Chaired by Leo Borgesius
Ingar Stene: Morals and Temporalities in Early Modern Geology
In this paper I explore three early modern works on geology, looking at how their authors dealt with the separation of what we today would call the biological and the geological, and how they developed, or failed to develop, temporal and moral schemes in order to both overcome the challenges of entanglement, or to capitalize on the opportunities it presented.
During the years 1657-1677, three very different works on geology were printed in Europe, all by authors living in or coming from Scandinavia. While these works had very different scopes, and ambitions, they all struggled to synchronise and integrate long geological processes, with the shorter cycles of observable life and human history, within the limits of a biblical timeline of 6000 years. But rather than succumbing to these difficulties, the early modern authors found strategies to face them not simply as problems, but also as opportunities. The prospect of time being etched into the strata of the earth offered a rich opportunity to craft new histories and meanings that reflected on the geological stratification of time, morality and history. As such, the emerging field of early modern geology was no stranger to the moral and historical implications of their studies.
In the Anthropocene we are once again becoming familiar with the early modern language of moral, temporal, and historical entanglements between the geological and the biological. If we are experiencing a continuity of, and a return to, ways of viewing the cosmos that blend the these realms, how might this alter the way we conceptualize our own present? What might we learn from past endeavours into the muddied realms of geology, biology, temporality and morality?
Bio: Ingar Stene is a PhD candidate at the Department of Archaeology, Consevation and History at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research focuses on the early modern history of natural, cultural and social entanglements in Northern Europe, looking at how concepts of nature, climate theories and the far north travelled in the early modern history of knowledge.
Roos Hopman: Thinking speed with snails: digitization, data, and loss in the natural history museum
In natural history museums worldwide, museum staff are working on making their collections of specimens (such as insects on pins, dried plants, or mounted birds) digitally available through online platforms. While the digitization of collections is not an entirely new phenomenon, current efforts are undertaken at a larger scale than in the past, with museum management promising digitization processes that are faster than ever in particular. Speedy digitization is of the essence especially now, so museum actors and biodiversity scientists stress, as natural history collections provide a crucial resource for understanding and circumventing effects of climate-change induced biodiversity loss. This speed, then, is promised to be achieved through the purchase of novel technologies, such as 3D scanners and a conveyor belt system, as well as the outsourcing of labor and the introduction of workflows. This paper takes an interest in the work of digitization – the labor required to make specimens and their metadata digital through the taking of photographs, scans, and the transcription of labels – to upset these stories of speed. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the malacology (mollusk) collection of the Natural History Museum in Berlin, I in particular bring into view the importance of hesitation and pause in digitization. With this collection of snail shells and the workers digitizing them, the paper questions the promise of speed for natural history collections and their data, proposing alternative times of the digital. Doing so, it furthermore opens up the question if speed may deliver what it promises; namely a digital infrastructure of biodiversity data that serves to circumvent the effects of climate change.
Bio: Roos Hopman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Humboldt University/the National History Museum of Berlin. Her current project focuses on the politics, promises, and practices of the digitization of natural history collections.
Erik Ljungberg: Writing Down Nature’s Rhythms: Gilbert White and the Naturalist’s Journal
This paper examines how Gilbert White (1720-1793), an 18th-century natural historian and parson-naturalist, used his Naturalist’s Journal to record and investigate the punctuality of natural rhythms in his parish in England. White was part of a small group of naturalists who attempted to make calendars of nature by observing and noting the annual appearances of hundreds of species. His journal, which contains 70,000 entries spanning over two decades, was a novel temporal-semiotic artifact that materialized natural durations and enabled their comparison and communication within networks of naturalists. I argue that such artifacts not only co-produced natural rhythms but also embodied specific temporal orders that reflected underlying cultural codes. Thus I attempt to articulate a notion of a relational structure whose ability to constrain the appearance of phenomena emerges from interconnected chains of circulating reference.
Bio: Erik Ljungberg has a masters degree in history of knowledge and a second bachelors in cultural anthropology from the University of Oslo. He is currently a doctoral student the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Currently he is part the project "The Mediated Planet" which looks the global environment as emerging through practices of collecting environmental data. His current research focuses the digitization of Swedish forestry between 1980 and today with a special focus on the importance of machine learning and artificial intelligence. His disciplinary homes are located in science and technology studies, media theory and the environmental humanities.
Elisa Storelli: A parachronology of atoms and stars
Temporal clusters are mind maps of my artistic practice and are used as a tool in my artistic research chronomorphology: the study of how time changes shape. I use this form of diagrammatic writing i to navigate through my thinking and to describe a possible correlation of ideas about the change of time over time.
I would like to present my ongoing work on an iteration of a temporal cluster that I started to develop during my residency at the institute for theoretical sciences in Bangalore and at CERN Geneva. I am interested in the impact that quantum gravity have on how we perceive the world around us, and how this might influence the human understanding and feeling of time. I am especially interested about its effect on our understanding of continuity and chronology. The reality we live in nowadays is not chronological anymore, at least not in a timeline based chronology.
My goal is to create a story, a scientific narration, not a fiction though. The work will tell a relative and relational tale, anecdotes and theories from non-western traditions will appear associated in the fortuitous present of an image, rather than along a timeline. Inspired by the image of particle collisions, I want to produce an image of collision myself. Instead of particles' tracks, my image will reveal historical facts about the (de-/re-)construction of chronology from all around the world, from the past and from various domains. The story will be an iteration of the image.
Bio: Elisa Storelli (1986) is a swiss italian artist based between Brissago and Berlin. Her practice – Chronomorphology – is dedicated to the artistic investigation of time. Storelli holds a diploma from the UdK Berlin. She has been a research fellow of the DiGiTal graduate program in Berlin 2020- 2021. In 2021 she completed a Meisterschüler:innen year with Prof. Dr. Rosa Barba and she is a PhD research fellow of the binational program for artist at the HfK Bremen. Storelli’s work has been shown at GAK, Bremen; Kunstraum am Schauplatz, Vienna; Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and La Rada, Locarno among others. http://elisastorelli.ch
Christina Nadeau: Tipping the Narrative on Climate Change: An Interdisciplinary Review on the Role of Tipping Points on the Temporality of Climate Change
Climate change fundamentally deals with time and temporality. Climate change often refers to future long-term projections of the state of our Earth system while drawing from evidence from the past to understand how the climate system functions. We do this to connect our present-day actions with future consequences in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Temporal dimensions of climate change are one of the main contributing factors to the lack of agency to mitigate its current and future impacts. Efforts to reduce emissions have been slow on-set and disjointed across nations, leading climate scientists and communicators to resort to more extreme narratives to emphasise the urgency required to avoid the collapse of multiple complex natural systems. Amongst the increasingly urgent narratives, the term “tipping point” has emerged as a research topic of growing concern and interest in the climate sciences. Climate tipping points (CTPs) in particular serve as a warning of nonlinear, irreversible changes to elements of the Earth’s system that could destabilise our climate system within human timescales. This research seeks to investigate the role of tipping points across multiple disciplines on the temporal dimensions of climate change. This was achieved firstly through review of the literature on tipping points and climate change temporalities. We investigated this further using a survey with 851 respondents in Norway, in which the respondents were randomly presented with a scientific text either on CTPs or traditional climate change. The results will be discussed further in the full paper
Bio: Christina Nadeau is a PhD research fellow at the Biology department at UiO. Initially beginning their academic career in the Geosciences but most recently graduated with an MSc in Climate Change: Environment, Science and Policy. Her PhD research at UiO revolves around the concept of “tipping points” and seeks to address linkages between climate feedbacks and societal perception of climate risks. This involves interdisciplinary research investigating the convergence and understanding of the relationships between climate tipping points and social perceptions of climate change.