futureNOMAD: 2086
In 2022, the Guggenheim Bilbao will present MOTION: autos, art, architecture—a museum-wide show devoted to the love affair between cars and culture.
Norman Foster, the show’s curator, has invited Yale to contribute to the FUTURES section of the show dedicated to imagining MOBILITY as it may be manifest in 2086—sixty-five years into the future at the 200th anniversary of the first Benz gasoline-powered automobile.
This studio will take up the challenge of this invitation to visit the future.
Sixty-five years is a long way out: uncertainties multiply; simple extrapolations fail futurology and science-fiction. Just two expectations may be reliable: 2086 will be post-carbon… or the planet will be post-human; some works of fiction have a way of channeling events… and coming true.
The studio will imagine 2086 mobility through the twin lenses of NOMAD LIFE and POP-UP CITIES. The work will focus on the paradox of mass autonomy—what happens when auto-mobility becomes socio-mobility, when vessels/vehicles interact, when convoys and camps emerge, when communities and cities ‘pop-up’.
The first half of the semester will be focused on vessels/vehicles with ‘social’ capacities, the second on morphologies, protocols and contingencies of nomad caravans, camps and cities.
LOS ANGELES will be the base of field trip research with visits to sites of automotive and nomad culture.
The future moves at different speeds, and 2086 will be a palimpsest of many prior technologies, infrastructures and investments. These relics present the terrain and horizon of our nomad explorations.
Students will work on individual projects and collective research groups. All members of the studio will be responsible for making project work museum-ready—this likely will continue through mid-March 2022.
The show opens April 7/8th.