Can we endure another environmental awareness sculpture crafted from trash, another fungus-inspired essay decrying human hubris while extolling humility and tech austerity? Can art and theory on nature and technology transcend dogmatic conformity?
This seminar reflects on the past ten years of climate-related art and design, analyzing its anti-humanist underpinnings and spatial effects. To counter this, we will study the lives and work of certain artists, designers, and writers with a very different relationship to nature and technology, a non-ideological comportment that will be traced through Nicholas Roerich’s mystical art-science expeditions; Roger Caillois’ diagonal science; Nietzsche’s joyous experimentation; Nick Land’s urbanism; and Maurice Dantec’s cyberpunk, among others. Through this lineage, we will construct a form of art-science exploration blending natural and metaphysical curiosity with epochal technical transformations. We will use this to analyze emergent design aesthetics of tech urbanism, including in Miami, El Segundo, and Starbase.
-
Seminar 1
Mon, Aug 11, 20251:30 pm to 3:30 pm -
Seminar 2
Tue, Aug 12, 20251:30 pm to 3:30 pm -
Seminar 3
Wed, Aug 13, 20251:30 pm to 3:30 pm -
Lecture: Art Against Man: A Postmortem on Climate Art and Design
Thu, Aug 14, 20252:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Stephanie Wakefield is an urban geographer whose work analyzes the philosophical, technical, and environmental transformations of urban thought and design in the 21st century. She is currently Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Design in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Miami in the Anthropocene: Urban Resilience and Rising Seas (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space (Open Humanities Press, 2020), and co-editor of Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance and Politics at the End of the World (Routledge, 2020).