The ‘Climate Futures’ program by the Visual Methodologies Collective is an experiment in collaborating with AI to shed light on and contribute to climate future imaginaries. In the artistic research project, AI functions as a co-author, who has (machine) learned about climate imaginaries on the basis of training sets of climate fiction literature and climate-themed visual arts, and Hollywood ‘climate disaster’ film trailers.

We design queries to prompt the trained algorithms to create new climate imaginaries, in text and in visual form. Subsequently, we edit these machine-generated cli-fi narratives and translate them into short stories, podcasts, video, and artwork. These cli-fi stories are narrated by a human voice that sends back messages from imagined futures, like postcards from the post-anthropocene.