Synstm – A Radical Creative Practice
- Berlin
- 10999
- Date: 26/04/2024
- LT: 08:09:38 PM
A creative practice combining technology, design, science and the arts to innovate towards a sustainable and collective future.
Through a radical green agenda, SYNSTM will create new creative possibilities to unlock the design potential in the age of the Anthropocene. Utilising the experience and expertise of the multi-disciplinary Sunst Studio, SYNSTM will combine its resources and knowledge of materials, construction, production and supply chains to be a catalyst for change and collective collaboration.
002 ESSAY
Long Form
interdisciplinary
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It is a failure of human imagination, to be unable to adapt and live in a way that preserves the critical zone so essential for life on earth. Already in certain parts of Africa and Latin America, climate change has been so dramatic that substantial areas of land can no longer provide a livelihood for people who have lived off it for centuries. Professor Will Steffen, the American chemist, believes that “we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse”, passing the Earth’s so called “tipping point” when irreversible changes will tip our climate into an entirely new state.
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The Anthropocene era we are living in now, is an age marked by human activity which as a geophysical force is now more powerful than all the planet’s natural processes combined. Concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and other human-made materials now far outweigh the Earth’s entire biomass. Turning nature into a product of culture, as our industrial processes irreversibly alters the natural cycles of the biosphere.
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The opening sentence of Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour is in reference to the ability of art to break us out of our thought patterns and create new spaces of possibility. The French sociologist realised that our systems of thought, the way we shape and design our world need to be completely overhauled, through a radically re-evaluation of the way we live and function.
Despite the devastation and division wrought by the COVID-19, it has shown us that in the face of unprecedented catastrophe, country-sized economic systems can suddenly be put on hold. Proof, if it were needed, that under the right circumstances the world is capable of implementing and operating under an entirely new paradigm.
Such are the unprecedented scale and complexities of climate change, that any solutions demand a globally-coordinated response. On a local level, that means efforts must be made both in cities and regions to adopt sustainable industrial, manufacturing and design practices. Then, and only through a fully-integrated, transdisciplinary response, can we find practical and implementable scenarios to reconfigure how we live and the processes that allow us to exist.