About seven years ago we stayed in an old stone cottage in Silverdale for a family birthday, an odd, lovely building attached to a gallery. The kitchen was on the ground floor and a spiral staircase wound up out of it to the living room on the floor above, and above that a sleeping loft you reached by one of those alternating-step ladders that make you think about your feet. The fridge hummed next to the bottom of the stairs. There was a window seat in the living room, and from it you looked out over Morecambe Bay to where the sun went down along the edge of the Lakes. I sat there one evening swapping messages with someone on Twitter I’d never met, I can put myself back in that seat now. The light on the water, the stone walls, the hum of the fridge below, the quiet of it. I can smell the room. The whole thing is still there, held together by everything else in it.

But ask me what I’m doing on Thursday and I have to check.

When I mention this to friends they tend to find it funny. But those two things are not the same kind of object in my head. The cottage comes back as one piece, the stairs and the light and the mood of the week all holding each other up. Thursday is an item on a list. A list is a format my head refuses to hold, and it took me decades to wonder whether the problem might be the lists.

At school, my dyslexia assessment said I’d scored well on intelligence, and even better on the severity of the dyslexia. What happened next depended on the teacher. Some adjusted, and were genuinely kind. Some didn’t believe dyslexia existed, and said so. To them, I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

The memory I keep coming back to, I’m about fourteen, it’s the opening weeks of the first Gulf War, and the war is sitting in the back of my head the whole time. Green night-vision footage and missile cameras, targets vanishing under crosshairs, men going down like figures in a computer game, a war that reached me every evening, on all four channels, as a precision tool, freeing a country from a barely human enemy. Maths. The teacher asks something spatial, angles, geometry of some sort. I take longer than the others, and I get it right. Then the bit that mattered: how did you get to that? I explain. It’s right, I’m told, but you did it wrong. You do it like this.

So I’d try to do it like that, and it wouldn’t run in my head, and now I had neither their method nor mine. Enough of that and you stop trusting the thing that works.

I can’t remember the question, of course. I remember the war.

History was worse, in a way, because there wasn’t even a method to be wrong about. It was dates. Lists of dates and unattached facts, pub quiz material, nothing joined to anything, no account of why the world is shaped the way it is. Dates with nothing attached to them are, for me, close to a series of sounds. They went past, I sat there in the middle of them, nothing stuck.

The school system wasn’t built for my head. It was built for one kind of head, the kind that holds a fact without asking where it sits and hands it back on demand. Turn up on time, wear the right clothes, follow the instruction, run the program. That shape made sense once, when what the economy needed was people at the assembly line, people keeping the ledgers, people managing the people at the assembly line, and a school that turned out heads like reliable parts was doing its job. Most of that world has gone, but the school system is still making parts for it.

Parts that are made to a specification. The ones that make the grade pass through. The ones that don’t go back to be ground down until they fit somewhere useful, or end up on the scrap pile. For those who can’t or won’t take a shape the system recognises as productive, the grinding takes confidence off a bit at a time.

So by the time I reached adulthood I had a bunch of ready-made arguments for why it was me that was the problem. They were among the few things school taught me that stuck. Every to-do list I made was dead within a week, so I was disorganised. Rooms full of people with no shared purpose arrived at full volume and without pattern, so I was an introvert. Routine never held, so I had no discipline. I carried these ‘faults’ and more for decades, and nobody stopped me, because I said them myself, and I said them with confidence.

Over time, across a BA, an MA and years of work, I found my own ways around these, and built back a certain confidence in doing things in a way that works for me, and a comfort in asking for what I need. The thing I ask for first now, before any project, before any task, is its context.

When I came to write this piece and went back to reading about dyslexia and cognition, I found a psychology experiment from the 1970s that goes some way to explaining why.

Two psychologists, John Bransford and Marcia Johnson, played people a series of instructions. Every sentence is ordinary English. The procedure is quite simple and involves arranging things into different piles. If you don’t know what it’s about, it’s fog. The words go past and nothing sticks to anything, which by now might sound familiar.

Around fifty people took part, split into three groups. One group was told nothing. One was told beforehand that the passage was about washing clothes. One heard the passage first and got the context afterwards.

Out of nearly twenty instructions in the passage, the told-nothing group remembered about three. The context-first group remembered about six. The group told afterwards remembered about three, no better than the people who were never told at all.

It’s that third number that has stayed with me. Context has to be there while the information is arriving. Handed over afterwards, it did nothing. The same words, the only difference was having somewhere to put them.

The paper is called Contextual Prerequisites for Understanding. I’ve thought of it as the washing-clothes experiment ever since. None of it is about dyslexia. It’s about how understanding works in anyone.

There’s a warm, well-meaning genre waiting for you when you start reading about your own head, and I wanted it to be true. Dyslexia as hidden gift. One book described the way my memory works so exactly, facts held as story and web rather than as separate items, that reading it felt like being seen. But the science is messier than the books: no creativity advantage on average, no visuospatial one either, an expert panel finding little evidence that dyslexia itself confers the superpowers.

Fine. I’ve compared notes with a lot of dyslexics over the years, and none of them has claimed superpowers. Some see it purely as a disability. The ones I’ve met through art school and work mostly describe something plainer: a head that’s a different shape, stronger in some places and weaker in others.

So let me say what I think is going on.

What dyslexia did was put some of the standard tools out of reach, so I used the ones I had to hand. Everyone’s head comes with a certain set of tools, mine are different to most. Forty years of reaching for the same ones has made me well practised in their use. The web-seeing, the reading of rooms, the feel for how things connect: I don’t think I was issued better versions of these. I just used them hard. But I know people the school system wore down before they got the chance to pick anything up.

As far as I can tell, I’m not better at using context than anyone else. I’m just worse at coping without it. Other people seem to have enough slack to absorb the cost without noticing: a thin impression from the unanchored paragraph, and on you go, and no alarm sounds. Mine sounds, and that is why I’m sat here dictating this essay.

So when I ask people to name a project or a person along with what it is and why it matters, in the same sentence, the request isn’t just for me. Look at most professional communication with the washing-clothes experiment in mind and you’ll recognise the setup. Decks of bulleted nouns. Acronyms nobody unpacks. Handovers written from inside a context for people standing outside it. History lessons made of dates. The told-nothing condition, run as standard practice, and everyone on the receiving end paying for it.

Which still leaves a puzzle: why was I hopeless at school and then not?

Nothing about my head changed. I got to a BA I enjoyed, and the things I’d been marked down for all my life, questioning the facts, pulling material from different domains into one map, building a worldview and testing it, turned out to be the point of the exercise. What changed was what got rewarded.

Then the Royal College of Art, and a room I’ve thought about ever since. Fairly early on I noticed I wasn’t the only dyslexic in a smallish cohort. I said so to the dyslexia tutor I’d started seeing, a warm, motherly, middle-aged woman whose name I’ve lost but whose belief in me I haven’t. She’d seen plenty like me come through, and knew I’d be alright. She reckoned about a third of the students were dyslexic. I don’t think she was quoting a study. It came from years in that building, and it matched what I could see around me. The dyslexics there had something. A left-field way in, an ease with, I still don’t have a clean word for it, connections that weren’t obvious arriving as if they were. For twenty years I held that room as evidence that the gift was real.

I now think the room was doing most of the work, and not by selecting for gifts. Think about what it takes for someone dyslexic to arrive at a place like that. You’ve found workarounds for the shape of your own cognition, because the standard tools were out of reach. And your sense of your own worth has somehow come through secondary school with enough left to believe an application was worth writing. That’s part of the filter, the workarounds and the surviving self-esteem, and a cohort selected by that path will be full of people well practised with their tools, looking like proof that dyslexia confers gifts. Among those missing from that room are the ones the school finished, holding the verdict and nothing else. Leave them out and this becomes lucky people telling each other they’re gifted.

Last year we were working on a show, and I had an idea for a set of prayer beads with remote-control buttons embedded in them. I wanted to make them myself. For a long time the beads were a bag of clay, a box of broken TV remotes and a loose idea on a list. Then a ceramic artist, Caroline Chouler-Tissier, joined the wider project, and things began to arrive. Talking with her. Seeing the prototypes she was making. The feel of a bag of clay in my hands again, a ceramic tool in my fingers again. I’d done ceramics at school, nearly took it as a degree, then didn’t touch it for twenty-eight years. The memory of the whole craft started clicking back into place, and it wasn’t deciding that did it. The clay was in my hand.

Within a couple of weeks I was firing handmade beads in the back garden, in a kiln I’d built from a garden incinerator and a length of ducting pipe, packed with sawdust and charcoal, trying salts and minerals on the surfaces to see what the fire would do with them.

That’s the same head that can’t hold Thursday. The memory was never broken. It holds things as a mesh, and my lists never got into it.

Anab, my wife and business partner, and I, with the shifting network of collaborators that is Superflux, build rooms for a living. Room in a loose sense. Some have walls. Some are films. Some are an object with a poem beside it. A room, in the sense I mean, is a built context: enough of a world around you, in enough senses, that new things landing in it make sense on arrival. The ‘washing clothes experiment’ gave people two words and it doubled what they could hold. A room is the same move made bigger. The context arrives first, through walls and objects and light, and the facts land inside it.

For seventeen-odd years I’ve been asked why a room beats a report. The answer I gave was about feeling, and it always struck me as right without being complete. Feeling is real and it matters, but it doesn’t cover the whole territory.

The rest of the answer is the washing-clothes experiment. Too many reports about the future are the topic-afterwards condition: here are the facts, assemble the world yourself, in your head, from a standing start, while reading. It’s about the hardest thing you can ask of a reader, and it gets handed out in forty-page documents, and then people wonder why nothing changes. A room reverses the order. You’re inside the context before you’re given a single fact to hold, and everything that arrives after that has somewhere to go. A good report can do the same. But a well-designed room can go further.

