Seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale

What is the material and metaphorical weight of Anthropocene information – the data and other information used to detect and understand the human impact on Earth as a bio-geophysical system? We “know” the Anthropocene through graphs, tables, charts, figures, and photographs – but do we really know the gigantic infrastructures that produce and underlie them?

Paul N Edwards focuses the research on the mutual shaping of cognitive infrastructures and planetary transformation. Paul N. Edwards is the director of the Program in Science, Technology & Science (STS) and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, as well as Professor of Information and History at the University of Michigan. Edwards’s book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), a history of the meteorological information infrastructure, received the Computer Museum History Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, the Louis J. Battan Award from the American Meteorological Society, and other prizes. His research focuses on the history, politics, and culture of knowledge and information infrastructures. He focuses especially on environmental security (e.g. climate change, Anthropocene risks, and nuclear winter).