Events

CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures

Exhibitions

The exhibition presents seven experimental productions from the CreaTures Laboratory – a collection of art and design projects aiming to foster positive eco-social change.

Nocturne: Sea Altar at the Atmospheres Deep exhibition (image credit: Isabel Beavers).

When

7.9.–12.10.2022

Where

Väre

Floor 2, FK lobby

About the event

The CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures) research project investigates the role of existing – yet often hidden – creative practices in moving the world towards eco-social sustainability. The EU H2020 project responds to the current environmental and social challenges and the urgent need to find new ways of living together on the planet to restore and preserve our ecosystems.

CreaTures is a collaboration between Aalto University as a coordinator with 3 other universities (Utrecht University, the University of Sussex, RMIT University) and 7 cultural institutions and art-design collectives (Zemos98, Superflux, Kersnikova, Hellon, Furtherfield, Sniffer, OKFI).

Learn more about CreaTures here

Open Forest

Author: Open Forest Collective

Open Forest is a collective, experimental inquiry into different forests and more-than-human dataflows. The project explores how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and otherwise engaged with, in playful ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond geo-engineering, techno-solutionist perspectives. In practice, the project consists of experimental forest walks followed by a co-creation of forest stories. Through these playful activities, the project entangles existing forests' datasets with data that questions and obscures the currently collected and available – mostly quantitative – insights about various forests. At Cooler Planet, visitors can browse through existing documentation of the Open Forest walks, stories, and forest patches and contribute their own stories and experiences.

Learn more about the project

Image: Live Open Forest walk through the Sipoonkorpi National Park, Finland (image credit: Markéta Dolejšová).

Composite image of the cover and selected pages of the More-than-human Food Futures cookbook

Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures

Author: Feeding Food Futures collective

Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures was a two day workshop experimenting with food as bio-design material and an accessible starting point from which to explore values, concerns, and imaginaries associated with food futures and climate resilience. Through playful food engagements and discussion, participants co-created eleven experimental food futures recipes that aim to provoke imagination and inspire critical thinking on how human-food practices could be different, supporting sustainable flourishing. The recipes together with other workshop outcomes were compiled into the More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook which is showcased at the Cooler Planet exhibition and available online, as open access publication.

Learn more about the cookbook

Image: More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook with 11 recipes resulting from the workshop activities (image credit: Feeding Food Futures)

Photograph with mostly black background and glowing organic shapes in different colours

Nocturne

Author: Isabel Beavers

Nocturne is a series of wild altars meant to be experienced at dusk, dawn, or at night. The altars are experienced outdoors in chance encounters, as well as in museum and gallery exhibitions. Rooted in intimate experiences with the elements, landscape, seascape, and more-than-human species, each site calls upon a specific and ephemeral moment of sensory collaboration: times when the sun, light, sound, and scent coalesce through the senses of the human body to produce sublime or ordinary but intimate moments. The work is an experiment in care-taking, eco-rituals, and a seduction into intimate moments with the more-than-human world. The practice of generating new ceremonies and rituals with more-than-human species serves as a method of re-localization, de-emphasizing the human-human connection, and reemphasizing the grounding impacts of human-more-than-human interactions.

Learn more about the series

Image: Nocturne altars: opening a space for serendipitous more-than-human encounters and new eco-rituals (image credit: Isabel Beavers)

Composite image of photo of people playing a board game and rainbow coloured shapes on black background with Hellon and CreaTures text

Sustainable Futures Game

Author: Hellon

Accelerating sustainability transitions requires imagination and creativity to concretise desirable futures narratives. For this purpose, Hellon designed the Sustainable Futures Game that connects societal sustainability goals with everyday organisational contexts to help build organisations’ capacities for imagining alternative futures. The game is designed for decision-makers and planners within public and private organisations, offering a creative and holistic approach to address sustainability challenges. The purpose is to help players co-imagine a desirable future state of a commonly decided city in 2030 through fictional storytelling and design prompts and then backcast ways to tackle critical challenges to reach the co-narrated future. As the story is co-narrated, the outcome of each game session varies depending on the participants interests and aspirations. This diversity of perspectives helps the participants find new opportunities and create novel pathways for reaching desirable futures.

Learn more about the game

Image: Sustainability Futures Game pushes imagination by asking questions about value systems, everyday life, new habits, and new governance models (image credit: Hellon)

Cyano Automaton

Author: Agniezska Pokrywka

The Cyano Automaton author Agniezska Pokrywka recently embarked on an analogue space mission to Mars, in the Utah desert, to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, and to challenge her criticism of space colonization. Her preparations for this adventure included the cultivation of cyanobacteria; more specifically: Arthrospira platensis. Spirulina, as it's more commonly known, has been used as food in the past (pre-colonial Mexico and Chad); in the present (in hipster and health-oriented communities); and will be in the future (on deep space flights). The spirulina cultivation set-up that is presented here is called Cyano Automaton: a vessel in constant evolution, reflecting the infinite changes that every living system goes through. In spite of these transitions, some questions remain unaltered: What can we learn from this silent observer of our planet and its billion-year-long wisdom?