A room gives you the basket: the smell of the laundry, the damp weight of it, the other jobs waiting while you do this one. The context comes in through every sense you have, and the feeling is the part of it arriving on the channels that don’t carry words. That’s what the cottage was doing when it held a whole week together, and what the clay did in my hands. That’s what we’ve found works. Why it works as well as it does, we’re still finding out.

All of this cuts the other way too, and here a second word helps.

Context is what you’re inside. A frame is what you look through, the edge that decides what’s in the picture and what isn’t.

The show the beads were made for opened earlier this year at the Weltmuseum in Vienna. We set objects we’d made among the museum’s own collection, with short poems beside them, and in one room we adjusted the labels, ours and theirs, so that everything spoke as if from a single world. It works. You walk in, the room becomes coherent, you understand what you’re looking at. The uncomfortable part is that nothing about that understanding feels wrong from inside it. The visitor reads the room fluently. What they’re reading is a fiction. Which is what museums have so often done to other people’s cultures, assembling confident worlds from incomplete fragments. We just turned it on our own.

A frame doesn’t produce truth. It produces coherence, and coherence comes as easily to a fiction as to a fact. You can understand a false account of things perfectly well: the causes have effects, every fact has somewhere to go, and the whole thing hangs together. I’ve been inside that myself. The room at the RCA was a frame, and I carried its conclusion for twenty years before I thought to check it, while making work about exactly this. And the war I remember instead of the maths question came inside a frame too, the precision tool, the barely human enemy. I understood the war I was shown, at fourteen, completely. That doesn’t mean I understood the war.

The rooms that did the damage, the school, the war on television, had one thing in common: they never announced themselves as rooms. They passed unquestioned, as just how things are. Curricula, feeds and news broadcasts mostly still do. Yet the rooms we build announce themselves. Mitigation of Shock was a London flat as it might be around 2050, food growing under purple light on old IKEA shelves, newspapers turning climate projections into front-page headlines, and nobody who stood in it believed they’d time-travelled. They were inside something declared, made, offered for inhabiting.

What a room like that does is turn the background into the foreground. Climate change is the background noise of everyone’s life now, known but impossible to hold, too big and too slow to see. A flat with the newspaper on the table and food growing on the shelves puts it in the kitchen instead, where decisions made a long way off turn up as things you can see and touch, and you can’t stay in the abstract.

Knowing it’s made changes what a room can do. The question ‘is this real?’ recedes for a while, and some of your defences go with it. What the room asks for instead is connections. We put the improvised growing rig and the newspaper talking about drought in the same frame, and what they have to do with each other is the question the room is putting to you. It’s the web-seeing from earlier, built into a room that draws it out of anyone who walks in.

And because you know you’re standing in a fiction, the question comes back out with you and lands on your own kitchen. If this were my ordinary life, how would I live? What would I learn to accept? What in this world is already in mine? Knowing it’s a fiction doesn’t mean you can see every choice we made for you. We decided what was growing and what the paper said, and those decisions shape what you can ask. That’s the frame, and we drew it. The fiction isn’t the answer. It’s somewhere to stand while you investigate the question.

The beads I fired in the garden spent the summer on a plinth in that Vienna room, beside a label we wrote for a world that doesn’t exist. People stood in front of them and, I hope, walked out carrying questions about this world rather than answers about that one.

So, briefly, because I didn’t walk you through my schooling for nostalgia, or as crowdsourced therapy.

Facts need somewhere to live, and that’s your head too, not just mine. The next time a document defeats you, check whether it assumed a context you weren’t given before you conclude anything about yourself.

Certainty deserves the same question: some of what you’re sure of was built in rooms you never noticed you were in, and coherence comes as easily to a fiction as it does to a fact.

And when you, or someone else, seems unable, you may be looking at a shape mismatch rather than a lack. Nobody is normal. There’s a set of people whose cognition happens to overlap neatly with the current shape of the world, school, office, feed, form, and they move through it with far less friction and get told they’re able. There are others whose shape collides with it, and they’re told they’re the problem. Which of those you are says less about your abilities than it does about the shape of the room you’re in and the tools you had to hand.

My way through was a certain bloody-mindedness, enough sight of how broken the school was that I never let it take all the tools off me, and rooms that turned out to be the right shape at the right time. Thirty years, and more luck than anyone should need. But rooms are built. And someone decides their shape.

Sources

Bransford, J.D. and Johnson, M.K. (1972) 'Contextual prerequisites for understanding', Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior.

Miller, L.M.S., et al. (2006) 'Contextual knowledge reduces demands on working memory during reading', Memory & Cognition.

Gilboa, A. and Marlatte, H. (2017) 'Neurobiology of schemas and schema-mediated memory', Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Erbeli, F., et al. (2022) 'No evidence of creative benefit accompanying dyslexia', Journal of Learning Disabilities.

Chamberlain, R., et al. (2018) 'Meta-analytic findings reveal lower means but higher variances in visuospatial ability in dyslexia', British Journal of Psychology.

Carroll, J.M., et al. (2025) 'Toward a consensus on dyslexia', Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Eide, B.L. and Eide, F.F. (2011) The dyslexic advantage. New York: Hudson Street Press.

The Craftocene came to us during the pandemic, while we were building Refuge for Resurgence (2020). Inspired by 5 years of working on Mitigation of Shock (2015-2020), in 2018 I had started writing and speaking about more-than-human centred design, first at the Interaction Design Festival ,and then most significantly at Tentacular Festival, about more-than-human politics, foregrounding a more-than-human position across planetary scale thinking - from fixing to caring, from planning to gardening, from independence to interdependence.

In the chaos of 2020, when so much of what we’d taken for granted was stripped away, we found ourselves drawn back to the most fundamental things: making with our hands, caring for each other and for the materials we had, asking who gets a seat at the table and what it means to set that table with love. Refuge for Resurgence was where that thinking first took physical form.

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There are many ‘ocenes’ now, each one an attempt to name the era we are in and what matters most about it. The Anthropocene is useful because it names the impact we have had, and Capitalocene because it names the cause. But we wanted a word that named a practice, something you can actually shape with your hands, heart and spirit, a way of working through the mess we’re in. Crafting materials, stories and myths matters to us because it is slow, deliberate and opens new possibilities. When you pick up a discarded vape battery and rework it into a power source, you are not just making something useful. You are reversing the grand narrative we have been told; the logic of an entire system: the supply chain, the planned obsolescence, the assumption that your role as a person is to consume and discard. You are paying attention to a material that was designed to be invisible after use.

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The Craftocene lands at a moment when the outside world is accelerating in a tragic direction. Beneath the stuff we consume, the systems we rely on, and the stories we tell, the myths that hold us are becoming undone, the systems that underwrote the myth of infinite growth are themselves showing their limits. A dangerously fertile space, that we struggle to make sense of, even as this change ripples around and among us. In this space, we propose a spirit-first approach of embodied attention, the beginning of a different relationship with the world. That intentionality, care and material dialogue become the foundation of, perhaps, more hopeful futures.

Over the past six years or so, we’ve explored this idea through a series of works, each one pulling at a different thread of the same question: what kind of world can we build from the wreckage of this one? What kind of ancestors are we becoming in the process?

Then Claudia Banz, who we’d first spoken with when she was Curator for Design at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin, took on a new role as Director of the Weltmuseum in Vienna, and the conversation picked up again in the summer of 2025. This time, the dialogue moved toward a different scale and ambition. We began to think about an interconnected story arc that could hold the full trajectory of our research. What if we showed The Craftocene not as a collection of projects, but as a proposition for civilisational transition?

And so, in record time, we have the biggest solo our studio has ever produced. The Craftocene brings together three works: Refuge for Resurgence, Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream, and a brand-new commission, Relics of Abundance, across three stunning rooms at the Weltmuseum. It opened on 2nd March and runs until 16 August 2026.

Back to the summer of 2025: Jon and I began to explore what we call wide spectrum entanglements: the threads that connect a single discarded vape battery to the lithium mines, a sneaker to high frequency trading, a designer chair to the founding myths of modernism.

Jon had been researching cargo cults for a long while, the Melanesian movements that arose in response to colonial occupation, particularly after the airdrop of manufactured goods during the Second World War. The term itself was conceived through a colonial lens, bundling together a whole range of practices, and it’s rightly controversial. But there was something underneath the colonial framing that we kept returning to. When manufactured goods appeared and upended old ways of living, communities remade these glimpsed objects from what materials were left. They performed ceremonies. They ritualised what they’d observed. They were trying to make sense of a system whose logic was invisible to them.

Anthropologists and ethnographers used to talk about cargo cults as though they were a curious phenomenon that happened with other people on a remote island far away from us. But circling through these ideas and reflecting on The Craftocene, what became evident was the uncomfortable recognition that we are in fact here today consumed by the cargo cult of capitalism.

However “civilised” we think of ourselves, we haven’t transcended object-based magical thinking. We think we live in the age of reason, yet our entire culture is organised around the veneration of things: sneakers conserved in clingwrap like holy relics, open-plan living rooms that look more like halls of worship than homes, a 136 million dollar Manhattan condo that is barely visited, let alone lived in, just a unit, a price, liquidity. We imbue stuff with supernatural powers: we pay thousands of pounds for a handbag that costs less than a hundred to make because it is perceived to bestow some value or power upon us. Money itself feels like a collective hallucination. If you told an anthropologist you’d discovered a civilisation that did this, they might not hesitate to call our obsessions ‘ritual behaviour’.

