A new intensification is reshaping the surface of the planet: human changes to the Earth’s climate, land, oceans and biosphere are now  so great and so rapid that the thesis of a new geological epoch defined by the actions of humans – the Anthropocene – is now being widely debated and articulated. This thesis is developing across a number of circuits, institutions, organisations, scientific and intellectual fields, all of which are equally affected by this unfolding discourse, as much as the environments in which they act.

Operating as an observatory, a composition of documentary practices and discourses, the project traces the formation of the Anthropocene thesis. Beginning in 2013, the project combines film, photography, documentation, interviews, spatial analysis and fieldwork to form an archive and a series of installations, seminars, debates and cultural interventions.

Across a number of specific international agencies and organisations, information about scientific research is acquired, registered, evaluated, processed, stored, archived, organised and re-distributed. These behind-the-scenes processes and practices, that lead to the equally complex decision making procedures, form new discourses and figures of shift. The Anthropocene Observatory documents these practices in a series of short films, interviews and documentary materials: aim of the project is to illustrate in detail the unfolding of the thesis of the Anthropocene in its many streams of influence.

The first episode outlines the connections and wide-reaching Anthropocene thesis in the practices of policy making, planning, decision making and scientific practices. The episode traces two parallel lines of co-development: on one side the re-composition of post World-War 2 sovereignties and polities, with the long rise of the international space and decolonisation processes; on the other side, the wide re-organisation of infrastructures, cities, networks and procedures of measurement and planning.

From the formation of the United Nations, from Cold-War Game Theory to the works on World-Game of architect Buckminster Fuller, from the scientific approach to human settlement planning of Constantinos Doxiadis, to the interactionist anthropological studies of Margaret Mead, the first episode traces the complex development of the relation between politics, science, planning, humanities and the arts.

Interviews to members of the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the WMO World Meteorological Organisation, to philosopher Bruno Latour and historian Paul N. Edwards, are assembled together with documents of ongoing climate research in the Antarctic, with historical documentation about the development of the complex knowledge production processes on climate change.

The Anthropocene is the new geological epoch shaped by mankind, a new epoch dominated by calculus. The expansion of the reach of mankind on the planet is driven by complex calculations and abstractions. Models, predictions, time series, simulations, analytical calculus are what link climate change sciences, Earth-System analysis and contemporary econometric practices.

Following the investigation on the procedures to transform the planet into an object of international planning, the new episode explores how the abstraction of model-making is shaping the decision-making practices and the many polities that characterise the contemporary epoch.

From global centres for climate modelling, to re-insurance companies, from CO2 markets to environmental monitoring, from system analysis to management theory: a series of computers and interconnected systems of calculation are the material basis for the multiple practices and procedures that connect science, finance, telecommunication and public policy at the age of the Anthropocene.

Measurement of the planetary strata along a trajectory linking a Soviet probe reaching the deepest point on the planet, a vast geological scientific repository, and remote sen- sing satellites, traces the complex relations between earth’s history and human efforts to control and plan its habitat at unprecedented scales.

Different measurement technologies along this trajectory reveal different ways of conceiving the relationship bet-ween scientific evidence and political organization of human action. The Kola Superdeep Borehole in the Russian Arctic was a mission to increase geophysical knowledge. The vast industrial exploitation of mineral resources became the basis for the utopian Soviet project to live rationally with nature, coinciding with the formation of a major role for scientific rationality and evidence-based decision making and planning. Contemporary measurements and inquiries into the core samples of the British Geological Survey reveal the connections of human activities to the material traces of the recent history of the Earth, marking the new stratigraphic evidence of the Anthropocene.

How are the complex systems and measurements of science of global change forming new territorial structures? How are accelerations and long duration shaping contemporary decision-making processes?

The contested history of geology - as a science of planetary history - has developed alongside the material and social spaces of modernity. Each form of political and territorial organisation - the city-state, colonial empires, nations, the international order - has been linked to different natural resources and maintained different imaginaries of geological time. The Anthropocene Observatory explores how the exit from the Holocene is rapidly intensifying the semi-stable forms that have bound human cohabitation to its material spaces. It enquires into the forms of contemporary life and the spaces it is generating, cutting through established bonds, opening up new connections between science and politics, moulding control structures and shaping new landscapes and territories.

The destabilising conditions entailed by the new geological epoch reverberate across polities,institutions, law, international organisations, infrastructures, war, land, practices of scientific investigation and practices of government, the sea, cities, markets and planning institutions. They reshape human spaces as well as their material counterparts, they form a new mode of operation, where non-human and human agencies interact in unprecedented ways.