Affirmation 3: Design Policy

Climate change reveals fundamental relationships between technological and natural processes. Artist Michael Wang will discuss recent work that grapples with these relationships and which seek to find creative and critical possibilities in this expanded field of the technological. Focusing on the metabolic, Wang will present works that engage modern energy infrastructures and their natural or biological underpinnings. He will also address more speculative works that look towards other forms of energy production and near futures of extraterrestrial extraction. Wang’s Manifesto of Photosynthesism, a call for an aesthetics of the carbon negative, will provide a theoretical background for several projects that work—and collaborate—with plants.