Exhibition - Open through March 15th – 28th.
Opening Reception - Friday, March 15th, 5:30PM
@ UVA: Transci Lab For Real World Chemistry And Creative Communication, Chem Bldg. 222
The Periodic Table has been called “nature’s Rosetta Stone,” “the chemist’s map” and “probably the most compact and meaningful compilation of knowledge yet devised.” If the time-honored periodic table hanging in science classrooms around the world enables prediction of properties and relationships between material elements, how might a new aperiodic table, updated and borne from the history-defying conditions of the Anthropocene, assist a global community struggling to navigate the material, ecological, and social justice issues of an accelerating climate crisis?
The Aperiodic Table is envisioned as a conceptual framework to represent and re-narrate materials through the beings, places, and ecologies they engage. It may serve as a flexible, ongoing container, utilizing a diverse set of media and collaborative formats to structure knowledge and make it actionable. As the periodic table is organized by rows (periods) and columns (groups) to catalog elements and their properties, the aperiodic table is organized by dynamic interactions of material, body, community, and place, including material design, ethics, and health.
As a roadmap for the new, strange, and often harmful material formations unique to this geological epoch of human accelerated change, the Aperiodic Table of the Anthropocene seeks to bring attention to rarely seen material trajectories – from extraction to waste, past to future.
The crises of the Anthropocene call for a new kind of lab for a new kind of research, with fresh frameworks to dis/organize the findings, updated and more resonant with the times: real world, narrative, and less pure, discrete, and contained. The tranSci Lab is such a space while the Aperiodic Table endeavors to showcase our passion for materials—their properties and dynamics—while lamenting the tragic roles many play in the Anthropocene.
The Aperiodic Table of the Anthropocene exhibition is on display at the the tranSci Lab for Real World Chemistry and Creative Communication, Chemistry Building, Room 222 from March 15 - 28, 2024.