The future is not what it used to be. But how are futures being made as futures past go up in flames?
The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought is pleased to invite you to join us for a seminar and discussion with Theo Reeves-Evison, on his new book Futures in the Making: Speculative Art for a Burning World (MIT Press, 2026)
Contemporary art and visual culture are brimming with images of a future shaped by environmental destruction, technological innovation, and new forms of sociality. In this we will engage with Theo on his effort to trace the genealogy of some of the tools and techniques that underpin creative practices, isolating a series of ‘speculative infrastructures’ that shape and script the way environmental futures are constituted as objects of imagination and experience. Looking at speculative and anticipatory practices as underpinned by infrastructures—both material and discursive—has the potential to shed light on the forms of power embedded within them, but it also points to the ways in which they can fall prey to lock-in processes and path-dependencies. Framed in this way, the junctures where lock-in processes begin to take hold can be seen as points at which artistic projects oriented towards environmental justice can productively intervene. Artworks not only have the capacity to generate alternative images of the future, the book proposes, but also rework the infrastructures by which such images are conceptualized and produced.
Pre-readings to stimulate reflection and discussion for the session will be forwarded to those who register.
Theo Reeves-Evison is a Senior Lecturer at Birmingham School of Art. He is the author of Futures in the Making: Speculative Art for a Burning World (MIT Press, 2026) and Ethics of Contemporary Art: In the Shadow of Transgression (Bloomsbury, 2020). Together with Jon K. Shaw he is the editor of Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017) and has contributed to a variety of journals including Third Text, New Formations, Critical Inquiry and Environmental Humanities.
