Grasping the Anthropocene demands a sense of deceleration—we need “slow media” that by analogy with the slow food movement, engages with the complexities of a rapidly changing world by slowing down to the pace of a museum visit or engaging with physical or visual objects. 

The Imaginary Museum of Listening to the Anthropocene

Grasping the Anthropocene demands a sense of deceleration—we need “slow media” that by analogy with the slow food movement, engages with the complexities of a rapidly changing world by slowing down to the pace of a museum visit or engaging with physical or visual objects. One such way is to focus on the development of an imaginary museum, whose galleries open up vistas for everyone seeking alternate ways to educate students and think about global change.

These days, global knowledge is often packaged for the “fast and furious” commercial media, or challenged by the democratic social media, but this module focuses on a “third way”: “slow media” that, by analogy with the slow food movement, engages with the complexities of a rapidly changing world by slowing down to the pace of a museum visit or engaging with physical or visual objects. The idea of the Anthropocene demands thinking about a Long Now—that is, not just a single human lifetime but up to seven generations, as suggested by The Long Now Foundation. To this we added the global imaginary, the Big Here: the local is now planetary in scale. An Anthropocene imaginary demands a sense of global citizenship and a consciousness on the part of an observer that includes their great-grandparents and their great-children. Having a “global soul” (to use Pico Iyer’s term) and dwelling across generations stretches and stresses the human sense of self. The idea of doing such imagining at a slower pace in a physical place or with real objects, offers an alternative to the “sound bite” approach to communicating complex ideas. One way to make the idea of slowing down concrete and accessible is through extending our understanding of the museum as a place that exhibits and preserves objects and artifacts. With the idea of an imaginary museum that holds individual objects and collections the seminar wants to offer new tools not only for people working in museums, but for everyone seeking alternative ways to educate students and citizens to think about global change and ways of living in the Anthropocene.