Jon was intrigued by the repeated appearance of modernist design chairs in these spaces: the Wassily, the LC2, the Eames, and the values and aspirations they carry, the haunted nostalgia for a time when the future looked new and full of possibilities. These chairs were supposed to herald a utopian era where mass production would deliver us from hardship. They carried in their lines an excitement for new materials and a faith in rational progress. But as Jon dug into the history, into Adolf Loos and the founding myths of modernism, we kept running into the same ideas of social Darwinism that once obscured anthropologists’ understanding of cargo cults.

I was drawn to the sneaker, to the sheer cultural obsession with it, everybody’s devotion to the shoe. And to the smartphone, that glowing abyss. Because what interested us wasn’t just the objects in isolation but what they reveal about the belief system underneath. If we do reckon with the consequences of modernism’s “optimistic” vision, the ever-growing mountains of waste, we can see how the story flips. The same culture that promised liberation through objects becomes a culture addicted to overproduction.

If the rituals of cargo cults look absurd to modern onlookers, how might the material remains of our relentless production come across to someone looking in from the outside? What would our descendants think we worshipped, or feared, if they found the remnants of all this? To those unfamiliar with the gravitas of asset speculation, debt overhang, or quantitative easing, the demands of the Market for exponential growth might loom like a divine authority. What rituals do we perform, in the hopes that prosperity will follow, as we place our faith in the system even after it has proven incapable of solving its own foundational flaws?

And so, we began to craft a speculative archaeology of our cargo cult economics. Relics of Abundance, the new work at the heart of The Craftocene, imagines a civilisation after ours (and by ‘ours’ we mean the orthogonal axis of rampant consumption that cuts through certain geographics and cultures; rather than a singular monolithic identity to describe the ‘whole world’ which is flawed in so many ways) sifting through the remnants and detritus of our excess, trying to piece together something like a Wassily chair to summon the old gods of abundance. We imagine, in our story, that they might work from fragments, perhaps surviving print media, distorted stories, and physical waste. Their understanding of our time is profoundly incomplete. They look back at our era as a mythical “time of plenty.” And their reverent misremembering is making visible what is already true, and slightly absurd, about our present: that we built our identity around the worship of things, and called it rationality. The distance of a far future just makes it easier to see.

What followed this research, then, was the intense mayhem of making that overtakes the studio during such a project. Across workshops, backyards, nooks and corners, the studio turned itself over to foraging, salvaging, crafting. Foraged cans, Coca Cola, beer, fizzy drinks, bags and bags of them, were burned in a clay contraption in the garden in the depths of winter, flattened and clad painstakingly onto a delicately HANDCRAFTED (!!!) wooden frame that our colleague Ed Lewis made over several weeks, to form the metal skin of the Wassily chair.

Long days working with black obsidian, polishing it, working melted silver into a band to frame the rock, it began to resemble a smartphone. Baking clay beads, pressing buttons extracted from foraged remote controls into the clay that then became the rosary. Molten lead poured into a mould for the sneaker exploded on more than one occasion, masks on, safety measures very much in place. And all of this in the wettest winter we’ve had, the marquee blowing away just as concrete was poured for the TV. Care, rigour, but also quite literally sweat and tears went into the making.

In a dimly lit room in the Weltmuseum, the final objects are displayed as complete ritual scenes, each one representing a ceremony performed in devotion to the Market. They carry an eerie sense of familiarity, grouped on plinths according to their respective rituals, and labelled meticulously. We wanted to use the aesthetic language of the museum itself, to show how future archaeologists might make sense of our material obsessions.

What appears to be a skeleton of the iconic Wassily chair wrapped in blue ribbon is, the gallery text informs us, in fact a ceremonial seat for a coming-of-age practice, its detail long since forgotten. The lead shoe, laid next to an ornate wooden box, is recast yearly as a sacrifice to planned obsolescence. A rosary hung on its bespoke display fixture, with buttons of a remote control embedded in the delicate clay, belongs next to a TV made of concrete, a shrine used in a meditation practice to receive messages from the aforementioned God, Market. The clay lamp next to the Wassily chair burns to mark the passing of time for those who would gaze into the abyss of the obsidian smartphone. On the walls, poetic fragments like lost scriptures tell the story of a civilisation steeped in magical thinking.

And threading through the room, barely there, a soundscape by James Bulley, poignant yet disturbing. The poems recited in cautious voices, as if to preserve the sanctity of the Market’s worship.

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Of course, The Craftocene is multiple stories, not a single narrative. At the Weltmuseum, Relics Of Abundance sits alongside Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream, an ongoing work that some may have caught at Design Museum’s exhibition “More than Human” last summer. And our multispecies banquet Refuge For Resurgence at the Venice Biennale first inspired Claudia to commission our studio.

Refuge for Resurgence invites audiences into mythic time when precarious climate upended our old ways of order and control. In their place, a new way of being emerged. A dining table is set, and each guest at the table - child, wolf, mushroom - is given equal standing, with table-settings handcrafted from detritus but made with extraordinary care. Our then colleague Leanne Fischler had combed the shores of Orkney to find flotsam and jetsam to make the cutlery, using jewellery-making techniques. Knives from brake lights and lichen-covered branches, spoons from vintage tea caddy scoops. Jon and I used kintsugi to salvage old platesm, writing a story of ruin and rebirth for the table, and Nicola Ferrao illustrated it across the plates, each one telling the story of a creature and the bonds that held them together. Ed and his father rescued a dead oak tree and crafted it, slowly, against the thickness of the aged grain - into a magnificent table that became the refuge.

The idea of decentring the human isn’t new. It’s only new to the traditions that centred the human in the first place. Across India, sacred groves have been protected by communities for centuries, governed by the understanding that these spaces belong to something larger than us, and that taking from them without reciprocity invites consequences for everyone. From the forests of Himachal Pradesh to the kavus of Kerala, these are technologies of ecological accountability that long predate anything the sustainability industry has come up with. The multispecies banquet carries that same spirit: the idea that the table must be set for everyone, not just us. The hopeful future that it promises is already old.

This spirit of reciprocity extends through traditions of storytelling. Myth-making and material knowledge exists across every culture on earth. And so, the storyworlds and objects we build in The Craftocene are our attempt to create storytelling possibilities you can physically inhabit, a co-imagined myth that acknowledges our ecological interconnectedness with the planet. It becomes a container to place ideas in, a guide that can move us from the overwhelming paralysis of the present towards an embodied understanding that craft, care and imagination can lead us forward.

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Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream asks what artificial intelligence could become if trained on centuries of ecological knowledge held in the body, language, and the land. And how might turning to AI, the very technology that currently devours energy and data at astonishing scale, help us turn towards ecological attunement rather than accelerate extraction? The “solutions,” the carbon calculators, the green growth pledges, the sustainable AI initiatives, tend to leave the underlying logic untouched. We wanted to try something else.

In our speculative work, we placed four handcrafted sculptural sensor-objects along the Thames to observe birdsong, tides, cloud formations and other atmospheric shifts. Each sensor - Sound, Water, Sky and Wind - is embedded with open-source electronics and custom code that feeds a small, specialist language model (Chorus for Sound, Silt for Water, Gaze for Sky, Breeze for Wind). This will cross-reference live ecological signals against a larger model trained on a corpus of British and European weatherlore: folk-rhymes, proverbs and oral traditions collected from the 1870s to the present, knowledge that commercial large language models are not designed to prioritise.

Kerala’s fishing communities read monsoon patterns through cloud formations and the behaviour of specific bird species, knowledge refined over generations and passed orally. When peacocks cry in India, we know rain will follow. Polynesian wayfinding traditions navigate thousands of miles of open ocean by reading wave patterns, star positions, and the flight of seabirds, a form of ecological computation that requires no silicon. And the Thames itself was once a sacred river. For centuries, communities along its banks understood it as alive, communicative, temperamental. Much of that has been paved over, literally and figuratively. But fragments remain, and our research into weather lore and river lore turned up astonishing depths of local ecological intelligence that large language models are not designed to prioritise.

The inversion at the heart of the work is this: the river prompts us. Instead of humans querying machines, screens display poetic invitations to pay attention, to learn to attune our bodies, heart and spirit towards the rhythms of the river.

The struggle over AI is ultimately a struggle over which ways of knowing are allowed to shape the world. Édouard Glissant wrote about what he called opacity, the right of cultures and beings to not be fully understood or translated into dominant frameworks. The river has a right to speak in a language we don’t fully comprehend, and the AI in this work isn’t a translation engine rendering the river legible to capital. It’s closer to a bridge language, creating a shared grammar of attention between human and more-than-human worlds, while honouring what remains opaque.

All three works are, in the end, acts of storytelling. Myth-making and material knowledge exist across every culture on earth. The storyworlds and objects we build in The Craftocene are our attempt to create storytelling possibilities you can physically inhabit, a co-imagined myth that acknowledges our ecological interconnectedness with the planet. A container to place ideas in, a guide that can move us from the overwhelming paralysis of the present towards an embodied understanding that craft, care and imagination can lead us forward.

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Bringing our speculative archaeologies in direct conversation with objects from the Weltmuseum’s permanent collection is particularly exciting for us. Showcasing ethnographic histories is a highly contested space. Whose histories are spoken of, what stories in the taxonomy are left out? At the same time, walking through the Weltmuseum’s collection, we were struck by how much knowledge is embedded in objects, how much agency they already have as storytellers in their own right. A Piaroa mask sits near our speculative prayer bead made from a TV remote. They hold equal weight because they are both encoding a relationship between people and forces larger than themselves. The difference is that one tradition understood this openly, and the other, ours, buried it under layers of market logic.

We have been taught to look at, decode and diagnose, the stories of other cultures and times, yet spend little time casting the same analytical eye on our own myths. Having our speculative works placed within the context of ethnographic histories, in the same vitrines as the museum collection, collapses the artificial distance between the cultures we study and the one we’re living in. The civilisation we’re looking at is ours.

