Memories From Stream City
A short fictional documentary about Stream City: the flying city where inhabitants behave like birds. #Re-designing Infrastructures
The creative power of value and its power to construct the future in real-time. #Shifting Value
Speculation is never just predictive. It doesn’t only account for the probability of certain futures, but it has the power to shape and reconfigure the material reality of the present. And while creativity is often delegated to the realm of speculative fiction, other, more insidious processes operate in the background, fully embracing this “creative” power to construct the future in real-time.
On the twentieth of April 2020, the price of oil went negative for the first time in history. The sudden event sent seismic shocks through the global economy. This oil-price shipwreck visualized how deeply entangled the present and the future are. It served as evidence of how the nature of raw materials can shift arbitrarily across the spectrum of resources and waste. The speculative video ‘Building Climate Futures’ investigates how to acknowledge the creative power of value in its dry economic sense, and link it to the creative power of art in imagining different potentials for the future.
Chiara Di Leone is a writer and design researcher, originally trained as an economist. Laura Cugusi is an artist, researcher, writer, and producer. Anastasia Noga is a researcher, writer and curator. Together they form the research Collective Cassandra. Its work investigates what institutional practices, technologies, design strategies and social systems come to be responsible for ensuring the future habitability of Earth.