Four speakers from across law, policy, sciences and art answer a simple question in under ten minutes each: How do the Great Acceleration charts sense and make sense of the world? Following their response, an open mic format ensues, whereby anyone can respond to what the respective speakers have said, requesting clarification, or suggesting a provocation. In this way, Earth Is a Sensorium unfolds as a public assembly. Through direct public engagement, the event explores what social and technological imaginaries are brought into being by and through accelerating change on a global scale.
Photo: vog.photo
Panel Discussion
Earth Is a Sensorium
Owen Gaffney (IE/SE), Mark Williams (GB), Armen Avanessian (AT), Ulrike Felt (AT)
POSTCITY, First Floor, Conference Hall
So. 7. Sep. 2025
11:30
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13:00
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Mark Williams
As a palaeontologist, I have spent a lifetime collecting fragments of past lives to weave stories about how life on Earth has changed over millions of years. Sometimes these changes were remarkably good, like the evolution of flowers, and sometimes very bad, like the loss of entire groups of animals such as the dinosaurs. I use the patterns that emerge from the deep geological record to help inform the near-future trajectory of life on Earth in the Anthropocene.
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Owen Gaffney
Owen Gaffney is a writer, optimist, producer, record label founder, and researcher. He founded Strange Attractors Records. In July 2025, it released Hard Rain with the Kronos Quartet, Ringo Starr, Laurie Anderson, Iggy Pop, Willie Nelson, and more than 50 other artists. He is chief impact officer at Nobel Prize Outreach and author of Earth For All: A Survival Guide For Humanity (2022) and Breaking Boundaries (2021). He co-leads the Earth4All initiative and is co-founder of the Exponential Roadmap Initiative.
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Armen Avanessian
Selected Publications: Metanoia. Ontologie der Sprache (mit A. Hennig), 2014. I Überschrift. Ethik des Wissens–Poetik der Existenz, 2015. I Miamification, 2017. Metaphysik zur Zeit,2018. I I - I. Spekulative Poetik von Feminismus, Algorithmik, Politik und Kapital (mit A. Hennig), 2019. I Konflikt, 2022. I Flüchtigkeitsmanagement. Medientechnologien zwischen Wirtschaft Kultur Politik, 2023. I Planeten Denken. Hyper-Antizipation und Biografische Tiefenzeit, 2024. I Planetarische Ethik, 2025.