*

Glissant proposed understanding cultures through their entanglement rather than through hierarchy or comparison, what he called “relation.” The Craftocene at the Weltmusem opens up the space to do this; time, culture, and geography fold into each other. Questions become possible that were harder to ask before. Who gets studied? What do our own objects reveal about us? And the question that runs through the whole show, the one we keep coming back to: what kind of ancestors are we becoming?

The Craftocene is the space where all of these threads tangle together. The knowledge system we are proposing to understand our current Anthropocene predicament is built on two conditions: reciprocity and resourcefulness. Reciprocity, because every object in this exhibition points to a relationship. And resourcefulness, because the ability to pick something up, understand its properties, and find a new purpose for it is not a quaint survival skill. It is the most relevant form of intelligence we have.

The Craftocene takes the remnants and waste of one way of living, and with care and ingenuity shows how it might be turned, slowly, into something that might carry a different story. It is an ongoing investigation, there are no neat conclusions, and we don't pretend to have arrived anywhere final. But we have our hands in the material of the world, and our hearts in the shared stories we tell one another, and we are endeavouring to find out. For us, there is a particular kind of knowledge that only comes through making, and imagining through the physical encounter with obsidian and lead and foraged aluminium cans and thatching hay, through the patient labour of crafting something by hand. When the machines have all been designed to go faster, we stubbornly insist, through the materials we work with, that other worlds are not only possible but are already taking shape.

The present is never finished. There is still, as Le Guin wrote, room in the bag of stars.

- By Anab Jain and Jon Ardern

Recently, we’ve been thinking about something the philosopher and urban planning professor, Donald Schön, wrote in 1984: ‘Designing is a conversation with the materials of a situation.’1

There’s something about this that feels particularly resonant: the notion that designing is a dialogue rather than a one-sided spiel, a two-way engagement with the world rather than a retreat from it.

At Superflux, we’re fervent believers in embodied intelligence, and in the idiosyncratic process of experimentation. For over 16 years, our material practice has been informed by the Indian philosophy of jugaad: the art of resourceful adaptation and creativity, of crafting tools from the remnants of our era.

In 2020, Anab coined the term “Craftocene” to give sound and shape to our vision of technology as a regenerative craft rooted in this resourcefulness, and to the way we materialise alternate futures and adjacent presents through the physical act of making.

While the Anthropocene hints at the extractivism of our current age, the Craftocene calls for ingenuity, skill, and innovation to build new tools from the ruins of our collective present. It’s a call to repurpose the waste of late capitalism, and to embrace all life’s rugged nature to survive, not in spite of, but with hope and purpose.

– Anab Jain

At the crux of this practice—one focused on embodied craftsmanship, as opposed to our other more speculative and narrative-led work—is the push to find new ways to adapt, transform, and move forward.

The material artefacts, devices and diegetic prototypes we’ve crafted over the years envision a shift towards more regenerative, circular and restorative ways of being. They propose alternate, craft manifestations of technology, and celebrate the connections between technology and our natural worlds.

Artefacts in the Craftocene

Our first physical foray in the Craftocene was an Arduino spear, which we designed and produced for the Singapore iteration of Mitigation of Shock, our immersive apartment radically adapted for a future in the wake of climate change. Alluding to the ongoing collapse of traditional food systems in the project’s speculative premise, the spear was handmade from an old circuit board, a length of wood, and twine made from a melted plastic bottle. It rested in the future apartment’s hallway as a visceral—and narrative—tool of survival and adaptation.

For our 2021 film, The Intersection, we produced a series of objects that served as diegetic props in the journey from a violent present to a cooperative future. Our server frame pack and array of sensors were situated in the film to draw attention to its complex social, cultural, political and environmental relationships.

Each artefact was hand-crafted by materials that would be available in a future in which mass production has been limited: salvaged hard-drives, discarded electronics and household items, foraged wood, and hand-etched circuit boards. They were physical metaphors, serving both as souvenirs of our present day and as prototypes for a post-crash scenario where technology and the natural world are deeply entwined.

The Vape Battery

While it can be challenging as a small practice to devote time to research and experimentation, we recognise their deep imaginative value. Untrammelled experiments are a core part of the studio’s R&D work: intentional seeds that often spring forth between client projects and commissions, recharging our creative batteries.

Without the time crunch of a deadline, these quests often lead us down unexpected avenues. Some disappear into the ether entirely, while others transform into large-scale projects, or hibernate for when the right moment or opportunity arises.

A recent example of one of our Craftocene quests was a battery pack we made from discarded vape batteries.

After observing the growing number of disposable vapes strewn across the pavements of London, we began thinking about what we could meaningfully—or at least just inventively—do to evict these pastel eyesores.

We scoured the streets for as many discarded vapes as we could find, which, needless to say, didn’t take very long. Armed with bagfuls of Elf Bars back at the studio, we shucked them open to excavate their lithium polymer batteries. At the time, we were intending to conclude a project with a website repository of research. Our hunch about repurposing these still potent vape batteries led us to wonder if we could use them to power the solar-run website at night or on overcast days.

After months of experimentation, we successfully created a large-capacity battery from these salvaged batteries, plastic vape casings, and solid copper and brass terminal blocks. The Craftocene battery pack was able to directly charge our website, although we did discover a few hiccups that might require more time to fix.

More than achieving a result, we were fuelled by the process of intentional experimentation. Every iteration was a way of coming at the same idea from a new angle, the goal pleasurably undefined; expansive enough for us to rummage through our ideas in real time and see what fit.

Thinking-Through-Making

“Thinking-through-making” is a term that’s often bandied about but rarely defined, maybe because of its perceived simplicity. It’s actually more complex than we might initially think.

Instead of separating thought from action, this approach to knowledge creation focuses on how understanding emerges through practice. It asks us to step outside of the mind and into our bodies, to engage with the materials of the situation in all their unpredictable tactility. Seen this way, craft becomes a site of encounter and exchange, rather than mechanical instruction.

Ideas come to Anab while she’s on the move: during her travels, while on walks, when she’s outside. For Jon it’s often when he’s cycling, for Léa when she’s swimming or people-watching, and for Ed when he’s using his hands. Carmen rejuvenates creatively through sketching, printmaking and cycling, while Andy is most inspired when he’s gardening or listening to music and sounds in the natural world. Julia’s best revelations emerge when she’s walking outside with no headphones on; for Matt, it’s when he’s looking at things through a camera lens and drawing visual connections. Mon’s ideas arrive when he’s out in nature or strange artificial landscapes, foraging for materials.

These creative moments all have something in common: ideas come when our bodies are activated and sensorially engaged.

Dwelling in the Interstices

In a way, thinking in conjunction with making is an alchemisation of mere concept, a process that adds texture to ideas, enriching them in the process.

In her essay on the ecology of attention, Lia Purpura writes about the beauty of interstitial space in a time before the never-ending scroll. ‘The gap between one activity and another was an open field, a transitional territory. An ecotone. Riparian. Estuarial,’ she observes. ‘What did I do in that interstitial space while walking, or waiting, or in a pause while writing? What actually happened when I sat at that red light, or looked up from the page, kind of lost?’2

These stolen moments of attention can be similarly applied to the lost art of experimentation in the age of automation. In an era where clearly defined deliverables and heavily justified outputs are king, it’s hard to let ideas properly gestate, to give them time to coalesce and totter before they take flight, or shape. We’re unwittingly being asked to become the oracles of our inventions, to be able to predict exactly where our ideas are going to take us.

Everything we know about the world is a process of experimenting, adapting, adjusting. It’s a way of touching the world in different ways and seeing how it responds. It can look very haphazard and jovial, but it's a form of serious play.

‘It's about finding that sweet spot between goal-oriented behaviour and open-ended experimentation,’ Jon has remarked. ‘You're not wandering aimlessly, but at the same time, you don't know for certain what your next steps will be before setting off. You're aware that there’s something potentially interesting in that direction, and so you wander through conceptual worlds, looking to see what treasures might be found.’

What is lost when a process becomes automated? When we curb the act of figuring, that is to say, ‘creating linkages, adjacencies, and intersections’3? When we stop grappling with an idea, teasing out its knots, allowing its unravelling to lead us somewhere unexpected? It’s not that we don’t get the need for a long-term vision in some form. But more and more, rather than being an adventure of equal importance, the process is becoming an inconvenient inevitability squashed between an idea and its realisation.

In an increasingly automated world, we’re in danger of losing this intertwined relationship between thinking and making: two different but symbiotic processes, each with rich inherent value. Replacing emergent, tactile, imagination-led processes—these forms of serious play—with AI prompts strips away something magical. It removes a reciprocal implication with the material world, our sense of acting and being acted upon in return.

Towards an Itinerative Practice

The sonorous duality of thinking-through-making is that it’s an act of improvisation, of adaption, of rhythmic itinerance. We’ve always waxed lyrical about the importance of iterative thinking in our practice, of problem-solving by learning from feedback, incremental progress, and adaptation. But maybe the way forward is to practise, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold suggests4, itineration instead of iteration: to focus on journeying instead of merely repeating.

Experimenting, itinerating, thinking-through-making: these are different garments that clothe what lies at the heart of all craft—exploring the mechanics and mysteries of our everyday world. It requires a certain surrender to the process; an openness to being diverted; a detachment from preciousness.

Real-world problem-solving, on the ground with your bootlaces trailing in the mud, is complex and unpredictable. It’s not clean, not glossy or by the book, but messy. Fertile. The best ideas don’t tend to break fresh ground on undisturbed soil, but in the muck of the unexpected, the way flowers sometimes bloom from a crack in the sidewalk.

This is true for all creative work. As we draw, sketch, make, iterate, and imagine, we bring ideas into being through our craft of choice.

