Imagine, oil-eating microbionts have taken over, cleaning up our current environmental mess. But they have also done away with everything beautiful and essential made out of plastics.
Imagine, the use of fossil fuels and all fossil-fuelled technology has been forbidden without a proper energetic substitute. Everything eventually has to be driven down. Less mobility, less luxury, no exuberance. Deserted petromodern infrastructures refueled with petronostalgia.
Imagine, the American Way of Life reloaded, a return of cheap oil due to some scientific and technical breakthroughs. More consumption, more mobility, more wars, more of everything. Utopia or nightmare?
The 1014 project space has been transformed into a hyper-reality testing environment. It is populated with experiential futures prototypes that investigate our relationships in a spectrum of post-oil scenarios. Through narrative techniques and design futures methods, a design studio at CUNY Citytech led by participatory futures practitioner Chris Woebken and cultural researcher Alexander Klose has developed a series of bespoke design interventions and immersive installations throughout our upper east side townhouse project space. In a private walkthrough, Heather Davis (Eugene Lang College, The New School), Elizabeth Henaff (NYU IDM), Timothy Furstnau (Museum Of Capitalism) and Karen Pinkus (Cornell University, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Ithaca) were invited to immerse themselves into these alternative imaginations that explore new values and imaginaries for a post-petro New York City.
In this online talk, our guests delved into these precarious scenarios, while discussing and responding to new values, myths, and cultural imaginations that might emerge while being shaped by the afterlives of petro-modernity.
Watch scenarios here.
Biographies
Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. Her current book project, Plastic Matter, argues that plastic has transformed the biosphere due to its incredible longevity and range, as it has also transformed our understandings and expectations of matter and materiality. She is also a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Davis has written widely for art and academic publications on questions of contemporary art, politics and ecology, and has lectured internationally. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017).
Dr. Elizabeth Henaff is a computational biologist with an art practice. Her research focuses on the ubiquitous and invisible environmental microbiome, and its relationship to anthropogenic environments. Her practice manifests as scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, scholarly writing, and artworks shown nationally and internationally. She is an Assistant Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Elizabeth-henaff.net / idm.engineering.nyu.edu/henafflab/
Timothy Furstnau is a writer, artist, and curator. He is part of the collective FICTILIS and co-founder of Museum of Capitalism. He recently joined the editorial team of Toolshed, an initiative to gather and share tools based in Hudson, NY, and his writings on political ecology can be found at tool-shed.org and elsewhere.
Karen Pinkus is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She has written widely on literary theory, film, visual arts, Italian culture and environmental humanities. Recent publications include her book Fuel. A Speculative Dictionary (Minnesota), and "Intermittent Grids," in the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue on Autonomia and Anthropocene. With artist Hans Baumann she created an installation about deep geothermal heat mining titled Crystalline Basement (an accompanying essay was published on e-flux https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/212954/crystalline-basement/). They have also co-written an essay, "138,462 Carbon Pyramids," on carbon dioxide removal, for the Strelka Foundation Magazine (https://strelkamag.com/en/article/138-462-carbon-pyramids). Pinkus has a new book in progress.
Down There. The Subsurface in the Time of Climate Change, a study of literary, filmic and cultural fantasies about the subsurface, the place of extraction (of fossil fuels), burial (of waste and perhaps, carbon) in the time of massive climate disruption caused by anthropogenic activity, on the surface.
This project is produced in collaboration between:
Alexander Klose, cultural researcher, Office for Precarious Concepts and Undisciplinary Research, Berlin, Germany and member of the research collective Beauty of Oil, Berlin/Vienna.
Chris Woebken, artist and participatory futures practitioner and co-founder of the Extrapolation Factory, Adjunct Assistant Prof. at CUNY City Tech and 2020 Faculty Fellow at the New School's Urban Systems Lab, New York City, USA.
www.chriswoebken.com / www.extrapolationfactory.com
Special thanks to the Urban Systems Lab at The New School for their support in developing research for the project.