An update on projects and happenings in the studio.

It’s been a while since you last heard from us here, and as a testament to our long silence, we’ve got quite a few exciting updates.

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 Earth Commission and 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.

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 (House of Electronic Arts), 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.