What happens when we’ve achieved all our outcomes, when we’ve passed a finishing line without being able to recall any of the “distractions” along the way that might have pulled us onto entirely different—and sometimes more interesting—paths?

‘Life is open-ended,’ as Ingold writes, in a reminder of the generative joys of experimentation, ‘its impulse is not to reach a terminus but to keep on going.’5

What feels like an apt response to yet another tumultuous year? What are the lessons we’ve learned, and how can we begin to act on them?

These are difficult questions to unknot, but one thread that seems to have rippled through the fabric of the year is the importance of critical thinking, especially in relation to planning ahead for 2025.

In recent conversations about the future of retail (and countless other industries), we’ve noticed a pattern quite familiar in foresight work. While we’ve seen some interesting explorations, the broader trends, signals, and ideas that emerge often feel ... flat. Predictable. Despite all the prompt engineering, it’s often a similar conversation: digitally curated experiences (in shopping , with maybe a dash of AI-driven convenience.

But where is the surprise? Where is the friction that sparks cultural imagination, invention, and innovation? What about the tiny edge cases and the unexpected whispers?

It’s tempting to want to gather, smooth, and reflect what’s already being said, and while this can be useful and generative in its own way, at times we might find ourselves stuck in a loop, recycling familiar patterns instead of breaking new ground.

This made us reflect on something essential to all futures work: the power of critical sensemaking.

What is sensemaking?

For Karl Weick, the prominent organisational theorist and emeritus professor at the University of Michigan who coined the term, sensemaking is a creative and interpretive process of assigning significance to unforeseen circumstances. It’s a retrospective practice of making something “sensible” in ways that aren’t purely cognitive. ‘The more ready you are to deal with reality,’ he’s noted, ‘the more you can acknowledge its complexity.’1

Sensemaking is a form of meaning-making in ambiguous situations—both the large-scale uncertainties and the everyday precarities. It’s an ‘unending dialogue between partly opaque action outcomes and deliberate probing’2; a tool for understanding how different meanings, triggered by uncertainty, are formed from the same event.

Sensemaking speaks to our capacity to navigate interruptions, to reorganise after a break in routine. Weick observes that disruptions, both mundane and catastrophic, ask individuals to make sense of both ‘what is occurring now, and to consider what should be done next’3. From this lens, sensemaking is always comparative: a process of driving present actions based on information gleaned from past unfoldings.

What makes sensemaking critical?

Critical sensemaking serving as a useful lens to interrogate how individual actions interact with broader social issues. It’s about moving from the question “what” to “why”. Critical sensemaking isn’t just a skill; it’s a way of engaging with the world that allows us to imagine futures that are rich, complex, and full of potential.

Reports about the future can tend toward the prescriptive, but if we’ve learned anything from our fifteen years in the field, it’s that trends aren’t always the best indicators for how events will unfold. Futures evolve by way of unexpected twists and turns, and a valuable tool to navigate through the thicket is our capacity for critical understanding, as well as our imagination.

Critical sensemaking in practice

At Superflux, this is what excites us. We don’t just look for the key trends or the obvious outliers. We embrace the messiness, the uncertainty, and the ambiguity, because we know that’s where new futures begin to take shape.

Joan Didion famously wrote that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live.’4 What’s less often quoted is the second half of what she penned: ‘We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers’—or futurists, thinkers, human beings—‘by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’

When we embrace critical sensemaking, we’re contending with the discomfort of knowing that the stories we tell ourselves aren’t always linear. We’re pushing ourselves beyond the familiar, inviting exploration at the edges of possibility. It’s not always easy. This work requires us to hold multiple, often contradictory ideas in tension. It invites us to question our own assumptions and biases. But this is where true innovation thrives.

Going behind the blueprints

In his seminal paper on sensemaking and enactment, Weick considers the blind spots that emerge under conditions of secrecy in chemical plants:

‘When people make a public commitment that an operating gauge is inoperative, the last thing they will consider during a crisis is that the gauge is operating. Had they not made the commitment, the blind spot would not be so persistent.’5

What happens when we go behind the blueprints, when we start to question and critique the things we’ve been conditioned to accept as immovable truths?

We need to adopt a collective stance of epistemic humility if we’re going to meet the demands of both our turbulent present and emergent futures. We need to develop a healthy distaste for absolutism and a zest for alternative viewpoints that may or may not contradict what we hold to be true, to lean into the tacit understanding that the only certainty is that nothing can be known—or predicted—for certain, and to accept that reality is often stranger than fiction.

Critical sensemaking asks us to slacken our hold on the myth of unchangeability, to question even the things that seem to underpin our entire way of experiencing the world, and to comprehend just how permeable the boundaries are between stability and fluctuation.

With 2025 on the horizon, we invite our readers to tread lightly with the prediction decks that are bound to be hitting your inboxes soon. Attempting to shape our collective futures is to grapple with the fact that futures are elastic, sticky, and indeterminate. Being able to make sense of seemingly chaotic information, to spot patterns and opportunities where others see only the daily clamour, can set us apart.

For now, we’ll leave you with some of our studio’s highlights from 2024. We’re sending you our warmest wishes this holiday season, and a very merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates! See you in the new year.

Written by Anab Jain, in collaboration with Julia Merican.

As a season, autumn tends to feel ripe for planting and nurturing ideas, and so, with an eye on the new year, we’re looking forward to seeding conversations that might sprout into new opportunities. Superflux only takes on a limited number of projects each year, and we are currently open to discussing potential collaborations and partnerships for 2025. If you’re interested in working with us on a project or collaboration, feel free to get in touch!

Summer is always a busy time at Superflux, and this year has been no exception. Here’s what we’ve been working on recently. 

New Work

Action Speaks 2024
For Ingka Group

The theme for this year’s New York Climate Week, “It’s Time”, was a rallying call to propel the energy transition into the mainstream. We were happy to launch our latest work at this important gathering with our longtime partner Ingka Group and their many partners, including the World Economic Forum, Project Drawdown, Kelp Blue, Home Planet Fund, the Masungi Georeserve Foundation, WASTE, and Houdini Sportswear.

Building on the work we did for New York Climate Week 2023, where we developed the Action Speaks initiative in collaboration with Ingka and kicked off its first year with an immersive installation, we designed an exhibition showcasing a selection of pioneering climate action projects from businesses, organisations, and communities around the world. Built as a fully circular, modular and adaptive framework, our design reflected the platform’s goals to catalyse real change through collective climate action. It offered multiple points of entry, inviting business leaders, NGOs, and the public to weave their own route around the Action Speaks showcase—a spatial reminder that there is no single way to begin navigating the climate crisis. By stepping through this threshold, our exhibition considered how we might embark upon collaborative wayfinding in uncertain times.

Once Upon A Future
For Earth4All, the United Nations Foundation and See Through Stories

The United Nations’ Summit of the Future in New York brought world leaders together in September to pledge their political will and commitment to creating a better future for both people and the planet. It was a pleasure to contribute to this pivotal moment at Gantry State Park with our new, public virtual reality experience “Once Upon A Future”, a partnership with the United Nations Foundation, See Through Stories and Earth4All.

Presented through the lens of a traditional, public tower viewer overlooking the Manhattan skyline, two possible futures for the city of New York serve as imagination prompts. Leaders and members of the public were invited to experience what the city might look and feel like if we dramatically reconfigured our economies, energy, and food systems. Extrapolated from evidenced scenarios by Earth4All and their scientific teams, these futures are not predictions, but instead act as containers for possibilities, hopes, and dreams.

A Just World on a Safe Planet
For the Earth Commission and the Global Commons Alliance

Climate justice is climate action. The Earth Commission and Global Commons Alliance’s report, ‘A Just World on a Safe Planet’, recently published in the Lancet Planetary Health Journal, underscores how justice must be central to every decision we make toward the planet’s future.

While science helps us understand our climate problems, stories are what move us into collective action. We were honoured to contribute to this groundbreaking work by telling the story of planetary justice through a tripartite digital artwork. The paper’s key ideas are brought to life in our visual narrative, through the Earth Commission’s “three I’s” framework: interspecies justice (acknowledging the needs of both humans and other species), intergenerational justice (safeguarding the rights of future generations), and intragenerational justice (addressing inequalities between individuals, communities, and nations).

As Joyeeta Gupta and Johan Rockström explain in the World Economic Forum, the paper’s “safe and just boundaries” act as a ceiling for resource extraction and pollution, while new research adds a foundation for ensuring a life free from poverty. The report highlights critical thresholds for climate, biodiversity, and freshwater, and provides a crucial roadmap for a future where both people and the planet can thrive.

Other Projects

We have also been working on a number of confidential projects investigating the futures of Artificial Intelligence. Emerging technologies have always been a key focus of the studio, and we are exploring AI’s potential as well as its unintended consequences across human, infrastructural and ecological scales. Our work’s form, as always, is tangible and material, but also speculative and imagination-led.

Travelling Works 

The Ecological Intelligence Agency
Tools for Change, The HEK, Basel (31.08 - 17.11.2024)

Our installation, the Ecological Intelligence Agency, first created for Policy Lab, Gov. of UK and Defra Futures, is currently being featured in the HEK’s exhibition ‘Tools for Change’ in Basel, Switzerland. This international group exhibition is conceptually inspired by the social philosopher Ivan Illich’s ideas in Tools for Conviviality, and showcases how technology and society might be reimagined through the many “tools” that artists wield.

the Intersection
What Things Dream About, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (14.05 - 18.09, 2024)
For All! Reshaping Democracy, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (30.05 – 13.10, 2024)
Re-Articulating Landscape, Museum of Modern Art Klagenfurt, Carinthia (12.06 - 01.09, 2024)
Art + Science Festival, Belgrade (25.09 - 31.10.2024)
Beta Festival, Dublin (01.11 - 17.11.2024)
Futures: Material and Design of Tomorrow, Grassimuseum, Leipzig (21.11.2024 – 04.08.2025)

Our speculative futures film, the Intersection, is enjoying a popular resurgence since it was first commissioned by Omidyar Network in 2020. The film has been showing at festivals in Serbia and Ireland and exhibitions in South Korea, Germany, and Austria. Soon, it will be showcased at a new exhibition in Leipzig, along with two brand new artefacts we built in the studio. 

