Forming Futures: exploring historic and contemporary forms of state science fiction and anticipation through creative practice

Project Code: FutureForm - 40211957

Project Description:

How do government, corporate and third-sector institutions articulate visions of environmental futures? Using visual forms such as photography, drawings, diagrams and models, this project invites a creative researcher to focus on ‘everyday’ anticipatory practices and generate artworks that destabilize enduring categories of dystopia, utopia, pasts, presents and futures.

The project will address the following questions:

• What insights can be generated when artists explore everyday cultures of environmental planning and prediction?
• How might artistic exploration of these cultures generate new forms that can unsettle understandings of time and temporality?
• What power do artistic interventions have to alter the effects and affects of anticipatory practices?

Forming Futures focuses on the seemingly unremarkable image-making practices associated with ‘state science fiction’ (Galison, 2014) –a genre of futures thinking embodied in such documents as the vision statement, or resulting from horizon scanning exercises that are nevertheless entwined with politics, beliefs and compromises.

The research will be anchored in the British Midlands –a region whose self-image has shifted dramatically from the optimism of the post-war years to the present– but set against the backdrop of planetary climate change and biodiversity loss. The minutiae of state science fictions will be explored in the context of wider currents in futures thinking, from the ‘golden age’ of Futurology to afro, indigenous and non-Western approaches to futures thinking (Eshun, 2003; Wildcat, 2005). Using practice-based methodologies, the researcher will explore the capacity of art to examine and diversify the range of anticipatory practices used by organisations and communities looking ahead.

Anticipated Findings:

• Devising and making new artworks that examine the visual languages, politics and performative dimensions of futures work, potentially in connection with communities. This will contribute new understandings of the significance of visual culture, and the construction of state science fictions, to our current environmental crisis.
• The bridging of several distinct research areas including art, visual culture, planning, futures studies and the environmental humanities to challenge assumptions about accepted and relevant methods and the operation of image making practices within them.
• A research agenda that accounts for the different scales and inconsistencies in the production of futures, considering the power dynamics of who gets to plan for the future, and who is ‘defutured’ by environmental crisis.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the study, we anticipate that FutureForm will contribute in these ways to the following fields:

• It will contribute to visual arts research by exploring the processes and forms of futuring and, specifically how artists manipulate forms to produce new relationships between past and future.
• It will bring insight into artistic exploration of the visual languages of planning, into planning and environmental research.
• It will contribute to environmental humanities by expanding the growing area of research that examines the significance of the visual languages of planning.

Contact (and Director of Studies for this project): Dr Theo Reeves Evison, theo.reeves-evison@bcu.ac.uk

How to apply

To apply for this project, visit the 'How to Apply' section on the Art and Design PhD course page.