Monday, January 3, 2011

Greater Anthropocene Project -- pt. 1, sketch

The Philospher proposes the following course:

1.   Please consider the view of the London Geological Society that the current epoch of deep earth history is most adequately characterized as the Anthropocene.

2.  Please consider the clarion call of the Real of our current civilizational, and hence planetary, plight.

3.  Please consider imagining what the London Geological Society would need to see in order to validly claim that the current epoch of deep earth history will be split into two phases:  the Lesser Anthropocene, and the Greater Anthropocene.

4.  In light of the aforementioned, consider that we today are living in what is most adequately termed the Lesser Anthropocene Epoch. 

5.  Consider that we are poised to enact the Great Transition -- a period civilizational history as profound as any notable period of deep history. 

IF we can hazard a consensus on the aforementioned -- where it counts -- THEN we can begin characterizing the forms of collective action that will strike us as symptoms of this Transition.

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I for one would propose the funding of a collaborative film project called Greater Anthropocene Project (GAP).  An alternative project that speaks to our fantasies might be called the World-to-Come Project.  At any rate, this would be a half-billion dollar project that contracts the great filmmakers of the world to generate 30 minute visions of the Great Transition.

Another project would be a social media collaboration, utilizing the platforms of the great social media domains of the Web.  Basically, users would collaborate on short film projects depicting the Great Transition. 

All of these projects would be collected into a database using Cultural Analytics software, as defined and developed by the great Lev Manovich, et al.  The database would be a cultural reservoir of an interactive variety. 

My hope is that a cultural reservoire of this type may act as an artificial graft for a new skin of cultural imaginaire.  This GAP database could act as one hub connecting to other hubs associated with entrepreneurial endeavors, venture capital programs, regional focus groups, think tank white paper databases, university research consortiums, volunteer search engines like idealist.org -- the list goes on and on.  If the database is interactive to the utmost of Cultural Analytic capabilities -- providing users with an overview of possibilities, real-time displays of trends of hub traffic, et cetera -- the ease of use will provide incentive for increased cultural imagination along the lines of the Epochal Transition we imagine the earth desires.