Digital Methods Winter School
Participants: Gabrielle Aguilar, Betsy Brossman, Illy Fajar, Paola Gardino, Laura Hoogenraad, Alice Novello, Stephen McNulty, Marjolijn van Raaij, Evi Roelfs, Ayoub Samadi, Nicoló Saracco, Esther Schoorel, Rachel Solis, Laura Temmerman, Sarah Vorndran, Olga Zvonareva. Facilitated by Carlo De Gaetano, Sabine Niederer, Warren Pearce and Natalia Sánchez Querubín
“If we wish to avoid climate catastrophes, we must pursue a different future than the one we are on track for today.
However, there is a problem: How do we move toward a future that we cannot imagine?
Inspired by this problem, there is a unique task which accompanies fighting climate change: imagining what the world looks like in which we do succeed.”
-Isaijah Johnson, 2020.
The Project
Social media platforms are seen as world-building spaces where climate futures are imagined. A visual analysis is performed in order to engage and con- tribute to contemporary debates on the emerging aesthetic turn in climate com- munication. Three genres of eco-fiction\ imaginaries are compared : solar punk, cottage core and Afrofuturism to under- stand how they visualize the future.
Findings
Across these three platforms “Afrofuturism” places people at the forefront of the imaginary – depicting people in nature or people with technology. Afrofutur- ism draws from traditional African heritages, archi- tectures and fashion styles and fuses it with futuristic and imaginative technology.
It does so in response to real past and present prob- lems, including histories of colonialism and structural racism. Through art it radically reimagines past, pres- ent and future. The Afrofuturist imagination places black people, histories and heritages at its center. Whereas in some examples histories of oppression are rewritten - i.e. think of ‘Black Panther’ - , in others it seems to be erased all together.
A good example of how the theme of technology is explored, is through the representation of the trope of the cyborg - a being that is part human, part ma- chine -, which is characterized by merging elements that are usually associated with cyborg imagery with pan-african or tribal elements.
This characterization of Afrofuturism can be found across the three platforms investigated within this project.