Imagining low-carbon futures

purple banner with white rock-like shape and text

As climate impacts are becoming increasingly visible, the need to transform towards a low-carbon future is now more evident than ever.

We need more compelling imaginaries of what such a low-carbon future may look like and what possible pathways towards this future may be. The Urban Futures Studio (Utrecht University) initiates an art-science collaboration centred around imagining low-carbon futures.

Publications

In a 6-months collaboration designers Julien Thomas and Ekaterina Volkova will work closely together with academic researchers towards an artistic interventionJulien and Ekaterina form the Perception Design Studio, a speculative social and graphic design bureau. As part of the PhD project of Lisette van Beek, this collaboration will explore new ways of reconfiguring model-based and artistic imagination of possible futures. How are low-carbon futures imagined in modelling communities? How could we shift the visual language of scenarios? And how to engage publics in the imagination of possible low-carbon futures? Julien, Ekaterina and Lisette will explore these questions in the coming months through collaborative research, experimentation and co-designing a public intervention.

 

This collaboration on exploring new roles for climate modelling in imagining low-carbon futures is embedded in the PhD project of Lisette van Beek. The Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht acts as a supporting partner in this art-science collaboration.

Julien Thomas

black and white potrait of Julien Thomas

Juien Thomas is an artist and social designer who explores the threshold between the spoken and the unspoken. He develops performative installations and processes in which the dynamics of objects and spaces are jointly explored and discerned through movement, rhythm, sound and voice.

 

Ekaterina Volkova

Black and white portrait of Ekaterina Volkova

Ekaterina Volkova is an artist and interactive media designer exploring critical making as a response to large-scale political issues. Through her work she brings together material, visual, and codified strategies to explore issues of democracy, conflict, diaspora and labour.

This is a 6 month project of the Urban Futures Studio. Interested to know more? Please contact Lisette van Beek.

Project lead