This course engages with speculative fiction, design, and contemporary art to explore creative practices in a new geologic era marked by the impact of humans on the earth. The course centres on practical techniques that may include fictocritical writing, data visualisation, journaling, and collaborative “futuring” exercises. These techniques will fold into assessment tasks. Independent and collaborative research will address approaches to art, design and theory in an era of mass extinction and environmental devastation.

Themes may include histories and critiques of the past and future, multispecies ethnography, practices of decolonisation, questioning the posthuman, and the role of imagination in social change. Students will emerge from the course having a greater understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the artist and designer working in the contemporary context.