The Anthropoid weighs 30,000,000,000,000 tons. Found in the year 2020 on planet Earth, it is the largest body of anthropogenic mass ever found. The duration of its impact was quite disconcerting as it was felt for centuries or even decades. It is very young and consists of many new and different combinations of human-made materials.

Operating in the Earth’s near surface environment, the Anthropoid is biologically, chemically and physically active. It is most concerning at the surface level, where humans live. However, it is extending up and down accordingly.

It’s volume is measured by estimates of the world’s geography – proportions taken up by cities, farmlands, roads, reservoirs, seafloors and the like. A little more than half of its components are the materials humans have assembled into towns and cities – mostly rubble, reworked rock and soil.

The internal structure of the 30 trillion-ton Anthropoid is made of ‘anthropominerals’ - metals, alloys, ceramics and glasses, cement, concrete, bricks and slags, polymers and plastics, composite materials, semiconductors, nanomaterials and so on, which suggests that a complicated chain of events led to its formation: 200 billion tons of coal has been extracted since coal-mining began, this has now transformed into carbon dioxide - nearly half of which still hang in the atmosphere above. Over 500 billion tons of concrete and 25 trillion bricks have been produced on Earth, as well as over 8 billion tons of plastics, which only little has been recycled, some have been burnt, but most of it, is still out there, buried in land or drifting in the seas.

Since its impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide, which has mixed into the global atmosphere, an endless amount of concrete that has piled up more in some places than the others and alarmingly mobile plastic that has travelled mercurially without consistent shape,  the Anthropoid is endlessly heterogeneous.

In the Age of Humans, the anthropogenic body has brought an explosive amount of lifeless species. There are over 242,828 crystal structures registered in the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database and this number is increasing weekly. 

When we study the Anthropoid, we are also studying the patterns generated and provoked by us. In contrast to its image of destruction, it materializes as a body of intense diversification, introducing new minerals and compounds, new possibilities and futures.

Thanks to:

Alfredo Ramírez Raymond, Prof. Jan Zalasiewicz, Stacie Woolsey, Elizabeth Holt

Supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Exhibited at Make Your Own Masters Show at Somerset House, London, 2021