Future News

Future News is an edition of Generative Web3 Tokens —created in collaboration with the software designer Davide Ciacco— that builds upon Lena Dobrowolska and Teo Ormond-Skeaping's ongoing practice of collaborative scenario-thinking.

Working with collaborative scenarios thinking methodology, Dobrowolska and Ormond-Skeaping have previously created speculative magazine covers, newspaper front pages, and documents that allude to the current affairs of both difficult and improving climate-changed future scenarios. These works were created alone and in collaboration via artist lead speculative climate storytelling workshops run for climate researchers, policymakers, museum and gallery audiences, and students.

By asking “what if” questions such as “What if the geoengineers blocked out the sun?” Dobrowolska and Ormond-Skeaping previously reworked the covers and front pages of iconic magazines, newspapers, and documents, with appropriated imagery to tell speculative future news stories that encourage us to stretch our imagination and consider alternative memories of the future. In doing so, the artists intend to reveal how often simplified media narratives frame our understanding of the world and how these narratives give rise to certain types of future scenarios.

With humanity standing at a fork in the road —one direction leading towards future scenarios full of techno-fixes such as carbon capture storage and geo-engineering and the other direction leading towards justice and equity-based futures that address the root cause of the climate crisis whilst respecting human rights and the rights of nature— it is more important than ever before to become aware of how political, media and scientific narratives shape the way that we perceive the future. In doing so, the artists believe that we will be better positioned to make choices to ensure that techno-deterministic scenario pathways are not used to colonise the future and further suppress the voices of already marginalised indigenous and minority communities by the corporations and institutions most responsible for the climate crisis.

Dobrowolska and Ormond-Skeaping turned to generative art and web3 technology to expand and further facilitate engagement with speculative storytelling as a means to avoid unlivable climate futures. In collaboration with Davide Ciacco, they worked to design a tool to generate future newspaper and magazine covers as a way to allow the public to develop their own future news stories and narratives from an image data set curated by the artists and through a set of manipulation parameters inspired by global climate simulators such as En-ROADS. Dobrowolska and Ormond-Skeaping see the generator as a research tool that can be used during and in parallel to their scenario’s thinking workshops, one that explores the co-creative potential for climate fiction to shape our climatic futures for the better.

Future News utilises images under the creative commons licence from image banks and archives that are currently circulating within the digital image ecosystems. In this way, the artists reveal historic and emerging representations of the unfolding climate crisis within the digital commons while continuing to reflect on the dominant scientific and political lenses that are perpetuated through the visual landscape. In this way, the artists continue their critical dialogue with documentary representation which began in response to critical reflections upon their own documentary image-making practice.