Inte Gloerich and Gabriele Ferri investigate the impacts of Covid-related datafication on marginalized urban communities, emphasizing the importance of creativity and imagination in fostering resilience and agency in the face of ongoing and future crises.
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It happened tomorrow is an artistic research contribution, in the form of video loops on CRT monitors, to the Warming Up festival at Tolhuistuin in November 2024. It was part of the Kunstroute, a program running from November 7 to November 10, where visitors were guided through a series of installations and artworks around climate change. De Gaetano curated a special collection of more than 400 videos from the open archives of Sound & Vision, including short films, documentaries, and news reports about different forms of (other than) human relationships with water in the Netherlands. In an ongoing series of workshops called “It Happened Tomorrow/ Reflections on Water,” still images from the collection have prompted students, artists, researchers, and policymakers currently based in the Netherlands to collectively speculate on future ways of living in a country with higher waters. Through individual and collective drawing and climate fiction exercises, people were invited to look at and expand on still frames from the collection as a way to imagine possible future landscapes, adaptation scenarios, and how to co-inhabit them with other species.These video montages explore and respond to the imaginaries generated during the participatory workshops and the narratives encountered in the audiovisual collection. Conversations from the workshops informed the textual captions on the videos, which take the form of fictional letters from an unknown researcher travelling through the Netherlands in 2124. Following Ursula Le Guin Carrier's bag theory of fiction, the audio-visual assemblages propose non-linear accounts of possible futures, open-ended and without heroes. Generative AI takes the role of co-fabulator in queering the boundary between past and future, human and more than human, giving shape to tiny climate fictions that question how we look at nature and how we can reimagine ourselves as part of it.
It happened tomorrow is an artistic research contribution, in the form of video loops on CRT monitors, to the final exhibition of the programme Climate Imaginaries at Sea. The exhibition is titled 'Unimaginable, clarion calls from rising seas' and was hosted at Bradwolff from 19 to 25 April 2024.De Gaetano curated a special collection of more than 400 videos from the open archives of Sound & Vision, including short films, documentaries, and news reports about different forms of (other than) human relationships with water in the Netherlands. In an ongoing series of workshops called “It Happened Tomorrow/ Reflections on Water,” still images from the collection have prompted students, artists, researchers, and policymakers currently based in the Netherlands to collectively speculate on future ways of living in a country with higher waters. Through individual and collective drawing and climate fiction exercises, people were invited to look at and expand on still frames from the collection as a way to imagine possible future landscapes, adaptation scenarios, and how to co-inhabit them with other species. These video montages explore and respond to the imaginaries generated during the participatory workshops and the narratives encountered in the audiovisual collection. Conversations from the workshops informed the textual captions on the videos, which take the form of fictional letters from an unknown researcher travelling through the Netherlands in 2124. Following Ursula Le Guin Carrier's bag theory of fiction, the audio-visual assemblages propose non-linear accounts of possible futures, open-ended and without heroes. Generative AI takes the role of co-fabulator in queering the boundary between past and future, human and more than human, giving shape to tiny climate fictions that question how we look at nature and how we can reimagine ourselves as part of it.
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"Rising Tides, Shifting Imaginaries: Participatory Climate Fiction-Making with Cultural Collections," is an transdisciplinary research project that merges information design, participatory art, and climate imaginaries to address the pressing challenge of climate change, particularly the rising sea levels in the Netherlands. The doctoral research project aims to reimagine human coexistence with water-based ecosystems by exploring and reinterpreting audiovisual collections from various archives and online platforms. Through a creative and speculative approach, it seeks to visualize existing cultural representations of Dutch water-based ecosystems and, with the help of generative AI, develop alternative narratives and imaginaries for future living scenarios. The core methodology involves a transdisciplinary process of climate fiction-making, where narratives from the collections are amplified, countered, or recombined. This process is documented in a structured speculative archive, encompassing feminist data visualizations and illustrated climate fiction stories. The research contributes to the development of Dutch climate scenarios and adaptation strategies, aligning with international efforts like the CrAFt (Creating Actionable Futures) project of the New European Bauhaus program. Two primary objectives guide this research. First, it aims to make future scenarios more relatable by breaking away from traditional risk visualizations. It adopts data feminist principles, giving space to emotions and embodiment in visualization processes and avoiding the presentation of data visualization as neutral and objective. Second, the project seeks to make scenarios more inclusive by incorporating intersectional and more-than-human perspectives, thereby moving beyond techno-optimistic approaches and embracing a holistic and caring speculative approach. Combining cultural collections, digital methodologies, and artistic research, this research fosters imaginative explorations for future living.