
The Visual Methodologies Collective will lead a workshop on speculative landscaping with archival materials at the Society 5.0 Festival on October 12 and 13. The festival, which will be hosted at the Student Hotel in Amsterdam, will feature a lineup of international speakers as well as a range of master classes and workshops.
Attendees of Visual Methodologies workshop will be invited to take part in speculative landscaping exercises to create possible vistas of the Netherlands in the year 2070. Participants will be asked to complete the environment by imagining what may happen in future scenarios, starting with still images collected from videos from the Sound and Vision video archive.
Short films, documentaries, and news broadcasts reveal how water has taken form in the collective memory of the Netherlands, and with which other concepts and values it has been connected. Looking back at how the environment, water, and climate were documented throughout history might help us identify common trends and rework them into new, more personal stories. What effect does recontextualizing pictures from the past into future possibilities have on our imagination? Can this exercise aid in the much-required quest for new climate imaginaries?
Participants will also have the chance to test their creations on the latest features of DALL-E 2, a text-to-image AI model.Tickets for the event are available at the festival website.