Working across video, sculpture, live simulation, and interactive installation, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Ian Cheng, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, and Jenna Sutela address the catastrophic damage of anthropocentric thinking while giving agency to nonhuman protagonists - from extinct Hawaiian songbirds to Martian bacteria and simulated shibas.

Utilizing VR and AR technologies, game engine software, and recent developments in artificial intelligence like deep learning, these artists augur digital environments and prototype more-than-human futures centred around collaborative strategies for ecological survival. These strategies have found their way into a new kind of art practice today. In their work, Butler and Le Guin established a more empathetic kind of world-building, using the genres as a way to think critically about society in a political-ecological context while envisioning alternative futures. Clarke, Le Guin and Butler use the world-building capacities of the speculative and science fictions as a cypher into the complex social, cultural, and ecological conditions of life here on Spaceship Earth. Wells and Ray Bradbury, or the вЂњhard scienceвЂќ fiction of Arthur C. Dick, the violent intergalactic warfare envisioned by H.G.

Unlike the techno-dystopian cities dreamed up by William Gibson and Philip K. Le Guin, ButlerвЂ™s brand of sci-fi ditches the jacked-up macho fantasies that characterize the genre to examine issues closer to home. Like the late speculative fiction writer and poet Ursula K. Slowly, Butler pokes holes in the techno-utopian fantasy of a вЂњPlanet BвЂќ for humanity, exposing the hubris and fallibility of this anthropocentric understanding of the universe. Yet the ship is christened The Christopher Columbus, suggesting that this cosmic colonialism will just repeat our Earthly mistakes. Akin to the speculative practice of terraforming, Earthseedlings embark upon a spaceship for the next habitable planet. Its protagonist, a young Black woman named Lauren Oya Olamina, conceives of a new religious community - Earthseed - whose destiny is interstellar resettlement. вЂњBut there are new suns.вЂќ Trickster was to be the final text in ButlerвЂ™s Parable series: borne out of the 90s, itвЂ™s a disturbingly prescient vision of the 2020s, set in a crumbling California eaten up by wildfires amid the rise of American fascism. вЂњThere is nothing new under the sun,вЂќ suggested Octavia Butler, the late African-American science fiction writer, in her unfinished book Parable of the Trickster. Here, Alice Bucknell draws a line from the otherworldly, ecological imaginings of writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula K Le Guin to the вЂњdigital gardeningвЂќ practices of artists like Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jenna Sutela and Ian Cheng. Originating with science fiction and fantasy writers, the practice of creating imaginary worlds is one that has gone on to influence many contemporary artists today who are experimenting with advanced technologies to create alternate realities and new visions for the future.

Project m cobalt legacy daisy