The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology and the Blackwood Gallery are co-presenting the Futurity Island, an infrastructure for interspecies communication. A network of water/sewer pipes, Futurity Island is assembled into an artificial skeleton that channels the sounds of “nature.” As an instrument used to drain swamps, the pipe is a metaphor for human-centered ecology and environmental domination, and a prime symbol of the Anthropocene. Futurity Island appropriates the pipe to bring humans and non-humans into a more symmetrical, collaborative relationship, aimed at listening to and hearing the silenced voices of our planet.
If basic and applied science can offer a general research framework addressing the water environment and climate change, artistic research and practice can merge critical thinking with out-of-the box approaches to existing knowledge, foster experimental learning environments, and invent new strategies for engagement with the public.
Inspired by discussions on radical imagination, Indigenous thought, collective intelligence, and plural ecology, this event invites participants to discuss and develop new habits of thought for the era of environmental collapse. Futurity Island will provide participants a space to speculate on interspecies ecologies and probe the usefulness of the concept “sympoiesis” toward imagining and working together in radical interdisciplinarity toward desirable futures.
Event Schedule
Friday, September 6, 7–8pm
Performance
Walker Memorial — West Lawn
Sadada Jackson (Nipmuc), Harvard Divinity School, MTS ’19 — Opening land acknowledgement
Nicole L’Huillier (Chile), MIT Media Lab — Performance, The Amphibian Song
Erin Genia (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), MIT ACT’19 — Performance, Earthling
Saturday, September 7, 12–5:30pm
Discursive Event
ACT Cube, 20 Ames Street, Lower Level, E15-001
12–12:30: Reception
12:30–2: Panel 1 — The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea
Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, artists and researchers at MIT ACT
Christine Shaw, Director/Curator, Blackwood Gallery and Assistant Professor, Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga
Etienne Turpin, Philosopher based in Berlin (videotaped presentation)
Discussants: Nicole L’Huillier (MIT Media Lab), Indre Umbrasaite (Die Angewandte), Tobias Putrih (MIT ACT)
Performance by Nicole L’Huillier
2:30–3:30: Panel 2 — Remote Sensing and Translating
Glorianna Davenport, Media maker, technology innovator, co-founder of MIT Media Lab and founder of Living Observatory; Brian Mayton, Research Assistant, Responsive Environments Lab, MIT Media Lab
Caroline A. Jones, Art historian, critic and Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section, Department of Architecture, MIT, and Director, Transmedia Storytelling Initiative
Performance by Erin Genia
4-5:30: Panel 3 — Submerged Perspectives, Extinction and Decolonial Futures
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Cultural critic and Chairperson of Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute
Eben Kirksey, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts and Education, Alfred Deakin Institute, Melbourne
Respondents: Brent D. Ryan, Associate Professor of Urban Design and Planning Head, City Design and Development Group, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning; Lorena Bello Gomez, Visiting Lecturer, MIT Department of Architecture
Discussants: Christine Shaw, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas
Sep 06, 2019 – Sep 07, 2019
Past
Amphibian Pedagogies and Submerged Perspectives
Sound performance, LP launch, and discursive event
With Lorena Bello Gomez, Glorianna Davenport, Erin Genia, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Nicole L’Huillier, Sadada Jackson, Caroline A. Jones, Eben Kirksey, Brian Mayton, Tobias Putrih, Brent D. Ryan, Christine Shaw, Etienne Turpin, Indrė Umbrasaitė, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas.
Presented on the occasion of Futurity Island at MIT, September 6–23, 2019.
With Lorena Bello Gomez, Glorianna Davenport, Erin Genia, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Nicole L’Huillier, Sadada Jackson, Caroline A. Jones, Eben Kirksey, Brian Mayton, Tobias Putrih, Brent D. Ryan, Christine Shaw, Etienne Turpin, Indrė Umbrasaitė, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas.
Presented on the occasion of Futurity Island at MIT, September 6–23, 2019.
