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Tagged: anthropocene

6 thoughts

The Cattle of the Sun

Félix Pharand-Deschênes · · 16 min read

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, the Sea Peoples, and a herd of stored sunlight that neither breeds nor dies. Homer wrote down what that costs, and it is not the voyage.

The Atasthalocene

Félix Pharand-Deschênes · · 7 min read

Nine lines into the Odyssey, Homer names the cause of shipwreck: atasthalíai — reckless follies, committed after fair warning. As Nolan's film opens worldwide, a closer look at the word our epoch may deserve, and the exit it names.

The Mythurgic Age

Félix Pharand-Deschênes · · 8 min read

On mythurgy — story as labour: fictions that fund, name, and build themselves into the world — and why our age runs on science-fictional myths that organize behaviour long before they are ever true.

The Beam Goes Level

Félix Pharand-Deschênes · · 8 min read

Comparison is the oldest instrument of thought — to weigh the unknown against a known measure. GLOBAÏA's Sfera gathers Earth's water, air, life, and human-made mass into spheres at true scale, and somewhere around 2020 the two pans — the born world and the made world — went level.

The Anthropocene Strait

Félix Pharand-Deschênes · · 12 min read

Fourteen named rocks — Monomorphia, Pleonexia, Hyperbasis, and the others — that lie between us and a safe and just harbour. An allegorical wink at Homer, on the eve of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.

The Sphere of Stranger-Minds

Félix Pharand-Deschênes · · 4 min read

On the Xenoösphere — the planetary stratum where non-human intellect now takes shape — and the physical infrastructure that gives it body.