OPEN CALL: Applications for the Strelka Institute’s Terraforming 2022

The Terraforming is a three-year (2020–2022) design-research initiative of the Strelka Institute, directed by Benjamin H. Bratton and Nicolay Boyadjiev. The program runs as an interdisciplinary design think-tank and will host contributions from multiple faculty and experts including Lydia Kallipoliti, Nicholas DeMonchaux, Helen Hester, Holly Jean Buck, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Tobias Rees, Thomas Moynihan, Nandita Sharma, Valerie Olson, Jussi Parikka, Xin Liu, Christina Agapakis, Ken Goldberg, Denis Leontiev, Venkatesh Rao, Fred Scharmen, Angelina Davydova, David Delgado and many others.

The third and final cycle of The Terraforming program invites a group of 30 interdisciplinary researchers to join the initiative for five months from February–June 2022. The 2022 program will have a hybrid format. It will begin on February 1, 2022 with an offline field-trip, followed by two months of online seminars, and ending with an extensive design-push phase over the period of 3 months which will take place offline in one location.

The premise of the design research program is that a viable future depends on comprehensive terraforming: In the decades to come, we will need to terraform Earth if it is to remain a viable host for Earth-like life.

The research of the first two years has reoriented foundational debates on how to conceive and model that viability, based on speculative analyses of synthetic intelligence, automation and ecology, food systems, space law, new modes of governance, the evolution of cities and much more.

The final year returns to the question of the built environment at multiple scales, from the epidermal to the continental, from the atomic to the atmospheric. Artificial environments are designed spaces for diverse functions and ways of being and knowing: the city, the laboratory, the factory, the home, the space station, virtual and mixed reality, the body itself, etc. All speak to the planetary as both the condition that makes specific enclosed worlds possible and also as a collective compositional project. In 2022 The Terraforming is adding a new chapter of motivating research themes—Artificial Environments, Astropolitics, Synthetic/Spatial Materialism, Planetary Sapience.

The program is tuition-free (researchers receive a monthly stipend) and invites architects, urbanists, filmmakers, media theorists, historians, philosophers, science-fiction writers, artists, engineers, economists, political scientists, ecologists, anthropologists and graphic designers to apply and work collaboratively on interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of cinema, text and speculative design-research.

Applications will be accepted until November 7, 2021.

For more information visit theterraforming.strelka.com or contact us at apply@strelka.com.