Futures in the Making

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

The future has been canceled or at least reduced to a perpetual extension of the present, or so 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, he 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.

Theo Reeves-Evison is a writer, researcher, and Senior Lecturer at Birmingham School of Art, where he is the founding director of the Lifeworlds Research Cluster in Art and Design. He is coeditor, with Jon K. Shaw, of Fiction as Method, author of Ethics of Contemporary Art, and contributor to journals including Third Text, New Formations, Critical Inquiry, and Environmental Humanities.