This is a strange time when people are beginning to wonder where, when and who they are. Do we need new (artistic) tools to orient ourselves in this world of ecological transformations?

What is deep time and what can we learn from the history of billions and millions of years of life on this planet?

“No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond and within) our own skin. These earth aliens are our relatives, our ancestors, and part of us. They cycle our matter and bring us water and food. Without “the other” we do not survive.“ (Lynn Margulis)

The epistemic and ethical ambiguity of the Anthropocene lies in the fact that the expansion of human cognitive devices and the technosphere has threatened biodiversity and often forced humans to confront their hybridity, dependence and vulnerability.

How can we invent and imagine new futures of coexistence on this planet? How can we learn from planetary intelligence?

And what do we understand about technological ecology?

Surely „we“ are not entirely human in terms of the boundary-crossing interconnectedness of our extended cognitive practice and the trans-species coevolutionary composition of the planet. There has been a deep shared history of humans, other primates and mammals, embodying the trans-species memory of infection, inheritance and continuous symbiotic evolution since ancient, pre-human times. In a sense, the meaning of assemblage or hybridity transcends the non-linear temporality between the posthuman and the prehuman. We have never been just human; we are no longer just human.

Is it our future destiny to enter the Metaverse? What is the role of art in the digital space?

Being an artist means going on a quest to understand yourself and the world you live in. The digital world is under command, very committed to the principle of order. How can we add a form of disorder or strangeness to this digital universe?

SPATIAL EXPLORATIONS FROM DEEP TIME TO THE METAVERSE brings a relevant ecological perspective to the MA Spatial Strategies. The seminar zooms in on the topic of how we deal artistically and ecologically with changing ecologies. This chapter zooms into the topic of technological ecology. It will address the issue of ecological contemporary artistic praxis, and open the field of vision, towards a more-than-human understanding of our world.

Imagine this seminar as a conceptual reader for unexpected navigations into strange assemblages, learning from planetary intelligence, exploring possibilities of the technosphere, scaling out into the Metaverse.

The winter seminar begins with an in depth reading and drawing sessions about navigation beyond vision with o.a. the book Terra Forma, A Book of Speculative Maps. This book charts the exploration of an unknown world: our own. The mapmakers of Terra Forma have set out to rediscover the world that we think we know with a new kind of cartography that maps living things rather than space emptied of life.

In addition to a theoretical lecture structure, this course will also be supplemented with artistic practice (feedback) sessions where each student individually develops a new work which will be developed over 2 semesters, where the first part is a sketch / prototype and theoretical research part and the final development takes place in the summer semester for the Rundgang.