Talks and Presentations

Malmö Conference

In August, our co-founder Anab Jain delivered a keynote presentation on rewilding our imaginations at The Conference in Malmö, Sweden—an annual gathering for thought-provoking discussions on futures and foresight. Taking listeners on an odyssey through Bhutan, England, and India, she spoke about weaving a spiritual infrastructure for our planetary future that can serve as a foundational catalyst, one that nourishes, nurtures and stewards deeper connections with our planetary ecology.

Sci Foo

This summer, Anab was also invited to attend Sci Foo in Cambridge, a yearly interdisciplinary “unconference” centred around new inventions in technology and scientific research, led by a range of invited scientists, technologists and policymakers from different pockets of the globe. Using recent Superflux projects as a touchstone, she facilitated a discussion on ecological imagination and delivered a short talk on how imagining different futures—from resurgent forests born of climate catastrophe to AI that speaks for rivers—can impact the decisions we make today. 

Welcoming our newest team members!

Mon Cano, Architectural Designer & Researcher 

A designer and researcher who navigates the intersection of design and ideology, investigating the cultural significance of technologies in relation to the ecologies and geopolitics that shape them, Mon supports and leads the studio’s spatial designs, with a passion for crafting DIY technologies and experimenting with raw materials. Say hello at mon@superflux.in.

Julia Merican, Writer & Researcher

A writer with an array of editorial and creative experience, Julia supports and leads the studio’s written communications and high-level research across projects spanning speculative design, technology, art, and ecology. Say hello at julia@superflux.in.

Stefan Schönauer, Design and Research Intern 

With expertise in speculative design, design research and a strong focus on storytelling, Stefan is assisting on creative projects across the board during his internship with us. Say hello at apprentice@superflux.in.

Closing Thoughts

We’ll leave you with one last kernel from the Earth Commission’s seminal new paper that’s been turning over our minds: ‘Past and present actions commit humanity to future outcomes.’ It feels like an invitation to consider how we want to orient ourselves to the world.

In the reverberations of these words, some questions we’ve been asking ourselves are: how do we contend with inherited systems of injustice? In what ways can we start spinning new narratives in the present to constructively transform our collective futures? And what might the world have the potential to be like if we did? 

These are expansive provocations with no straightforward answers, but by casting them into the world—or, more aptly, onto your screens—we hope they can serve as spores from which more complex thoughts might sprout, and burgeon into action. Till next time. 

New Work*

(*or Newly published online)

The Quiet Enchanting
Commissioned by King’s Culture

Ok, we know it’s not ‘new’, The Quiet Enchanting was installed in October of last year… But whilst our mythical frieze along the Strand was originally only on view until Spring 2024, it has now been extended well into the autumn—And so, with the summer sun well and truly out, we can’t think of a better time to get down to Westminster and re-encounter this work with fresh eyes. 

For those who live outside of London don’t worry: we’ve just published a film edit of the work and story with a new sound score by our long time collaborator David Vélez. There on our website you can read all about the research underpinning The Quiet Enchanting, as well as a glimpse of the worldbuilding process that led to this speculative narrative of collective re-enchantment.

Head over to our website to read, and watch, more!

Travelling Works

The Intersection

What Things Dream About @ National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (14.05 – 18.09, 2024).
For All! Reshaping Democracy @ Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (30.05 – 13.10, 2024)
Re-Articulating Landscape @ Museum of Modern Art Klagenfurt, Austria (12.06 – 01.09, 2024)

It is a busy summer for our speculative futures film The Intersection, with a selection of artefacts from the film currently on view at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, and Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, AND Museum of Modern Art Klagenfurt, Austria.

Set in the near future, The Intersection journeys from a violent present to a cooperative future. Exploring the interconnectedness of rapidly advancing AI, social unrest, political upheaval and climate crisis, the film follows four protagonists who embody active hope. With the gumption to imagine alternatives, they protagonists fight to democratise technology to serve community, support nature, and advance planetary justice. 

We made the film back in 2020, during the eruption of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter and just before the ‘AI-boom’. Now, four years later, we’ve found many people are revisiting that film, viewing it in the context of our present-day grapples with large language models and the near-future prospect of artificial general intelligence.

On view in Seoul, Bonn and Austria are the sensor artefacts that the Intersection protagonists craft from the detritus of the Anthropocene (from re-appropriated consumer electronics to foraged wood). Each device has a specific purpose: some constitute monitoring devices acting as an entry point into a mesh network, communicating with thousands of local sensors surveying the landscape; others  monitor airborne pollution or help communities to build an understanding of ecosystem recovery.  

If you can’t travel to one of the exhibitions this summer, you can catch a glimpse of the artefacts in the film itself which can be viewed here. Oh and come November, the artefacts will have moved onto GRASSI, Leipzig!

Recently Published

Towards Another Architecture: New Visions for the 21st Century, ed. Owen Hopkins(London: Lund Humphries, 2024) 

The climate emergency alone requires us to rethink everything we have previously taken for granted about how we conceive and construct buildings. What we need is not a new architecture: an architecture that is not bound to a single vision or future, but is diverse, pluralist and sustains multiple conversations about the active role that architects might play in the world. Towards Another Architecture brings together contributions from practitioners and thinkers working in a range of fields and geographies to advocate their vision(s) for another architecture.” 

It was a pleasure to be asked to contribute to the book alongside such a wonderful cohort of practitioners including Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, Dávid Smiló, Xu Tiantian, Gonzalo Herrero Delicado Marianela D’Aprile, Ruth Morrow, Alice Brownfield, Xenia Adjoubei, V. Mitch McEwen, Marianna Janowicz and Joshua Mardell.

We penned an essay advocating for the move ‘FROM CAUTIONARY TALES TO STORIES OF ACTIVE HOPE’ in which we elucidated on the thinking behind our ‘more-than-human manifesto’:

Our earlier ‘cautionary tales’ tackling technology and social unrest gave us the tools to address lived experience from a place of criticality and compassion. While the past few years have felt like living inside a big cautionary tale, we feel the urgency to give voice and form to imagined futures that generate active hope.[…] A More Than Human Manifesto, a challenge to long-standing histories of human exploitation and extraction, this manifesto of intent is, quite simply, our reworking the order of things.

So, we may be biased, but we think any and all architecture students, studios, aficionados or enthusiasts should have this book on their shelves.

Studio Opportunities

(Yes, we are hiring!)

Writer and Researcher

Do you love questioning and interrogating complex ideas from all angles? Do you thrive in busy and dynamic creative environments?  Are you passionate about ecology, technology, speculative futures, interdisciplinary design and art? Do you enjoy writing substack posts? ;-) 

This is an integral role in our studio, working closely with co-founders and directors Anab Jain and Jon Ardern. In this role you’ll support and lead the studio communications and high-level research across all internal and external projects spanning speculative design, technology, ecology and arts. This role involves translating knotty ideas, possible futures, and working experiments into accessible written form for a variety of audiences: from clients, press and the general public. With persuasion, flair and integrity you will articulate our cultural and ecological mission, championing the value of design-led research via a range of written outputs. 

Head over to our website to view the full job description. 

Seeking expressions of interest for Producer / Project Manager 

In anticipation of new projects, we're updating our directory of collaborators. And to do this, we’re inviting expressions of interest from experienced freelance Producers and Project Managers with a proven track record of delivering exceptional creative projects and immersive experiences for business, culture, government and non-profit organisations within various sized budgets.

This is a fixed contract / freelance position – while we are flexible with hybrid work patterns, due to the nature of the role, some weekly presence in our London-based studio is essential. We are interested in hearing from anyone with 3 to 5 years experience in project managing and producing  creative, immersive exhibitions, events and experiences, across multiple geographies, working with multiple stakeholders and institutional partners.

We are particularly interested in meeting collaborators with full or part time availability between July and October, with the possibility of extending the collaboration past October. 

Please fill out this form and email us at hello@superflux.in with your CV, cover letter and portfolio where applicable, and a confirmation that you have submitted the form. In the subject please state [Your name] - Freelance Producer/Project Manager.

…And welcoming new team members!

Carmen Pop-Tiron, Studio & Operations Manager

With experience in change management, operational strategy, business management and scalability, Carmen is leading our Studio’s operations and broader creative practice into the next phase of growth. Read more about Carmen’s interests and professional expertise here, and say hello at carmen@superflux.in

Andy Thornton, Strategy & Partnerships Lead 

Advocating for a more strategic and thoughtful use of design, creativity, culture and systems thinking in business, Andy is helping shape Superflux’s mission-led services while stewarding our long-term relationships with partners, networks and communities. Read more about Andy’s interests and professional expertise here, and say hello at andy@superflux.in

You’ll often hear – from climate scientists, policy makers and the academic community – that when it comes to the climate crisis we have the facts we just need to communicate them better, break out of the bubble, and into the world. When we communicate better then action, surely, will follow. Our work at Superflux often intersects with science, industry and policy, but it’s also often something that comes after, when quote-unquote ‘science’ passes the baton onto quote-unquote ‘art’. We query this separation, this hierarchy. 

