Ecological Translation asks how climate change might be imagined differently if humans could speak directly with animals, plants and the natural world. Drawing on Michel Serres's call to ecologise the civil subject of law, the project takes up new developments in bioacoustics and AI that promise a "google translate" for interspecies communication—technologies already reshaping how whale migration, coral reefs and birdsong inform climate response. Bringing together experts across law, science, technology, policy and art, the symposium and exhibition interrogate what is at stake when the radical alterity of nonhuman life is rendered into the idiom of English syntax. Ecological translation names both this speculative promise of interspecies communication and the ecology that emerges through the correspondence of different disciplinary imaginations of nature. Presented at Goethe-Institut Athens, the project stages an interdisciplinary encounter with the opportunities and threats of new technoscientific approaches to the unfolding climate crisis.

There is an urgent need to update the Great Acceleration graphs that were developed in the first decade of the 21st Century to articulate the research on the Anthropocene. The ultra-rapid intensification of human activities that mark the transition into the Anthropocene in the Mid-Twentieth Century has been identified as the Great Acceleration of a number of indicators of the Earth System and socio-economic factors by Will Steffen et al. in the ambit of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program IGBP, and have since then been updated only a few times.

The multidisciplinary challenge is to move beyond the 12 initial graphs, designed to indicate how socio- economic trends and Earth System trends connect to shape the transition of the Earth into the Anthropocene. The clear-cut distinction needs to be surpassed, and more interconnections and feedbacks need to be inscribed into the graphs. A localised understanding of how the intensification of material, energy and information fluxes are shaping territories during the Anthropocene is substantial for all lines of work towards the UN Sustainable Development goals. New methodologies linking the arts, natural and social sciences, and technology can indicate paths to connect polities and democracies to critical data.

For further details, see this one-day symposium I organised, together with Territorial Agency and Ars Electronica, called ‘Earth is a Sensorium’, as part of the 2025 Ars Electronica Festival:

The outcome of this collaboration were featured as part of the Negotiating Humanity exhibition at the Ars Electronica Festival, 2026.