Climate Visions (Fall 2023)

Instructor

Gediminas Urbonas

TA

Mrinalini Singha

Units

U / G

Lab Fee

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

Credit

3-3-6 U / 3-3-3 G

Schedule

MW 9:30am-12:30pm

Location

E15-283A

Climate Visions positions artistic intelligence as a way to contribute with aesthetics and criticality to climate science, suggesting new visioning, that is in dialectics with scientific one. Lingering between pragmatics and fiction this course will probe new perspectivism that enables future narratives of cohabitation with more-than-humans. The workshop will engage with the labs on MIT campus as a site where utopias for the future forms of environmental citizenship and new climate commons will be prototyped. In conversation with scientists the participants will develop hybrid projects of art and design suggesting an artistic instrumentarium for ecological repair, envisioning, speculation and probing of alternative perspectives, that catalyze a different climate for the future.

A multitude of concepts will be engaged with during this workshop: hybrid habitats and milieu, critical zones and new climatic  regime, shadow biosphere and feminist fabulation, sympoiesis and composibility, cohabitation and commensality. The analysis of these terms will be explored in lectures led by philosopher Kristupas Sabolius. Readings  related to this subject include those by Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Gilbert Simondon, Catherine Malabou, James Lovelock, Michel Serres, Georges Canguilhem, Scott F Gilbert, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Andrew Pickering, Isabelle Stengers, Vinciane Despret, Eduardo Viveiro  de Castro, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jakob Johann von Uexküll, TJ Demos, and others.