Author: Edith Doron
Nexus Senior Program Manager, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh
Those were the words of Rob Long, Founder and Director of Clear Story Productions, who by the end of our ambitious pilot program, a 12-event public series on the Anthropocene entitled, Strange Times- earth in the age of the human, raised a glass (or two) to celebrate. We branded the experimental initiative, 'Carnegie Nexus': conceived, incubated, and hatched by a group of forward thinking curators and educators at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.
In August of 2015, by way of an ACLS Fellowship, I arrived in Pittsburgh having completed by PhD with the Center for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen—that’s Aberdeen, Scotland (UK). The museum fellowship had lofty goals: leveraging shared resources across the arts and sciences, creating connections where none had previously existed, changing paradigms and developing new collaborative habits across four fiercely independent museums. It also had rather vague strategies for achieving these goals—which, to me, read as, freedom to experiment.
Cross disciplinarity is more than just bringing together disciplines around some clearly delineated object of study. It’s about challenging those disciplines to reach out beyond their traditional purview in a way that makes them need the other. It’s about finding that object to which our conceptual apparatus is inadequate—inadequate not only because it is narrowly defined but because it is forgetful. I recall Jacques Lacan’s quote reflecting on the in-betweeness of his own theoretical praxis:
‘The fact is that science, if one looks at it closely, has no memory. Once constituted, it forgets the circuitous path by which it came into being; otherwise stated, it forgets a dimension of truth that psychoanalysis seriously puts to work.’
After much listening and learning, several thematic clusters emerged: the Anthropocene was the first to ‘grow legs’. The Anthropocene is defined as the new geological epoch when human environmental impact has reached a point of becoming the dominant force upon the Earth’s core systems. Coined by Crutzen and Stoermer, it has penetrated a wide range of research and practices because it troubles at the most fundamental levels our understanding of environment, our theories of history, and of technology. It destabilizes clear cut categories between the natural and the artificial, the human and the non-human, biology and culture.
We set about developing an event-based series that would offer multi-media performing arts, documentary film premieres, and conversations that cross-bred herpetologists with conceptual artists, and roboticists with philosophers. This required us to put together a ‘curriculum for the Anthropocene’. Working closely with Ben Harrison, Curator of Performing Arts & Special Projects at the Warhol and Steve Tonsor, Director of Science at the Museum of Natural History together with a self-selecting group of people inside and outside the museums, Strange Times was born. We opened each event with a bio-acoustic composition, named Silver Clouds by Jayce Clayton which was based on avian research at the Powdermill Nature Reserve. While this soundscape played, we screened the verses of the ‘Ode to Man’, the famous chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone which holds the key to the series title and reads:
‘There is much that is strange, but nothing
that surpasses man in strangeness.’
The series was coursing through questions that were grounded in the belief that the ecological crisis is a symptom of something bigger, deeper, older: an alienation, a crisis of humanity, a kind of rupture in our image of ourselves and our relationship to nature—a relationship that no romantic ‘return to nature’ nor technological amelioration could articulate, much less address. Of course, we partnered with scientists; but we all understood that science was too important to leave to the scientists.
The trace of strangeness remains in our next program series which will be held this April: Becoming Migrant…what moves you?
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