Last month we were invited by AIMES, Future Earth, the Earth Commission, and the WCRP Safe Landing Climates Lighthouse Activity to be part of a roundtable discussion on the complexities and opportunities for Communicating Tipping Points. In a short presentation [available to view online] Anab shared how Superflux’s practice of non-verbal communication and immersive experience can help us literally touch and feel potential futures: when you’ve felt what might be possible, enacting it is only natural, it’s in your muscle memory. Guided by moderator Maya Rebermark, Anab and the panel – Colin Butfield (Studio Silverback), Tim Kelly (EarthHQ), Johanna Hoffman (Harvard), David Mckay and Félix Pharand-Deschênes (Globaia) – discussed the importance of creatives working alongside scientists, the challenges of communicating technical and abstract data, and what can be done to help us think long-term.  

It was an incredibly stimulating and rich conversation. We’ve since been reflecting on the questions and propositions that emerged, and we thought we’d share some further thoughts – as and how they relate to the work we are doing at Superflux – below. 

It is our hope that these thoughts will be helpful to both creative practioners and scientists and all those who are grappling with how to communicate cutting-edge climate research so as to inspire collective action.

How do we balance trade offs when communicating science, and particularly in relationship to tipping points?

(Thoughts on accessibility and feeling)

First, what is a tipping point, what is a tipping element, how many are there 8, 12, 28? Are the same ones being counted? How do we share the depth of detail for impactful storytelling?

Often the intention of our work is to get as far out into the world and speak to wider audiences with different ways of seeing and thinking about their environment. Because of that we might not ever again mention ‘tipping points’ and ‘earth systems’, instead working with the science we explore spaces where imaginative leaps might help different communities access and experience future possibilities. Dense scientific thinking would instead be communicated through the lens of lived experience, perhaps it's viewed through the lens of food insecurity or increased migration – experiences that touch people directly, that affect them. Some could say that our work is making subjective the objective, drawing feeling (both physical and emotional) from the abstract and analytic. 

How can scientists and creatives effectively inform audiences about the existential threat of climate crisis?

(Thoughts on action and agency)

If you draw a line in the sand at 1.5C or 2C, some people will see it as a line of existential threat and if we go over that, we are in the land of the dragons. In others, it creates a sense that, the closer we get to the boundary, it’s too late and we are doomed. Existential threat is steeped in fear, people hear it and then immediately think we might as well give up. In conversation with Neuroscientist Kris De Meyer, he explained of this situation:

“if you instil an emotion you have no way of controlling the action. Fear might paralyse action or spur extremist action, often has a counter-effect to what you want to achieve”

Kris then followed with an example:

“If I want to help you to cook a nice meal. I'm not going to show you a dish and say ‘doesn't this dish look wonderful’ now go and make it, I’m going to give you a recipe that allows you to make that dish as well as show you the beautiful dish. And so it's these things together; the recipe for how you get somewhere and the positive outcome that you can get to…”

That conversation with Kris really helped cement that the way we go about communicating existential threat must focus on building agency, recognising how the environment elicits certain behaviours, and tap into the psychology of values that motivate us. 

What makes for meaningful art-science collaboration when it comes to communicating something as vast, abstract and multiple as our climate-altered futures?

(Thoughts on future memories and art/science collaboration)

A poll in nature a couple of years ago found scientists and artists are working together as never before however hierarchies remained, with artistic work deemed merely illustrative, or as an object of study. Art/Science alliances are most valuable when there is a shared stake in a project, where we are able to jointly design it and can critique each other’s work. Such an approach can both prompt new scientific research as well as result in affecting art. 

When people literally touch and feel a possible future we stir emotions and prompt memories that can reduce temporal discounting, enabling us to prime and rehearse future action. These futures are by no means didactic or as absolute – for how can we instil the agency for change from a position of fixity? Rather, the work we do, and strive to do, at Superflux is to help people feel that another future is possible, and give them the tools to enact it. 

And so here lies a crucial question: can science incorporate these elements? Should we not view science and culture as interdependent, rather than separate domains? Rather than science passing the baton to art, art passing the baton to daily life, is there the capacity for these domains to coalesce seamlessly?

How we live together, how we farm, how we design our cities and harness energy, all this is art and it is science too. This is not a radical thought, it’s how indigenous cultures continue to engage with the world. Ultimately, it is by embedding this philosophy into tangible, lived realities that we will inspire action. It is in this symbiosis of science, art, and culture that we will find the power to transformatively adapt with the climate crisis and forge a sustainable future for generations to come.

Studio Updates

• Head over to our website to read a full deep-dive into Action Speaks Summit presented at New York Climate Week 2023: an immersive installation and exhibition conceived, research designed and produced by Superflux in collaboration with INGKA Group (IKEA) and partners.  

• Our speculative video work ‘The Seas are No Longer Dying’ is on view at Water Pressure: Designing for the Future at MKG Hamburg. The show runs from 15.3.24 – 13.10.24.

• A paper on The CreaTures project ‘9 Dimensions’ – a tool for evaluating creative practices, and how they connect to transformative change – has been published in Ecology and Society journal as part of a special feature on Meaningful Transdisciplinary Collaborations for Sustainability: Local, Artistic, and Scientific Knowledge. We are proud to have been involved in the project and in co-authoring the paper. 

Studio Experiments 

• And of course we are never not experimenting. We end this newsletter with a behind-the-scenes shot of Jon and Ed who have been prototyping handcrafted helical antennas, fiddling with ghost satellite chasing, environmental sensors, meshtastics and whatnot (we’ll explain more later)!

We are respectful of inboxes and endeavour to share monthly updates from our studio. For more follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn.

In these monthly updates we’ll be sharing recent developments and happenings from our studio – expect to be the first privy to new openings, traveling exhibitions, forthcoming talks, projects-in-progress, and our behind-the-scenes research.

New Work

Safe and Just Futures
For Earth Commission and World Economic Forum

One of the most important pieces of recent climate research surfaced what had long been under-recognised in the science community: If our future is to be liveable we need targets beyond climate; a liveable future depends on the interdependence of human and more-than-human wellbeing AND the resilience of the earth system. Safety and justice must be accounted for.

In the paper (published in nature and available to read online for free), the scientists focus on how we can stay within five of the nine planetary boundaries that are critical to stabilising the Earth system: Climate, Biosphere, Freshwater, Nutrients and Aerosols. These boundaries are informing a new generation of interconnected science-based targets to help avoid dangerous tipping points in the Earth system.

“For the first time, safety and justice for humanity on Earth is assessed and quantified for the same control variables regulating life support and Earth stability.”

Earth Commission, Global Commons Alliance. Published 31 May 2023

We were thrilled to partner with Earth Commission and leading scientists to begin to explore what these ‘safe and just earth system boundaries’ might look and feel like. Our interpretations of the research were recently presented at World Economic Forum, Davos and the work is now available to view online where you can read more about how safety and justice (that is distributed inter-species, inter-generationally and intra-generationally) is imperative for a liveable future. 

Our Travels

(New York City; Salem, Massachusetts; Sapporo, Hokkaido)

COAL + ICE
Asia Society, New York (13.02– 11.08, 2024)

Our immersive installation ‘New York, 2050: A Possible Future’, first created for IKEA/Ingka Group’s Action Speaks summit in New York, now features in ‘COAL + ICE’ at Asia Society, an immersive photography and video exhibition accompanied by a series of related programs. COAL + ICE brings together over 50 artists to visualize the causes and consequences of the climate crisis as well as foreground positive innovation and adaptation.
Above you can see some install shots of the New York skyline doused in a toxic orange light, taken on-site last week.

Our Time on Earth
Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts (17.02–09.06 2024)

‘Refuge for Resurgence’ has travelled to Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts, the host of ‘Our Time on Earth’. First shown at Barbican Centre, London, the exhibition celebrates the power of global creativity to transform the conversation around the climate emergency. Inviting audiences to imagine their ideal future world, the show asks How will we use the precious time we have here? What will it take to live together in harmony?

For those already familiar with Refuge you’ll know that the multispecies banquet has a seat at the table allocated for a fox, rat, wasp, pigeon, cow, human adults and child, wild boar, snake, beaver, raven, mushroom and wolf. Each place setting features a different food offering and bespoke cutlery specific to the guest. When Refuge arrived at Peabody some of the wolf fur was in need of replacement, the brilliant curators found a wolf sanctuary in Massachusetts who donated some fur from a beautiful local wolf named Linnea!

2124–Where the Future Begins
Future Theatre, Sapporo International Art Festival 2024 (20.01–25.02, 2024)

Closing soon! Gathering future mythologies that tell of deep transformative change over the course of 100+ years, in this show you’ll find an adapted version of our speculative myth ‘Refuge for Resurgence’.

5 things that have caught our attention…

(organs played slowly, trees vs roads, toxic air, banquets of extinct food and AI of course)

1. Thinking, listening and playing As Slow As Possible 

   
   On Monday 5th February, Organ² / ASLSP – a 639-year-long John Cage organ piece – changed chord for the first time in two years. The work, whose acronym ASLSP stands for ‘As Slow as Possible’ was scored by Cage in 1987, and in 2001 The organ of the Burchardi Church, Halberstadt, began to play the piece. With a scheduled duration of 639 years, the Halberstadt organ will play its final chord in the year 2640. This makes it the longest running non-computerized piece currently being performed. Cage’s piece and the Halberstadt performance really resonates with our focus on long-term thinking, how it can be measured, sustained and encouraged. This embodiment of patience and commitment gives us hope. 
   

