Ways of Worldmaking: ReCognizing Possibilities

“We start, on any occasion, with some old version or world that we have on hand and that we are stuck with until we have the determination and skill to remake it into a new one. Some of the felt stubbornness of fact is the grip of habit: our firm foundation is indeed stolid. Worldmaking begins with one version and ends with another” (97). Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking This panel presents five projects dedicated to envisioning plausible worlds for the near future: Christopher Roth’s Project 2038; Jennifer Lyn Morone’s The Scheme of Things; Rori Knudtson’s film Spire (a project of Infinite Seed); Primavera de Filipi’s Earth2030 (produced with Tony Lai); and, Liam Young’s approach to film and architecture.

SPEAKERS Charlotte Kent is the Assistant Professor of Visual Culture and Program Director for Art History and Visual Studies at Montclair State University. With a background in aesthetics and the history of ideas, as well as deconstruction and narrative theory, she analyzes the power structures surrounding the discourse of art, with current research on how contemporary artists and speculative designers working in the digital sphere adopt the absurd. She has contributed to both academic and general audience resources, including Word and Image, Journal of Visual Culture, Harvard Design Magazine, and Brooklyn Rail and writes a monthly column on the Business of Art for Artist’s Magazine.

Rori Knudtson is an artist, architect and writer working with installation, sound, film and performance in questions that seek to pragmatically engage architectural, technological and economic theory. She is the Founder/Director of Infinite Seed, a decentralized entertainment world building ecosystem that incentivizes people to adopt new behavior patterns with a positive impact on environmental and social disruption. She serves as a critic in the Body and Space Morphologies program of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and has served as an M.Arch assessor at the Bergen Architecture School, a critic at the Otis College of Art and Design Public Practice Department, Woodbury University School of Architecture and the Bergen Academy of Art and Design.

Tony Lai unleashes collective potential at a human and a systems level. He is a lawyer, researcher, and technology entrepreneur, advising and working with companies, government agencies, law firms, and nonprofits to build the future of trust, transactions, and dispute resolution. He is an Entrepreneurial Fellow and Founder of the Blockchain Group at CodeX, Stanford’s Center for Legal Informatics. Tony founded the company, Legal.io, to deploy technology to scale legal access worldwide, and serves on the boards of various companies and non-profit organizations working on improving data governance and legal inter-operability. He consults on collaboration design with DSIL Global and learnt design thinking at Stanford’s d.school.

Jennifer Lyn Morone is the CEO of RadicalxChange and a multi-disciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience in relation to technology, economics, politics, and identity and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future. Morone is a trained sculptor with BFA from SUNY Purchase and earned her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London with Dunne and Raby.

Christopher Roth is an artist, film director and tv producer. In September 2020, he will shoot a fictional film for the cinema about a commune in the 1980s. In 2018, Roth co-launched space–time. tv, a cooperativist tv-platform with (so far) 3 stations: realty-v, s+ and 42. In the same year Architecting after Politics premiered, after The Property Drama and its prequel Legislating Architecture it is the third film with Brandlhuber+. They were screened at the biennials in Chicago and Venice. Christopher shows at Esther Schipper and made Hyperstition with Armen Avanessian and parts of The Seasons in Quincy, Four portraits on John Berger screened at the Berlinale, 2016. And Baader which won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlinale 2002.

Liam Young is a speculative architect and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is cofounder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, an urban futures think tank, exploring the local and global implications of new technologies and Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio that travels on expeditions to chronicle these emerging conditions as they occur on the ground. His worldbuilding for the film and television industries has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time Magazine and New Scientist, he is a BAFTA nominated producer and his work has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and MAAS in Sydney.