Climate Visions (Fall 2024)

Instructor

Gediminas Urbonas

TA

Vinzenz Aubry

Lab Fee

Per-term $75 fee after Add Date; SMACT students are exempt

Credit

Units arranged U/G

Schedule

MW 9:30-12:30

Location

E15-207

This course focuses on the production of artistic experiments catalyzed by research in art and climate and eco-sociality of the locale. Conceptually it deals with experimental modes of artistic production that shifts the discussion on artistic research towards critical engagement with the new climatic regime. Negotiating between pragmatics and fiction this course will probe new perspectives that enable future narratives of cohabitation with more-than-humans. The workshop will engage The Herter Community Garden in Boston as a site where utopias for future forms of environmental citizenship and new climate commons are prototyped. In conversation with local stakeholders, the participants will develop hybrid projects of art and design suggesting an artistic instrumentarium for ecological repair, envisioning, speculating, and probing of alternative perspectives, that catalyze a different climate for the future.

Inspired by the counterculture experiments and emerging environmentalist design of the 60’s and 70’s, the course will discuss concepts such as anthropocene aesthetics, compossibility, critical zones, eco-activism, feminist fabulation, interspecies assemblies, permacomputing, and archipelagic thinking.

Readings  will include those by Jane Bennet, Georges Canguilhem, TJ Demos, Eduardo Viveiro  de Castro, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Astrida Neimanis, Andrew Pickering, Elizabeth Povinelli, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, and others.

Visits to the class and the field trips may include Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Tue Greenfort, Diane Borsato, Fernando García-Dory, Pelin Tan, Julie Kepes, D-Lab experts, FutureFarmers, Critical Art Ensemble, platformlondon, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages.

The class is structured with the help of the three conceptual lenses through which participants will look into the artistic project: The Manifesto, The Score, and The Instrument. As such these conceptual lenses would (A) connect with pressing concerns on climate crisis – bridging between community /  injustice / climate change, and (B) help to un-earth the underlying (autochthonous) landscape in the  city, affected by an extractivist economy and colonization.

In addition to lectures, discussions, crits and individual studio meetings there will be visits to the labs organized facilitated by guest interlocutors, and designed to catalyze explorations to probe what “landing on Earth” (Latour) means in practical terms.

The class will meet as a group on Mondays 9:30 am – 12:30 am for main input: lectures, visits from guest artists, designers and scholars, and discussions of readings, with Lab work scheduled on Wednesdays 9:30 am – 12:30 am, when individual meetings and/or studio visits and desk crits with the instructor (and guest artists) would be organized. Wednesday time slot would also be reserved for workshopping of students’ ideas, and/or library research.

Students will engage in (3) phases and modalities of work: MANIFESTO, SCORE, and INSTRUMENT.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor (4.329)