Exchange on Deep Time and Deep Response-ability

Determining the age of materials—a seemingly objective act—is, in fact, one of multiple significations evoking cosmic hopes and political resonances. Radionuclide and radiocarbon signals offer humankind understanding of more than just chronometric measures—they attach human history and activities to material processes. The laboratory practice of geochronology is one of both scientific fact and fiction that relies on climate research, environmental studies, archaeology and forensics. How can we imagine the intimacy that geochronology creates with abstracted, distanced events? And how do the geochronologists and geohistorians interpreting these events understand their response-ability to material signals from the past?

With Jamie Allen and Irka Hajdas

Filmed by artists Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke