Christoph Rosol

I am group leader of the umbrella project “Knowledge in and of the Anthropocene” and a researcher and curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (HKW). I studied history of science and media studies in Berlin and Toronto. In 2008 I was a stipendiary at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC and from 2008 to 2011 joined the graduate program "Media of History – History of Media" (Erfurt, Weimar, Jena). In 2012, I became a Predoctoral Fellow at the MPIWG and, later that year, a Research Associate in HKW’s The Anthropocene Project. As a member of the curatorial team ever since, I was principally involved in devising and developing the follow-up projects Technosphere and the long-term initiative Anthropocene Curriculum, a global platform for experimental research and education that I co-head together with Katrin Klingan. Such work at the intersection and shifting boundaries between the natural sciences, humanities, design, and arts enables me to engage productively with the numerous facets of Anthropocene research while studying it at the same time.

Since 2017, I have been heading the Department I umbrella theme “Knowledge in and of the Anthropocene,” coordinating and developing all Anthropocene-related work in the department. In my doctoral research, I deal with the (pre)history and epistemic foundations of General Circulation Models (GCMs), which are derived from numerical weather prediction techniques but have now evolved into a core component of so-called Earth system models. Based on a historiographic reframing of the objects, techniques, and longue-durée ideals of rationally modeling atmospheric motion (i.e., the excessively hybrid configuration of empirical, theoretical, and technological practices that stabilized an epistemic manifestation of the unrepresentable), I argue for a reconceptualization of the notions of “uncertainty” and “scientific revolution” that are common terms in the literature on this subject.

The current focus of this work is on an analysis of climate records (specifically, deep-sea sediment cores) and their operative role as data repositories in constraining numerical experiments of paleoclimate reconstructions. By discussing an exemplary simulation of a possible pre-Quaternary analogue to current climatic change (the PETM), I am investigating the modes of representation, time evolution, and non-linearity in modeling a climate history of the Earth.

Curatorial Work

• 2012–14  The Anthropocene Project
  • 2013  The Anthropocene Project. An Opening
  • 2014  A Matter Theater
  • 2014  Anthropocene Campus
• 2015–19  Technosphere, (incl. chief editor of the  Technosphere Magazine)
  • 2015  The Technosphere, Now
  • 2016  Technosphere × Knowledge
  • 2016  Anthropocene Campus: The Technosphere Issue
  • 2017  1948 Unbound
  • 2019  Life Forms 
• 2017–18  Anthropocene Lectures  
• 2018–19  Mississippi. An Anthropocene River