Becoming an epoch warrior : artistic interventions into chronostratigraphy

This PhD project, Becoming an Epoch Warrior: Artistic Interventions into Chronostratigraphy explores how artists can actualize the refusal of the word “Anthropocene”, exerting our expertise in naming and storytelling to weigh in on the consequential, era-defining decision of what to name the future. The research aims to use the epoch naming debate to inspire models of collaborative and responsive experimental artistic practice that promote practical and speculative means to eradicate “Anthropocene” and proliferate other futures in its place.
The 38 members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) are attempting to formalise the word “Anthropocene” as the name for a new geological era defined by the impact of humankind (Zalasiewicz 2018). This geologic debate sparked a strong, transdisciplinary opposition against the word, including myriad suggested alternative names throughout the 2010s (Albrecht 2015, Crist 2013, Cuomo 2015, Demos 2017, Haraway 2013, Pyne 2015, Raworth 2014, Saraceno 2015, Moore 2017, Winner 2017).
My research identifies the forms of disempowerment maintained by the geological status quo, then seeks to correct them through experiments that put the power of epoch naming in the hands of artists. In contrast to the narrow remit of the AWG, I devise my work through collaborative methodologies that support active negotiation, open-ended thinking, and exchange of power between makers, thinkers, and institutions. Key among these methodologies is the process of worldbuilding, which I use to explore methods for co-creation of detailed, multimedia artworks that mobilise new means of participation in the intersection of culture and geology.
To gain further understanding of how the process of epoch naming is negotiated, I undertook several site visits, alongside interviews with two members of the AWG and two leading philosophers promoting alter-epochs. The exegesis outlines how this background research informed periods of both individual and collaborative making. My exploration of worldbuilding as a methodology produced several bodies of multimedia work, beginning with facilitated collaborative and public live events, talks, and working groups. Adapting to the global context of the COVID-19 pandemic, I then reimagined this progression of live events as a book and digital gallery that follow the throughline of a speculative, alternative Geological Congress, accessed as the ephemera contained in a conference tote bag.
This work confronts the challenges of naming a geological era with a mix of humour, absurdity, and sincerity. In attempting to use artistic tools to undermine geological norms, I test both the powers and limits of individual, collective, and artistic autonomy in the face of large-scale global issues and deeply entrenched power structures. What results is a body of work that encapsulates both the acute and long-term symptoms of our current Earth circumstances. Inviting participants into a polyphonous world of alternative epoch names successfully supports generative thinking. Inevitably, however, action must yield to the limitations, baggage, and short-term challenges that constrain the human relationship with deep time. The novel discoveries that are the outcomes of this PhD research model new, practical, collaborative, and creative methods for artistic research, while also uncovering timely, confronting, and uncanny insights into the systems that support cultural-scientific monoliths