We Are Weather: Reimagining Climate Change Through Speculative Art

• In Event: 25.056 - Reconfiguring the Imagined and Real Futures of Educational Research: The Importance of Being Speculative

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper examines a series of speculative contemporary art projects on the theme of ‘weather.’ Rather than critically document our current weather and climate change pathologies, the art projects offer propositions as creative proposals and radical thought experiments. If speculation is the creative leap of looking beyond and within the known in order to imagine something unexpected, then speculation can become a methodology for action and thought beyond the limits of human mastery. Focusing on speculative propositions rather than solutions artists can challenge heroic narratives of the Anthropocene, or as Massumi (2002) points out, “it is the edge of the virtual, where it leaks into actual, that counts. For that seeping edge is where potential, actually, is found” (p. 43).

Theoretical Framework:
Dominant climate change discourse is saturated with conjectures in which humans will control the future or save the past, a discourse that implies active humans and passive climate. In addressing these concerns feminist new materialism, posthumanism, and speculative realism have argued for the de-centralization of the human, and an “ethical recognition of the vulnerable, interdependent, interwoven, human, and non-human flesh” (Alaimo, 2010, p. 31). In taking up a vital-materialist and speculative proposition in relation to climate change, this paper draws on Neimanis and Walker’s (2014) concept of “weathering.” Weathering they contend is “a way of being/becoming, or a mode of affecting and differentiating that brings humans into relation with more-than-human weather” (p. 560). They argue that such a re-orientation shifts the question of “what can we do to stop climate change,” which keeps climate change at a distance, to “how is climate change me?” (p. 561).

Methods/Methodology:
Speculation requires a propositional methodology. Propositions are proposals about how things may be, rather than what is (Manning, 2013; Manning & Massumi, 2014. Manning and Massumi (2014) insist that propositions activate thought, rather than impose a descriptive or interpretive strategy. I have invited 5 artists to propose speculative projects on the theme of weather. The ‘weather’ propositions shape what Celia Lury (2012) calls live methods, which intersect with new materialist methodologies that insist on the way agency flows through relational networks and is mobilized through human and non-human intra-actions. This liveness remains open, incorporeal, virtual, and exists in a time that is always past and always about to come, but never happening (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Fieldwork thought in this way emphasizes doing rather than meaning making, or as Manning and Massumi (2014) would suggest, it “composes concepts” (p. viii).

Significance:
In re-imagining a more immanent understanding to climate change, contemporary art offers innovative, intimate, and speculative means for exploring pertinent questions and issues. I ask questions about what artwork does in the face of climate change. What kinds of materialist ecologies are constituted through these art practices? What can contemporary art offer in response to such ontological inquiries? And how might this world different ethical and political encounters?

Author

• Stephanie Springgay, OISE/University of Toronto