Call for Submissions: The Terraforming 2022
The Terraforming is a three-year (2020–2022) design-research initiative of the Strelka Institute, directed by Benjamin H. Bratton and Nicolay Boyadjiev. The program runs as an interdisciplinary design think-tank and will host contributions from multiple faculty and experts including Lydia Kallipoliti, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Tobias Rees, Valerie Olson, Christina Agapakis, Ken Goldberg, Venkatesh Rao, Fred Scharmen, David Delgado and many others.
The third and final cycle of The Terraforming program invites a group of 30 interdisciplinary researchers to join the initiative for 5 months from February – June 2022.*
The premise of the design research program is that a viable future depends on comprehensive terraforming, not of Mars to make it suitable for Earth-like life, but of Earth itself — ecologically, geopolitically, geotechnologically.
The research of the first two years has reoriented foundational debates on how to conceive and model that viability, based on speculative analyses of synthetic intelligence, automation and ecology, food systems, space law, new modes of governance, the evolution of cities and much more.
The final year returns to the question of the built environment at multiple scales, from the epidermal to the continental. Artificial environments are designed spaces for diverse functions and ways of being and knowing: the city, the laboratory, the factory, the home, the space station, virtual and mixed reality, the body itself, etc. All speak to the planetary as both the condition that makes specific enclosed worlds possible and also as a collective compositional project. In 2022 The Terraforming is adding a new chapter of motivating research themes – Artificial Environments, Astropolitics, Synthetic/Spatial Materialism, Planetary Sapience.
The program is tuition-free (researchers receive a monthly stipend) and invites architects, urbanists, filmmakers, media theorists, historians, philosophers, science-fiction writers, artists, engineers, economists, political scientists, ecologists, anthropologists and graphic designers to apply and work collaboratively on interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of cinema, text and speculative design-research.
Applications will be accepted till November 7, 2021.
For more information visit theterraforming.strelka.com or contact us at [email protected]