Alicja Rogalska
Article
Future Imaginaries: investigating and intervening in the political imaginary crisis through collaborative speculation
This interdisciplinary, practice-based research project examines how future-oriented socially-engaged art can contribute to our understanding of and intervene in the crisis of political imaginary, expanding on the activist and usefulness modes predominant in socially-engaged art today. Through practice and thesis, I will ask: how can future-oriented collective art-making reconfigure notions of political imaginary and what agency does it exert in narrating desirable futures? I will devise new methodological tools (inventive devices) in collaboration with speculative designers and social scientists. Using these, I will facilitate the development of ideas for elements of a film about future society. The resulting immersive installation of a film set (without making an actual film), will explore how political desires and future visions can be expressed and narrated collectively in a simultaneously discursive, visual and material way. The project will contribute to socially-engaged art methodology, practice and scholarship, following the recent interrogation of radical imagination and futurology in social sciences.
Supervisors
Richard Noble
Susan Kelly