Find out more about the project here

Image: Cyano Automaton: a spirulina cultivation vessel in constant evolution (image credit: Agnieszka Pokrywka).

Julia Lohmann's Hidaka Ohmu at the A Bloc. Photo: Mikko Raskinen

Baltic Sea Lab

Author: Julia Lohmann & Department of Seaweed

The Baltic Sea Lab develops co-creative ways and tools to activate people to promote sea health. The project aims to grow a network of potential “sea stewards”, caring for their local sea environment through co-creative engagements. In 2020–2021, the Lab with its multi-sensory seaweed pavilion Hidaka Ohmu, hosted exchanges, panels and co-creative ocean literacy and research events, partnering with local Finnish institutions like the John Nurmisen Foundation, the Hanaholmen, and the Tvärminne Zoological Station. Drawing on these activities, a framework was established to support creative practices in engaging communities with ocean literacy: Knowledge (awareness of ecological and cultural issues), Care (empathy, emotional and embodied connection), and Action (active participation, agency).

Find out more about the lab here

Image: Hidaka Ohmu sculpture in the Baltic Sea Lab project space (image credit: Mikko Raskinen).

Maker Contribution to Dodo ry’s ‘Megapolis 2026: Energetic Cities’, as part of Pixelache’s outreach & education programme ‘Pixelversity’, Helsinki, 15.10.2011 (image credit: Antti Ahonen)

Pixelache: How Do We Keep Going? Transformations In Practice

Author: Andrew Gryf Paterson, Irina Mutt, Sumugan Sivanesan, Antti Ahonen

Pixelache Helsinki is a Finland-based creative association on emerging creative practices with almost 20 years of activity in 2022. Starting as a Festival of Electronic Arts & Subcultures, throughout the past decade the association has been running a trans-disciplinary platform for emerging art, design, research, technology and activism that involved a dynamic local community, and an annual festival experimenting with a rotating directorial model. The rich association’s history and activities in the field of transformational creative practice are the core focus of the association’s process, by engaging with organisational meta-data, and Pixelache’s production office in Suvilahti as a tangible memory device. We set out the hope of answering: How do we keep going? The Cooler Planet exhibition presents two audiozines resulting from an experimental archival and ethnographic work that sought to gather perspectives from active Pixelache members reflecting upon how the organisation has transformed between 2013-2019 via objects and narratives. Within the space are several of the objects referenced in the audiozines, as well as a handmade Gantt chart showing active members in the association.

Find out more about the association here

Image: Maker Contribution to Dodo ry’s ‘Megapolis 2026: Energetic Cities’, as part of Pixelache’s outreach & education programme ‘Pixelversity’, Helsinki, 15.10.2011 (image credit: Antti Ahonen).

Aalto's CreaTures team

The transdisciplinary project highlights how the arts can contribute to addressing climate change and associated effects. The project aims at demonstrating effective paths to achieving sustainability, social cohesion and peaceful co-existence at a time of rapid change.

13.11.2019 News

Creative arts and design practices have already demonstrated transformational potential in the area of social cohesion and environmental citizenship. However, they are often fragmented, poorly resourced and badly understood.

9.9.2020 17:00 – 19:30 Events

Creative practices for transformational futures (INUSE/ENCORE)

Department of Design

Designs for a Cooler Planet is a five-week-long festival celebrating experiments in planet-friendly materials, fashion, and food.

7.9.–12.10.2022 Events

Planet-friendly alternatives for materials, mindsets and architecture.

7.9.–12.10.2022 Events

Published: 22.8.2022
Updated: 9.12.2022

CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures

When

Where

About the event

Project showcase

Open Forest

Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures

Nocturne

Sustainable Futures Game

Cyano Automaton

Baltic Sea Lab

Pixelache: How Do We Keep Going? Transformations In Practice

Aalto's CreaTures team

Contact: Marketa Dolejsova

Gaurika Singhal

Savannah Vize

Kirsi Hakio

Tuuli Mattelmäki

Andrea Botero

CreaTures at Aalto

Research project CreaTures seeks to further the sustainability agenda with creativity

ONLINE: CreaTures Panel: Discussing the power of creative practices for reshaping the future

CreaTures (2020-2023)

Designs for a Cooler Planet

Life 1.5 – an exhibition of planet-friendly materials, fashion and food

What's the future made of?