Lifeworlds
We explore how art and design research engages with climate crisis, in the face of incommensurate scales and times of loss and change. Art and design practice involves directly making decisions with resources, processes, time, action, space, texture and scale. The manipulation of elements offers ways to understand how the world is assembled and to make forms that embody and imagine it differently. Creative practices of design, art and writing offer modes of construction, deconstruction, assemblage, iteration, fictioning, and speculation that can generate unexpected, disobedient, joyful and liberating ways to imagine and comprehend climate crisis and its alternative.
Lifeworlds explores how art and design research engages with climate crisis, in the face of incommensurate scales and times of loss and change. The ubiquitous nature of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion requires new ways of bridging planetary processes and the intimate effects these changes have upon daily life. The cluster looks at how creative practices of design, art and writing offer modes of construction, deconstruction, assemblage, iteration, fictioning and speculation that can generate unexpected, disobedient, joyful and liberating ways to imagine and comprehend climate crisis and its alternative.
Art and design practice involves directly making decisions with resources, processes, time, action, space, texture and scale. The manipulation of elements offers ways to understand how the world is assembled and to make forms that embody and imagine it differently. Creative practices of design, art and writing offer modes of construction, deconstruction, assemblage, iteration, fictioning and speculation that can generate unexpected, disobedient, joyful and liberating ways to imagine and comprehend climate crisis and its alternative.
‘It’s not climate change —it’s everything change’, wrote Margaret Atwood in an article in 2021, echoing the many other thinkers, writers and makers who have noted the disorientating quality of environmental crisis and its broader socio-cultural effects. The ubiquitous nature of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion requires new ways of bridging planetary processes and the intimate effects these changes have upon daily life. As habitable worlds teeter on the brink of extinction, it becomes increasingly necessary to challenge entrenched habits of mind at the same time as providing new pathways to action. There is growing recognition that the challenges of comprehension climate change brings- especially regarding time, spatial scale and the tension between individuals and large social systems, can be explored, articulated, perhaps even re-configured, through the arts and humanities.