Event Documentation
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Futurity Island at MITEvent Documentation
- Contributors
- Lorena Bello
- Glorianna Davenport
- Erin Genia
- Macarena Gómez-Barris
- Nicole L’Huillier
- Sadada Jackson
- Caroline A. Jones
- Eben Kirksey
- Brian Mayton
- Tobias Putrih
- Brent D. Ryan
- Christine Shaw
- Etienne Turpin
- Indrė Umbrasaitė
- Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas
Lorena Bello is an architect and Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Architecture at MIT where she teaches students the fundamentals of the design of the built environment, ranging from the scale of the object and buildings to that of the city and larger territories. Lorena’s research focuses on large-scale territorial implications of infrastructure and urbanization as catalysts for design. She is also the founder of TERRALAB, in association with MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism.
Glorianna Davenport is a trustee of Tidmarsh Farms, founder of Living Observatory, and former faculty member, Principal Investigator, and co-founder of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, Davenport’s research focused on evolving new digital platforms for documentary media. As trustee of Tidmarsh Farms, Davenport led the Schulman family effort to restore and conserve a 600-acre former cranberry farm in Plymouth, a property which today houses the largest freshwater restoration project in Massachusetts. In parallel, Davenport established Living Observatory, a non-profit collaborative organization focused on documenting, interpreting, and inviting scientists and the public to explore the long-term story of ecological change across restored wetlands.
Erin Genia is a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Oyate and descended from the Little River Band of Odawa. As a graduate researcher in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT, she has focused on creating a powerful presence of Indigenous epistemologies in the arts, science, and technology with a goal of fostering an evolution of thought and practice in societal instruments that are aligned with the cycles of the natural world and the potential of humanity. She has also worked as a community organizer and cultural worker in her communities. Her work has received attention from diverse audiences, and been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of Northwest Art. Genia was awarded the AAF/Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts in 2018 and received her first public art commission for Resilience: Anpa O Wicahnpi from the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author of four books and dozens of essays and interviews on environmental media, decolonial theory and praxis, queer femme and creative and embodied research methods and what she deems as “antidotes to the colonial Anthropocene.”
Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering and include her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In it, she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. Her first book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009) traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. She shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital. Her co-edited volume with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe. Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.
Macarena is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, as well as faculty member in the Brown Arts Institute.
Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering and include her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In it, she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. Her first book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009) traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. She shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital. Her co-edited volume with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe. Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.
Macarena is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, as well as faculty member in the Brown Arts Institute.
Nicole L’Huillier is a sound artist, musician, and architect from Santiago, Chile. Currently she is based in Boston as a PhD researcher at the MIT Media Lab, Opera of the Future group. Her work explores spatial experience, perception, and the relationship between sound and space, based on the idea of sound as a construction material. She works at the intersection of art, music, architecture, science, and technology in order to open questions about possible futures, redefine how we perceive our environments, and most importantly, trigger connection and empathy between human and non-human agents. Nicole is also part of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, where she explores possible experimental forms and implications of art, expression, and culture as humans migrate to outer space. She is also an experimental musician, drummer, synth-lover, and one half of the space-pop duo Breaking Forms.
Sadada Jackson, MTS, MEd, RYT, is a student of practice who lives in her body and vacations in her mind. She is as a freelance educator who works with leaders and decision-makers in education and the healing arts/practices to embody and curate ethical practices, structures, and relationships in their work. She holds a BA in Theatre with a minor in English, an MEd in Secondary Education from UMass Boston, and an MTS in Indigenous traditions from Harvard University. She is a certified 200-hour yoga teacher and a teacher trainer at 4 Corners Yoga and Wellness Yoga Teacher Certification program. She is Natick Nipmuc.
Caroline A. Jones is Professor in the History, Theory, Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. She studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception, and on its interface with sciences such as physics and biology. Jones has also worked as a curator, notably at MIT’s List Visual Art Center: Sensorium (2006), Video Trajectories (2007), and Hans Haacke 1967 (2011). Her publications include Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (1996/98, winner of the Charles Eldredge prize), Picturing Science, Producing Art (co-edited, 1998), Sensorium: embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art (as editor, 2006), Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005/08), Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (co-edited, 2016), and The Global Work of Art (2016). Her current research collaboration with historian of science Peter Galison examines patterns of occlusion and political contestation in seeing and unseeing the Anthropocene.