2. What we care for, and how
   
   This two-year old video of a tree in Japan being relocated to make way for a road resurfaced on our instagram feed and got us thinking about hierarchies of care. Often when it comes to choosing between new roads or nature conservation, transport routes trump all, anything in the way gets felled, flattened, paved over, draining biodiversity, memory and meaning from the landscape. Last November Shropshire county council approved a new road scheme known as the North West Relief Road at Shrewsbury, the construction of which would entail felling Darwin Oak, a 550-year-old, open-grown, ancient oak tree. These extremes of either-or, and the refusal of coexistence and compromise, returned us to thinking about what we care for/about and how we demonstrate care. The Japanese relocation of a tree is acknowledgement of it as a living being. We encourage readers to revisit this article on the Japanese veneration of trees in Harvard’s Arnoldia (Volume 77, Issue 4), a quarterly magazine exploring knowledge, experience, and imagination wherever they entangle with the nature of trees.

   

3. AI and the Global South

   
   We are watching Studio B: Unscripted’s new series: AI and Global South. In the first dialogue, Nobel peace prize laureate Maria Ressa and Urvashi Aneja explore the impact AI is already having on communities in the Global South – from labour conditions to democracy and the environment – raising questions over who stands to gain from the technology and at what cost. We love the conversations facilitated by Studio B and this series looks to be a cutting and critical look beyond the current AI hype. 

4. Queering Air in Toxic Polluted Worlds
   
   We attended the launch of Nerea Calvillo's new book Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds (2023) published by Columbia University press. The event, held at Goldsmiths, invited scholars and artists (including Cooking Sections and Dancing New Ecologies) to engage with the book's themes. 

   Contesting solution oriented bureaucratic regimes that seek to ‘manage’ air, Aeropolis instead thinks of air itself as city-like in its myriad social, cultural, political, ecological entanglements. A fascinating fusion of feminist technoscience and queer ecological frameworks, we loved Calvillo’s uplifting of “designing-thinking-making” as a methodology for both designers and citizens to move toward more just and equitable futures. We really recommend you grab a copy of the book!

5. A Banquet of Near-Extinct Ingredients 
   
   At the end of January, former white house chef Sam Kass partnered with Andrew Zimmern to host his ‘Last Supper’ as part of the Great Northern festival in Minneapolis. Kass ‘Last Supper’ was first hosted in 2015 as part of COP21 and has since been to Davos and all over the US. The premise of the meal is simple: Kass crafts a menu wherein all the foods are legitimately affected by the climate crisis. Coffee, wine and chocolate feature prominently, emblematic of food and drink that gives us the most pleasure and yet could suffer from major crop loss with only the slightest warming. The menu also reminded us of the work of Cooking Sections (mentioned above) and their performative installation exploring how farmed salmon have turned grey and how the changing colours of species around the planet are warning signs of an environmental crisis. 
   Kass’ dinners are an impactful total-work-of-art that reveals just how intertwined and interdependent agriculture, climate, culture and sociality are. And we aren’t at all biased in our love of a banquet-cum-artwork. 

   

On Resolutions…

For many of us the start of a new year entails resolution setting; time to drop those bad habits from the previous year and commit to cultivating some good ones. For those of us involved in foresight and futures work, January also asks us to make predictions and map out coming trends on the horizon. When it comes to new year’s resolutions or predictions both tend to think only of the 12 months ahead and come December are likely redundant, ticked off and considered done, or simply passé, a tired ‘out’ to be replaced by a more tantalising ‘in’. 

Now 12 months does feel like a measly length of time when it comes to shaking habits reinforced over a lifetime, and vertiginous when it comes to cultivating new ones. Either way, 12 months is a helpful portion of time that most of us know how to accurately measure. It’s a timeframe that follows a classic narrative structure, we have a new beginning where potential is ripe, we have a period of seeding and gestation, then blooming and action, then rest and review (all helpfully guided by the temperaments of the seasons). In those 12 months I’m more likely to set a resolution to [start going to the gym] than to [become an athlete], as we know what is reasonably achievable within that space-time. Yet what about those necessary changes whose impact is not immediately measurable, that might not be ticked off by December, but need to be seeded now only to bear fruit in the far off future?

Of course, the change we are thinking about is the action needed to respond adequately to climate change (itself a ‘change’ that has been increasingly making itself felt in catastrophic ways across the world). We know that what we have done has got us to where we are now, however with changes that occur over an extended period of time there is rarely a clear causal chain to trace back, a definitive moment that set it all in action or solved it. Anab comes from India, where the revolt against British colonial rule started in 1857, and it was not until 90 years later, in 1947, that India became independent. Revolutions may be slow, dark and murky, often progress isn’t palpable until you are out the other side, but in the darkness and chaos there is always hope. As Researcher and founder of Warm Data Labs Nora Bateson has observed:

“Change is unpredictable in direction and often occurs at second and nth orders of systemic relationality”. 1

It then follows that the practice of resolution setting – with its focus on a defined goal and specified set of actions that lead to an assumed outcome – is an unhelpful means of cultivating gestures that attend to complex systemic change over the next thousand years. Resolutions do little to help nurture the short-term adaptation that prepares us for long-term adaptation. 

And so instead of new year's resolutions we’d like to dedicate this year ahead to ready-ing (not to be misinterpreted as prepping for an inevitable apocalypse). Rather, the hopeful notion of ready-ing is evocatively described by Bateson as “tending to the prelude to change.”2 It involves an acceptance of, and remaining flexible to, the unseen and innate complexity of all living systems. To tend to the prelude to change is to commit to relinquishing our hold on predefined ambitions and give ourselves over to emergent insights, it “is a shift of attention from what can be done to achieve an outcome, to how to nourish the conditions into which the organism(s) learns to be in its world.”3 More than anything there is patience and trust in process, allowing for the previously unimaginable to be realised.

…And Revolutions

We can’t think of a better guide on this journey than Masanobu Fukuoka, the man behind the book The One Straw Revolution (first published in 1975). An inspiring story of social impact, The One Straw Revolution is a quiet refusal of the status quo that reimagined our relationship to food, to ourselves, and to time. Masanobu Fukuoka trained as a scientist, but disillusioned by modern agribusiness he left his well paid job in the city and returned to his family farm where over the next three decades he perfected his “do-nothing” farming. A method of farming free of pesticides, fertiliser, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort. Fukuoka’s visionary thinking and efforts – such as regenerative agriculture, permaculture, the connections between soil and food – however are not just set on transforming agricultural practice. He would say:

“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” 4

This radical approach has had a wide reaching (and ranging) influence. In the 1980’s Dr Partap C. Aggarwhal worked to bring Fukuoka’s method to the Friends Rural Centre in Rasulia, India. He writes “We too saw revolution in a straw. We did believe that if only a fraction of ordinary Indian farmers could adopt rishi kheti [agriculture of the sages] they could bring down the agro-business establishment, the government, and with it the entire urban-industrial structures of the country. Perhaps the straw had the same kind of power as Gandhi’s charkha.”5 Responding to and adapting this practice, Raju Titus – a farmer from Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh, whose land had incurred much loss and was on the brink of abandonment – followed Fukuoka’s lead and ceased to use pesticides, tillage and halved his farm’s irrigation capacities:

“Now the soil is healthier, we don't worry about the future. We have less work, more time for recreation and economically we are better off. When I was using modern farming methods, I was always worried about my crops. I was literally at war with nature.”6

When following modern agro-business Raju Titus was like a swimmer trying to move upstream against a strong current, his dependents (those who bought his crops and demanded higher yields) shouted ‘swim harder!’, but really the interventions needed were not downstream but mid and upstream. It is only there you can change the direction the current flows, facilitating the subsequent ease that comes from swimming with the current. Rather than be at war with nature, Raju Titus could work with nature. This attentiveness to the interconnectedness of systems, the co-dependency between human and nature, and a trust in the nth orders of change is something that can only be achieved when practising a long-term outlook. We got in touch with Fukuoka’s estate for a recent project, and all this was affirmed: Masanobu Fukuoka Natural Farm’s guiding philosophy continues “to think about things on the long-term time axis of 1000-2000 years, rather than mirage-like desires for the immediate future.”

Indebted to Nora Bateson and Masanobu Fukuoka we here at Superflux are committed to moving beyond resolutions that centre personal gain or organisational growth, to immerse ourselves in the prelude, a space in which we can re-sensitise ourselves to the glimmering activity of the world in its worlding, of forests in their foresting and meadows in their meadowing. We hope you’ll join us in practicing that commitment!

Studio Updates

• We are excited to announce our participation in ‘2124 –Where the Future Begins’ at Future Theatre, Sapporo’s International Art Fair 2024. This show gathers future mythologies that tell of deep transformative change over the course of 100+ years. In the show you’ll find our speculative myth ‘Refuge for Resurgence’ and we'll be sharing more about that work in future posts.

• Our immersive installation ‘New York, 2050: A Possible Future’, first created for IKEA (Ingka Group) for their Action Speaks summit in NY, will be shown at ‘COAL + ICE’ at Asia Society, New York from February 13 through August 11, 2024.

Closing thoughts

We hope these meandering thoughts prompt some wondering and wandering from you too. Over time we’ll start to find the shape and rhythm that works best for this space, we are experimenting with form as well as our subscription model but for now we are excited to give glimpses into our thinking, and occasionally share some of our experiments and prototypes, stories and archaeologies, cautionary tales and hopeful visions.

We’ll see you next month!

We are respectful of inboxes and endeavour to share monthly updates from our studio. For more follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Our work is an ongoing project of profound hope, committed to helping shape an active movement of systemic, multiple, entangled, collective, and alternate futures through radical imagination. This substack will – occasionally – give glimpses of our thinking, but also, share some of our experiments and prototypes, stories and archaeologies, cautionary tales and hopeful visions. 

You can expect:

🗓️ Quarterly updates on our projects, exhibitions and thought leadership

📚 Studio updates detailing what we’ve been listening to, reading and thinking about

🪄A sprinkling of long-form texts that work through knotty ideas around climate futures, artificial intelligence, imagination practice, embodied experience and more! 

Think of it as our studio research diary. Subscribe and enjoy!.

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