It's said that the Anthropocene epoch began on July 16, 1945 with the Trinity atomic tests. Captured at 24 fps on a Mitchell 35mm Movie Camera at a distance of 9140 metres from Ground Zero, there could be no more succinct and terrifying image of the Anthropocene. In silent frames we see a new sign emerging full of fear and ingenuity, violence and horrible beauty. It seems fitting that the Mitchell was the most common of Hollywood cameras, as if the machine manufactured icons, making and interpreting them, as if the machine made catastrophes and fantasies real.

The new blossoms of the Anthropocene are still forming and unique; they resist any simple symbology. The idea of the Anthropocene changes the way we see the world even as we experience it. We are in a period of wild evolution and simultaneous devolution. It often seems that we are caught in a widening gyre, that we have loosed anarchy on the world.

‘New Signs’ will reveal how contemporary practitioners in Landscape Architecture, Art and Architecture are working to capture this cloud mushrooming even as we’re in it. What emerges from this great conflagration?

The ‘new’ is still without a ‘sign’ but new ceremonies, forms and conditions are emerging. A strangely playful and subversive culture is conflating the new with the ancient, the foreign and the local, the visible and the imagined, the ordinary and the ineffable. Have you looked into the now to find the new? What signs will point the way from blossoming catastrophe to verdant Anthropocene.