference website.

Important Dates

Call for proposals: 20 February 2021 – 30 May 2021

Notification on proposals outcome: 30 June 2021

Draft program released: 1 August 2021

Registration: 15 June – 15 August 2021

Conference: 5 – 7 September 2021