This book came about as an intersection between two events. The first was a public gathering that I organised called ‘Dark Horizons’ in April 2017 with Andrew Culp and Bogna M. Konior at the New School in New York. I wrote a paper for this evening called: ‘Black Sun: The singularity at the heart of the Anthropocene’. In this piece, I envisaged the architecture and structure of this book, without filling out the evidence and relations to education and social change that we find in these pages. Further, in May 2017, as a guest of the Center for Values in Medicine, Science and Technology, in the University of Texas at Dallas, I listened to a speech by the author Kim Stanley Robinson, who spoke about the Anthropocene, and inspired me to initiate the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene (https://iiraorg.com/).
We cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming due to the greenhouse effect, or to the problem of population control, without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society. (Guattari, 1992/1995, 2)