Claudia Westermann, Monika Lukowska-Appel, Jo Li Tay, and Pia Interlandi
This presentation introduces the creative practice research of the Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab, a transdisciplinary research initiative within Curtin University’s School of Design and the Built Environment located in Perth, Western Australia. The Lab investigates how creative practice can respond constructively to ecological crisis and rapid technological transformation by engaging in an experimental and speculative practice that generates encounters between human and non-human biological organisms as well as computational systems, treating the latter two as co-existing forms of other-than-human agency. Brought into one conceptual space the two raise related design questions, even though they remain ethically distinct kinds of agents, approached and cared for in different ways. Holding the two in playful entanglement as a method that, rather than collapsing them into one category, sets the beginning for new ecological opportunities. Drawing on philosophical resources of cosmological play, in particular the work of Gregory Bateson, Don Handelman and Eugen Fink, the presentation proposes speculative entanglement as both a research orientation and a mode of practice-based resistance. It argues that the seeming causalities and efficiencies by which modern society organises human life are neither inevitable nor exhaustive, and that creative practice offers a form of serious play capable of holding open other cosmological possibilities. The practices of the Lab members are understood as productive sites where scripts meet life, where living agents interpret, resist, and transform the instructions that partially structure their worlds.
Keywords: speculative design, pluriverse, play, cosmology, more-than-human, ecological imagination