ADS13: Entangled Earth: +3°C

Climate change is at the heart of a global, but unevenly distributed, polycrisis that is already reality: a web of interconnected natural disasters, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, food shortages, over consumption, political violence, fragile supply chains, economic strain, misinformation, and displacement.

'How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?' [RW Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, 2013.]

We have already progressed well down the road toward the +3° world. The endeavour of our generation is to find and illuminate compelling pathways toward possible mitigations/preventions and adaptation wherever necessary. Resisting both nihilism, or overly idealised solutions, ADS13: Entangled Earth is a studio concerned with envisaging worlds that could yet be. In her book Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway (2016) urges us to ‘learn to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’. In Entangled Earth, we will acknowledge these troubles, dwelling with the predictions for a +3°C world and hypothesising how we might adapt – technologically, ecologically, politically, and culturally – for living with a world of greater climate extremes.

Should the Earth warm by +3°C, these are some of the conditions predicted by current models (Wiegandt, 2024):

Extreme heat will push areas of the world to air temperatures and humidities that are beyond human tolerance. +3°C globally could mean average temperature increases of +6° on land. Increasing temperatures have already resulted in mass mortality events; such as the 40,000 bats who died in a single heatwave in Australia; and the mass bleaching of coral reefs.

Food shortages are a risk as pollinators suffer mass mortalities, or move to different environments. Global crops may be destroyed en-masse as atmospheric warming intensifies droughts and floods. In a +3°C world, large swathes of agricultural land that feed a disproportionate portion of the world will become unviable for both human habitation and the crops they currently sustain.

Intense Precipitation events are becoming more frequent and have already been responsible for recent fatal floods in Libya, Greece, Germany, France, Italy, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States.

Ice Sheets and Glaciers hold an amount of water equivalent to 65m of sea level rise. A rise of even 1m would displace 130 major coastal cities, destroy ports, and threaten hundreds of nuclear power plants. It is possible that between +1°C and +3°C, the ‘tipping point’ of the Greenland ice sheet will be triggered, with its melting becoming a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

The scale of anthropogenic change on our planet is such that any individual place, object, or action is inextricably tied to a complex network of dependencies and consequences across the globe. We are rapidly learning, although perhaps still too slowly, that events in one part of the world have unpredictable and reverberant consequences across vast distances of space and time.

In this context, the idea of a ‘site’ as a bounded region on a map loses potency as a tool for allocating responsibility and rights, and for measuring consequences and opportunities. While ‘site’ has long been the contextual entity governing architectural thinking, in ADS13 we will depart from ‘sites’ in favour of ‘entanglements’. An entanglement refers to the clusters of interconnected geographies, technologies, ecologies and cultures, which are engaged in mutually dependent or destructive feedback loops. A shift in focus and language away from bounded sites toward entangled realities also offers an opportunity to restore ways of knowing that resist human-exceptionalism. This shift then allows us to reframe the natural environment as a collection of mutually flourishing entities intertwinned in complex reciprocal relationships.

At the end of the sixteenth Century, the invention of the microscope began to open a window into tiny realities that had always carried a powerful, often deadly, force in the world, but which had never before been seen. Armed with this newfound sensory apparatus, a new frontier of scientific and creative inquiry opened the doors to modern medicine and material science.

Today, we find ourselves face to face with invisible realities at the other end of the scale.The sheer size and complexity of today’s entanglements often renders them as phantoms to our natural senses. Like black holes, we might be able to observe their effects, but they themselves lremain beyond the human sensorium. Philosopher Timothy Moreton calls this category of entity a ‘hyperobject’; a phenomenon so immense it defies perception. The climate crisis and its subcomponents are often cited as quintessential hyperobjects.

Hyperscopes

If we are to replace traditional notions of site with complex hyperobject entanglements, we will need to find ways to glimpse them. Tn term 1, our task will be to prototype ‘Hyperscopes’; creating techniques and devices that render hyperobjects more intuitively legible to human senses. Through investigative design, we will experiment with ways to listen to, capture, describe, draw, render and simulate the planetary entanglements behind the climate extremes of a +3°C world.

Listening Posts

During Term 1, we will also investigate the various sensors used by contemporary science to monitor our environment. From terrestrial atmospheric towers, to autonomous high altitude aircraft, to networks of remote sensing satellites, to undersea hydrophone arrays; the built environment includes a planetary infrastructure for observing itself and the natural world it depends on. Each student will choose an environmental ‘listening post’ as a case study and design a method to draw it and the spaces and temporalities it inhabits.

Building on the research from Term 1, students will shrink the scale of your investigation from a generalised planetary condition to a location in the UK, or your home country, which is at risk of experiencing a climate extreme in the near future. Extrapolating from scientific forecasts, we will explore possible scenarios in these locations and their entanglements. In response to these forecasts, we will build projects that propose adaptations to: the built environment; rituals and routines; technological systems; and to governance. We not only encourage these propositions to be aspirational rather than cautionary, but also to be plausible rather than utopian. We will approach these adaptations from both scientific and cultural perspectives through the lenses of ‘Operative Models’, and ‘Restor(y)ing Earth’.

Operative Models

An operative model is an environment or system that allows a hypothesis to be iteratively tested. In ADS13, models will be both investigative and representational devices. Each of your design projects will be supported by an operative model which you will craft and test. Ideally, these models will act as scaffolds for you to experiment with possible consequences to design decisions, as well as being the primary method through which you can defend and advocate for your designs.

