Futures in the Making (Speculative Art for a Burning World)

How art and design can be powerful tools for actively shaping the futures of climate change.

The future has been cancelled or at least reduced to a perpetual extension of the present. This is something we have been told many times by cultural theorists in recent decades. As the unfolding environmental crisis impels us to look ahead with a renewed sense of urgency, many now realize that these futures never went away. In Futures in the Making, Theo Reeves-Evison invites readers to explore the role of contemporary art and creative practice in shaping environmental futures. As well as looking at representations of these futures, it pays particular attention to the tools and techniques used to produce them.

Tracing the genealogies of socio-technical practices such as scenario planning, prospecting, and geoengineering, the author argues that the ways pasts, presents, and futures are bridged represent a kind of infrastructure. While many of these infrastructures are readily associated with scientific, corporate, and policy work, they nevertheless sit within an expanded field of speculative and anticipatory activities. Creative practice has the potential to expand this field even further, widening the frame of what constitutes a valid form of future making, and changing how environmental futures are offered up as objects of experience in the process.