Creative Futures Consortium X SWISP Lab: Young People in Anthropogenic TimesWatch video with captions on YouTube (recommended) https://youtu.be/OFDjhW6I6vU?si=Jx-x1OTzhnWiG0Fq

Recording of 5 minute live presentation introducing SWISP Lab and its signature project, Hacking the Anthropocene by A/Prof Kathryn Coleman and Dr Sarah Healy. The presentation, titled Young People in Anthropogenic Times was one of a series of 'snapshots' from the new Creative Futures Consortium Partners at the one-day symposium: Creativity, Science of Learning, and Artificial Intelligence: What Would Maxine Do? Co-hosted by the Creative Agency research lab (RMIT University School of Education) and AARE Arts Education Practice Research SIG, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, 234 Queensbury St, Carlton, Level 5, 25 November 2023.

TRANSCRIPT:

• 0:05 OK, hello.
• 0:07 We are SWISP Lab, and our program of research revolves around young people in anthropogenic times
• 0:16 SWISP Lab stands for Speculative Wanderings in Space and Place.
• 0:20 And it's a duet of Kate and Sarah.
• 0:27 To be engaged in the practice of artography means to inquire in the world through both making and writing.
• 0:32 The process of making artifacts and working with words are not illustrative of each other, but are woven through each other to create new knowledges.
• 0:42 SWISP Lab facilitates hackathons which begin with climate stories of young people living in diverse geopolitical locations.
• 0:51 The stories shape our understanding of how we coexist, the technology and the land, and how we might come to coexist differently.
• 1:01 So thinking here with Catherine Youssoff, the Anthropocene renders visible new architectures of time and matter, both sedimenting existing genealogies of global world space and radically reorganizing an imagination of the scope and material duration of what the human is, in, and through time.
• 1:20 So anthropogenic time sit in the Anthropocene, and this anthropogenic time encompasses the idea of climate in every sense of the word, not just the weather, but also the racialized, gendered, settler colonial climate that has led to THIS historic moment.
• 1:39 So the wonderful Maxine Green reminds us that aesthetics is the antidote to an anaesthetic.
• 1:44 By activating creativity, we can wake up to our numbness and imagine different possible presents.
• 1:50 For SWISP Lab, becoming wide awake through deeply situated creativities is at the heart of speculating for anthropogenic types.
• 1:59 Our hackathons activate creativity while engaging computational thinking with inputs including big and little data, art, media, events, and more.
• 2:10 These are hacked to produce outputs that then get added to the inputs of future hacks.
• 2:16 It's very iterative.
• 2:18 We have a game play, and we have designed a Hacking the Anthropocene Kit (HAK.io) that you see here, which features a series of methods cards that are key to the game play.
• 2:32 We've now got 14 running.
• 2:35 There's a really quick glimpse. So SWISP Lab hacks are comprised of collaborative creativities involving both human, technological and other collaborators.
• 2:49 We play with Gen AI all the time, thinking of it as a plaything or playmate, as Miguel Sicart, 2014 would say (https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10042.001.0001)
• 2:57 At a recent Science Gallery Bengaluru Carbon hack, we played the Digital Play card with the Hundreds card inspired by Lauren Berlant (and Kathleen Stewart, 2019, https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-hundreds)
• 3:05 And here's what it led to: Chained. Life's a chain of chaotic moments strung together like little carbon atoms, bonded with no sense of structure or form or no discernment of an end.
• 3:20 With the yearning to connect to those like themselves, they go Is this an end or is this the beginning of something new?
• 3:37 The hundreds Otherwise by SGB Carbon Mediator and the images by Deep Dream Generator.
• 3:49 So this text you see here we're calling "Love in the Anthropocene."
• 3:53 It expresses the intricate and complex relationship between climate, the digital and the realities of having to relocate for education or work opportunities.
• 4:02 The image is generated by us with Deep Dream Generator in response to the text written, again, by another carbon mediator.
• 4:12 My boyfriend lives 350 kilometers away.
• 4:16 He travels to Bangalore once a month.
• 4:19 Well, we mostly text.
• 4:21 We flirt online in solitude.
• 4:23 Our butterflies of love are probably stored somewhere far away from both of us in a data storage facility.
• 4:31 Imagine the carbon footprint of that thing.
• 4:34 Our declarations of love are fluttering, butterflies all digital, all heating up the earth slowly.
• 4:40 Love is a code bottled up, consuming energy.
• 4:43 Love is an exhaust pipe constantly checking out smoke in search of the other.
• 4:50 The butterfly image is generated by Deep Dream in response to the Love in the Anthropocene text.
• 4:55 And we leave you now with Chatty G's response to text and image of whispered stories of Bangalore Nights and digital daydreams where every pixel of passion inadvertently feeds the ever growing energy consumption.
• 5:12 Perfectly timed.
• 5:13 Yeah, if you want a little bit more, head to our blog https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/swisp/
• 5:22 Thanks, Kate (and Sarah)