Some examples of operative models include:

Mathematical Climate Models:

Equations that take a range of environmental parameters as inputs and predict output variables based on their relationships. Example: enROADS

Large Language Models (LLMs)

Neural networks trained on vast language data sets that recognise and extrapolate meaning from patterns. Examples: ChatGPT, Gemini, Project CETI

Space-Time Models

Virtual environments that depict relationships between spatial geometry and temporal events. Example: The Image Data Complex (Forensic Architecture)

Digital Twins

Virtual models that display realtime sensor data from an ‘entangled’ physical counterpart. Examples: Digital Twin Victoria, TreesAI (Dark Matter Labs)

Roleplay

Roleplaying scenarios can be used to understand social and psychological elements that may affect human decision making. Examples: Serious Games - Disaster Management, Red Teaming - Cyber Security

Rule-based/Emergent Behaviour Models

A simple system of rules that when allowed to play out creates complex behaviour. Examples: Cellular Automata, BOIDs, r-Place

Earth Observatories

Depictions of changing conditions on the Earth’s surface can be created by interpolating between measurements taken by in-situ and remote sensors. Examples: Earth Observatory, Earth.nullschool, EarthEngine

Restor(y)ing Earth

As an important counterpoint to scientific modelling, our studio will simultaneously adopt an anthropological approach toward the future we face. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz interpreted culture as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (Price, 2010). Embedded within our contemporary culture are stories of property, human exceptionalism, expulsion from nature, and measuring species success via economic growth. In a +3°C future, we will need to tell ourselves different stories.

We will imagine the belief systems, rituals, technologies, social conventions, and routines that might be needed to support our proposed adaptations. We will consider the very personal ways we define kin, give agency to others, bear attitudes toward permanence and transience, and the degree to which unborn generations feature in our stories as of equal importance to the external ways in which we manipulate our world.

Narrative Lighthouses

Our aim is for the hyperscopes and adaptations we develop to act as lighthouses for unknown shores. These shores are potential futures. In the first instance, a lighthouse assures us the shore is there. In some cases, it warns of rocks we might otherwise wreck ourselves upon, and, in other cases, it illuminates a calmer inlet we can navigate towards. We believe in the need for narrative lighthouses to keep casting light on the shores of these future worlds, and the sacrifices and innovations are required to land there.

Audience

In designing the final format for your project, we will ask you to consider who it is for? Does your project take the form of public advocacy on behalf of a threatened community? Is it a policy recommendation for current day law-makers? Is it a video for children who will experience the challenges of an already warming world? Whether your project is expressed through film, drawings, reports, pieces of literature, photography, performance, or any combination of these medias, we will ask you to define the specific attention, needs, and context of your audience.

Production Design

When representing the future scenarios you have investigated and modelled, we encourage detail, specificity, and immersion. Drawing on techniques from production design, we will draw and render the future as if it has already happened. How we might adapt to and dwell with the +3°C world will be articulated through detailed scenographies depicting lived experiences of the future. From these scenographies we can infer rituals, practices, objects, architectures and entanglements. Who sits in the living rooms of the +3°C world? What objects, or subjects, furnish their surroundings? What words are spoken before a harvest? What values are taught in their schools? What language(s) do they speak? What constitutes their family? What materials are in abundance? What of the current world has been forgotten?

The Lab

We encourage the use of novel tools including, but not limited to: Gaussian Splatting/NERFs, AI remote sensing, game engines, generative AI, computational simulations, GIS. Drawing on the processes of our own practice, Inferstudio, ADS13 will continuously discuss learn new softwares and methods, be willing companions on any technical journey students wish to undertake, and offer specific guidance if students pursue paths we have travelled before. We will also work with you to identify possible consultant experts.

The Library

We embrace collaboration and will seek out opportunities for shared research where synergies exist between individual projects. We will curate a studio-wide library of research extending from facts to photographs, anecdotes to statistical analysis. We will also work to provide digital infrastructure for smooth sharing of models, datasets, simulations, and templates.

The Hearth

We will look for opportunities to gather and exchange stories. Where possible, we will find contexts beyond the workspace of the studio to sit together, walk together, and eat together as we try to share the wisdom accumulated over each of our own experiences. We will create a space for listening and for discovering the nature of the stories we each tell each other about ourselves. We will celebrate skills and interests from beyond the studio and embrace the other lives we each seek to walk.

References:

Civic Square & Dark Matter Labs. (2024). 3 Degree Neighbourhood [PDF]. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11JLLVqvHeh1c4FULWTJqwjlc0qQ031XO/view (Accessed: 10/09/2024)

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Price, P. L. (2010). Cultural geography and the stories we tell ourselves. Cultural Geographies, 17(2), 167-171.

Rahmstorf, S. (2024). Climate and Weather at 3 degrees more. In: K. Wiegandt (Ed.), Three Degrees More. Open Access: Springer. pp. 3-15.

Tutors:

Inferstudio is the digital design practice of Bethany Edgoose and Nathan Su. The studio works through production design, data visualisation, animation and narrative writing. We collaborate with artists, architects, technologists and researchers on commissioned projects, while also producing independent works. Our independent creations focus on the future of extended reality and emerging relationships between human society, ecologies, and more-than-human persons.

Bethany Edgoose is an editor, writer, and researcher. With a background in anthropology, her work investigates the impact of digital technologies on new forms of personhood and identity. Before Inferstudio, she worked as a cyber-security analyst and a nuclear security researcher. She graduated with distinction from the M.Sc in Anthropology and Development at the London School of Economics.

Nathan Su is a designer, technologist, and researcher. With a background in architecture, he works through virtual worlds to both speculate on possible futures and reveal contemporary realities. He has recently worked as an advanced researcher for Forensic Architecture, and has taught in architecture schools internationally, including at UCLA, the Architectural Association (AA), and Strelka Institute. He studied architecture at the University of Melbourne and at the AA, where he received Diploma Honours.