About The Anthropocene Foundry
The Anthropocene Foundry is manifestation format to present video art selections from The Anthropocene Project, including about 500 international artists, created and curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne for The New Museum of Networked Art – dealing with the human impact on nature and the natural living environment manifested in two comprehensive media collections – video art & sound art. For the screenings @ different places animated contents from different sources . eg. The Anthropocene Project, AnimateC’24 (Cologne Art & Animation Festival) and Vacations on the Subconscious (1924-2024 – 100 Years of The Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton) have been selected to point to the human impact on different levels, also in terms of the artistic creation itself. The video artists composing different types of self-created footage, are partially using the latest technology (artificial intelligence) based on a specific subjective view on the Big Creation (our world) forming new types of reality of the world they are living in. They do not only reflect the existing but go far beyond to visions of the future, referring to the finiteness of life as well as the infinity of the Creation. By being confronted with, the audience becomes the foundry of a new human existence, at least in the imagination.
2000-2025 // The Foundation Screening Series (Finiteness – Infinity) and the screenings are part of the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the New Museum of Networked Art on 1 January 2000 and the current foundation process of The Agricola de Cologne Foundation for the Arts which will operate the museum from 2025 onwards.
“The Anthropocene Foundry” celebration programs are presented between 18 December 2024 – 31 March 2025 in Kolkata, Addis Ababa, Los Angeles and simultaneously in Cologne featuring the entire “Anthropocene Project” at different places in different video constellations.
While Anthropocene (actually only proposed as a new epoch of geologic time, following the Holocene) is an officially not yet definitely defined period of time during which human activities are thought to have had a significant impact on the global environment, regarded as having begun sometime between twelve thousand years ago, with the spread of agriculture, and two hundred years ago, with the advent of industrialization, as a topic of the media art context of The Anthropocene Project, the term is going far beyond marking the contradictory relationship between (the volatile transitory character of) human nature and (sustainable) nature, the significant human impact on ecosystems, including the human-caused climate change, biodiversity loss etc.