Eben Kirksey is an American anthropologist who is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that situates contemporary scholarship on animals, microbes, plants, and fungi within deeply rooted traditions of environmental anthropology, continental philosophy, and the sociology of science. Duke University Press has published his two books—Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)— as well as one edited collection: The Multispecies Salon (2014). Currently he is finishing a new book for St. Martins Press about the scientists, lobbyists, entrepreneurs, and activists remaking the human race with the gene editing tool called CRISPR. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, hosted Kirksey in the 2019-2020 academic year, where he conducted research on gene editing, the innovation economy, and social inequality.
Brian Mayton joined the MIT Media Lab in 2010 and is currently working towards his PhD. His research interests include connecting ubiquitous computer technology to the physical world through sensing and actuation, and how networked sensors can change the way we interact with and experience the world around us. In his current research project, he has networked and instrumented a large outdoor site with wireless sensor nodes to capture and document the transformation as the site is restored from a former cranberry farm to natural wetland.
Tobias Putrih engages 20th century avant-gardes, particularly utopian and visionary concepts of architecture and design, through a range of conceptual and materially ephemeral projects. He designs makeshift architectural modifications of public spaces—cinemas, a library, galleries, and a university commons. Putrih deals with artworks as proposals, maquettes, or models—exploratory assertions of radical possibilities, the idea of the monument reconceptualized as something momentary and experimental. Putrih’s solo projects (with MOS architects) have been presented at Museum Boijmans Van Beunigen, BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Wexner Center, and MIT List Center. Other installations include exhibitions at Espace315 at Centre Pompidou, and at Capella MACBA; and collaborations with filmmaker Runa Islam at Galeria Civica in Modena and Kunsthaus, Zurich. Group exhibitions include TRACK, S.M.A.K., Ghent; Forms of Resistance, VanAbbe Museum, Eindhoven; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, and 29th Sao Paulo Biennale.
Brent D. Ryan is an urbanist, Head of the City Design and Development Group, and Associate Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His research focuses on the aesthetics and policies of contemporary urban design, particularly with respect to current and pressing issues like deindustrialization and climate change. Ryan’s current research projects in China examine coastal landmaking, the threat to urban villages, and a case study in the transfer of development rights.
Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a Research Fellow & Visiting Scholar in Art, Culture Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Curatorial Research Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021–2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Etienne Turpin is a philosopher, founding director of anexact office, and research coordinator of User Group Inc. LLP, worker-owned cooperative building software for disaster response and environmental monitoring. With Anna-Sophie Springer, he is co-principal investigator of Reassembling the Natural.
Indrė Umbrasaitė is a Lithuanian-Austrian architect and educator. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria (die Angewandte), in the Studio Kazuyo Sejima. Umbrasaitė studied architecture in Vilnius and Vienna, graduating from the master class of Zaha Hadid. Prior to that, she studied the history of culture and anthropology and interior design. While she gained her professional experience collaborating with offices in Vilnius, Salzburg, and Vienna on a broad range of projects, her individual work explores creative subjective mapping methods within the architectural discipline, aiming to rethink the relationships of body-space, global-local, socio-cultural, and environmental heterogeneity.
Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas are artists, MIT-based researchers and educators, and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. They have exhibited internationally including at the São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, Venice, and Gwangju Biennales, Folkestone Triennial, and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions (among others). They are the recipients of numerous grants and awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize (2007); a Prize for the Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006) and the Prize for the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007). They were also nominated for the Nam June Paik Award in 2012. Urbonas Studio curated Swamp School, a learning environment at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, the generous donors to the 2018 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT, the School of Architecture and Planning, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga, Musket Transport, Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program, and IPEX.
Futurity Island, 2018 was commissioned by Blackwood Gallery for The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, curated by Christine Shaw.
Futurity Island, 2018 was commissioned by Blackwood Gallery for The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, curated by Christine Shaw.
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
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(905) 828-3789
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.