Precognitioning Post-Oil
Columbia GSAPP, NYC · 2021
Guided role play and immersive installations let participants rehearse everyday life, social values and new kinships in a New York beyond fossil fuels.
Workshop documentation
Course & program documentation
Workshop record
Guided role play and immersive installations let participants rehearse everyday life, social values and new kinships in a New York beyond fossil fuels.
3 day · Alexander Klose — Co-facilitator · Cooperating institution: Goethe Institute
Workshop partner: 1014 / space for ideas · Selected documentation
Precognitioning post-oil
What might it feel like to live in New York City after fossil fuels?
The fossil energy regime of coal, oil and gas has to and will end eventually, coal rolling and the renewed celebration of excessive fossil fuel consumption have been merely petromelancholic rebound effects… This is the backdrop for our ongoing research project on the histories and afterlives of petromodernity. How do we want to live in a post-fossil future? How and with whom will we develop new kinships after the social bonds connected to the resource economy and the exuberant promises of our ‘Western Way of Life’ are untied? Will we actively delve into a world of living materials and microbiological entanglements? Will we get beyond racism and patriarchy? Will we cease to privately own land?
Join us at one of three successive precognitioning sessions at 1014! Play out visions of urban renewal, societal reformation, and a post-extractivist approach towards natures and societies after the possible endings of fossil energy regimes.
Through narrative techniques and design futures methods a series of bespoke design interventions and immersive installations transform 1014 into a hyper-reality testing environment. Using guided speculative role play and co-created moments of immersion, participants are encouraged to experiment with new values and beliefs that might emerge in a post-petro world. The scenarios and installations have been developed in collaboration with an architecture course at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, led by participatory futures practitioner Chris Woebken in partnership with cultural researcher Alexander Klose.
The idea of precognition: Being neither driven by big corporations nor by governments, the precognition process takes up the project of working with and on futures in an explicitly non-technocratic, experimental way. It avoids statistics-based "scientific" methodologies. Instead, it relies on collectively crafted visions and material-based artifacts and embodied roleplay. An archeology of the fossil presence: surveying infrastructures, collecting images and narratives that at the same time manifest all kinds of afterlives and hint to possible escape routes.
You’re invited to join us as a participant on one of the evenings Oct 28, Oct 29, Oct 30. In two groups of max 15 people, visitors will walk through the installations and the precognitioning process accompanied by Alexander Klose and Chris Woebken and different ‘lead speculators’ from varying fields of practice and knowledge for each evening. We will explore and respond to new precognitioned values, myths, and cultural imaginations that might emerge while being shaped by the afterlives of petro-modernity.
Commissioned and hosted by 1014, New York City, in cooperation with Goethe Institute New York City and Popup Goethe Institute Houston.
Find more information on our lead speculators here:
https://www.1014.nyc/events/precognitioning-post-oil-hjrjl
Scenes from the sessions at 1014 and collages by Adeline Chum, Jules Kleitman, Aditi Mangesh Shetye, 2021