Anti-Catastrophic Futures

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WE APPEAR TO LIVE IN A CATASTROPHIC AGE …

Our lives are caught between climate change, pandemics, wars, market crashes, biodiversity collapses, and supply chain disruptions. The new normal, it seems, is one where apocalyptic narratives predominate and where precarity is to be expected or even embraced. Many efforts to head off catastrophe, meanwhile, often seem inadequate to the task, embracing status quo politics or hanging their hopes on salvation through technological disruption. What, then, would an anti-catastrophic project that takes our myriad crises seriously but does not fall into the trap of catastrophic thinking look like?

In this multimedia presentation the newly established Chair of Digital Cultures at TUD introduces some of their latest projects. Join us for a tour through the archives of “Against Catastrophe” and explore the eerie landscapes of “Forest City”, an artificial island and eco-smart city at the southern tip of Malaysia.

The experimental publishing platform “Against Catastrophe” offers a forum for the presentation of short multimedia works engaging in contemporary crises and catastrophes. Contributions situate crises, shocks, and violence within a broader examination of infrastructure, art, energy, economy, geopolitics, and extractionism, extending our understanding of these issues and complementing both journalistic and scholarly accounts.
Research Associates Johanna Mehl, Michelle Pfeifer, and Nelly Pinkrah will introduce some of the recent contributions and discuss how they reimagine our relations to energy, design, geopolitics, logistics, and finance.

We also invite you to attend the screening of Prime Model (2022), a 15-minute video work by Research Associate Michaela Büsse that brings together on-site footage
from Forest City, an artificial island and eco-smart city located at the southern tip of Malaysia, with a toy model of the site created in Cities: Skylines, a popular urban planning game. The short film provides a glimpse of Forest City’s eerie presence while highlighting the extractive nature of speculative urbanism. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Michaela Büsse.