Envisioning Climate: Afrofuturist Chronicles, a Residency with Vanessa Keith
- Simon Kim, Mark Yim and Camillo Jose Taylor
- Graduate Department of Architecture, Immersive Kinematics, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Penn Engineering), Weitzman School of Design
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Artist Residency Grant
Market, Year 2180 Johannesburg
Immersive Kinematics, a research group at Penn that brings together a humanities-based synthesis of design and technology will host visionary artist and architect Vanessa Keith of Studioteka as an artist in residence. Keith’s work, influenced by Eco-, Afro-, and Indigenous Futurism, addresses climate issues through emerging technologies including Extended Reality (XR) that foster new and more equitable forms of community. She is the author of the book 2100: A Dystopian Utopia / The City After Climate Change, which foregrounds the design issues facing an Anthropocene planet. She won the Sundance Stars Collective Imagination Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival for Year 2180, a virtual reality game based on her book which is currently in development. Keith and the work of Studioteka were also featured in the Netflix documentary series ‘The Future Of’. From 2019 – 2022 Keith was a Lecturer at the Weitzman School of Design and taught a research seminar, Envisioning Climate, which focused on climate fiction and storytelling using emerging technologies and virtual reality. Immersive Kinematics is inviting Keith back to Penn to teach a series of workshops on worldbuilding that centers African-American, Black diaspora and other excluded perspectives in forging sustainable, just and equitable futures for us all.