Staring at the Sun
Alice Bucknell, still from "Earth Engine", 2024. Single-channel 4k video, made in collaboration with Anna Norelius, Brandon Tay, Carlo Udina, Cocompi and Juan Pablo Pacheco as part of Medialab Matadero's Synthetic Minds collaborative prototyping lab, Synthetic Minds.
Staring at the Sun
Staring at the Sun is a research project and multimedia “sci-fi documentary” that’s rooted within an unfolding dialogue around planetary-scale climate modification projects. Toggling across scales, political agendas, technologies, and temporalities, it critically examines contemporary solar geoengineering proposals including stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) that are currently undergoing research development in both the United States and the European Union.
Embedded inside the fiction-theory narrative of Staring at the Sun is a video game called Earth Engine. Earth Engine onboards concepts of posthuman playability in gaming, leveraging climate projection data to spawn an open-ended environment where the planet is the player. Taken together, Staring at the Sun and Earth Engine broadly examine the paradox of predictive technologies in foreclosing other possible futures. The project also taps into the burgeoning political economy of Earth Visualization Engines (EVEs)—digital twins of the Earth built with AI and gaming hardware that will run complex climate simulations. EVEs are proposed as “global modeling centers”, bastions of “international excellence” meant to “educate and empower” an imagined global audience of climate stewards. Of course, within the gamification of climate forecasting, there are winners and losers. Such biases are reinforced through climate data itself, which has massive data gaps in countries most vulnerable to climate change, while countries like the US and Switzerland are teeming with data.
While in residence at EPFL, Bucknell will research alternative solar futures developed by Global Majority researchers, scientists, and policymakers, as well as collaborate with CLIMACT to better understand how such data is visualized. The project works towards alternative protocols for atmospheric governance by drawing on the work of prominent scientists, scholars, and theorists including Lynn Margulis, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Karen Yusoff, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing, alongside the work of organizations including the Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement and the Indigenous Environmental Network. The final iteration of this project will take the form of a “sci-fi documentary” video work set between Wyoming and Lausanne.
Collaborations: CLIMACT
Alice Bucknell
Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Using game engines and speculative fiction, their work explores interconnections between architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence. Bucknell is generally interested in the limits of scientific knowledge and systems thinking, the weird possibilities of play, and the ecological dimensions of games that can dissolve binaries such as human vs environment, natural vs synthetic intelligence, and self vs world. In 2021, Bucknell founded New Mystics, a digital platform merging magic and technology. In 2022 they organized New Worlds, an experimental event series at London’s Somerset House Studios expanding on emergent worlding practices.
Their work has appeared at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, Gray Area in San Francisco, Basement Roma in Rome, Singapore Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Fiber Festival in Amsterdam, and the Serpentine Gallery in London, among others. Their writing appears in publications such as ArtReview, e-flux architecture, Frieze, and the Harvard Design Magazine. In 2023 they were the Vilém Flusser Resident for Artistic Research at transmediale and UdK in Berlin and a SCI-Art Supercollider Ambassador in Los Angeles. In 2024 they were a participant in Medialab-Matadero’s Synthetic Minds prototyping lab. Bucknell is currently working on The Alluvials, their first video game, commissioned by mudac in Lausanne. They are a resident of Somerset House Studios in London and teaching faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.