Society 5.0 festival (Oct 2022)
During this workshop, speculative landscaping exercises created visual imaginaries of how the Netherlands would look in 2070. Using the idea of “out-painting”, participants were asked to draw imagined future landscape scenarios, having as a starting point still images collected from videos from the Sound and Vision video archive. Participants also had the chance to test their creations on the latest features of DALL-E 2, a text-to-image AI model.
The still images from short films, documentaries, and news broadcasts revealed how water has taken form in the Netherlands’s collective memory, with which other concepts and values it has been connected throughout time. Looking back at how the environment, water, and climate are documented throughout history helps us identify common trends and rework them into new, more personal stories.
What effect does recontextualizing pictures from the past into future possibilities have on our imagination?
Can this exercise aid in the much-required quest for new climate imaginaries?