{"id":3262,"date":"2026-09-30T15:20:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T07:20:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/jcg\/?post_type=events&p=3262"},"modified":"2026-09-30T15:28:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T07:28:05","slug":"lunchtime-talk-futuring-through-speculative-entanglements","status":"publish","type":"events","link":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/jcg\/events\/lunchtime-talk-futuring-through-speculative-entanglements\/","title":{"rendered":"Lunchtime Talk: Futuring through Speculative Entanglements"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A lunchtime panel with Curtin\u2019s Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab, in response to<\/strong> Regional Arts Triennial – Radical Futures<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does it mean to imagine a future from within the material practices, places and relationships we inhabit? In this conversation, members of Curtin’s Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab, Monika Lukowska-Appel, Claudia Westermann, Pia Interlandi and Beck Barlow, read the works of Radical Futures through the lens of speculative entanglement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on their research through practice, they propose that a form of serious everyday play can open what already exists to other possibilities. Across the regional voices gathered in the exhibition, the panellists trace how care, cultural continuity and ecological responsibility take shape through making. They relate these works to their own practices: coastlines translated through AI and lithography, installations that set technology in dialogue with place, garments that return to the soil, and sewing as a way of carrying relationships and knowledge. Futuring, they suggest, requires trust in practices that embed the uncertain in the now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the Speakers<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A\/Prof Claudia Westermann <\/strong>is an artist researcher, licensed architect, and Associate Professor of Creative Practice, co-lead of the Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab and co-director of graduate research in the School of Design and the Built Environment. Claudia Westermann is Vice President of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) and co-editor of Technoetic Arts. Claudia Westermann’s projects have been widely exhibited and presented, including at the Venice Biennale, the Moscow International Film Festival, ISEA Symposium for the Electronic Arts, and the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Germany. She has received awards for her practice and teaching, including two provincial and three national awards. For her visionary engagement fostering systemic research and practice through education, she received the Margaret Mead Prize from the American Society for Cybernetics in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Monika Lukowska-Appel <\/strong>is a creative practitioner, researcher, and lecturer at Curtin University, where she teaches Design and coordinates the Master of Design program and co-leads the Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab. Her practice explores the use of digital technologies alongside traditional print media, examining the implications of new<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A\/Prof Pia Interlandi <\/strong>is Associate Professor of Creative Practice in the School of Design and the Built Environment, Curtin University. She is a creative practice researcher working with materials that return to the ground, asking what textiles do after use and what living systems make of them: garments designed to decompose, fungal inoculation to speed the breakdown of textile waste, and weeds as a source of circular fibre. Garments for the Grave has been commissioned by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Science Museum in London and the National Gallery of Victoria, and has widened into collaborations on soil, decomposition, circular economy and Indigenous community-led practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beck Barlow <\/strong>– Ballardong Whadjuk woman from the Noongar nation. Designer and lecturer at Curtin University. Founder of Deadly Denim, a fashion label grounded in creative practice and cultural storytelling. The work spans installation, community-facilitated workshops and runway presentation, and has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the New Zealand, New York, and Paris fashion weeks. A decade of sewing workshops with Aboriginal women’s groups, youth, regional communities and people in custody underpins a practice in which making is how relationships and knowledge are carried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Event Details<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Wednesday 28 October
12pm – 1pm<\/strong>
Free event, open to the public<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Register here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab <\/strong>at Curtin University\u2019s School of Design and the Built Environment brings together researchers whose practices sit at the intersection of fashion, art, architecture, graphic design, and sustainability. A shared orientation holds these practices together. Investigating how creative practice can respond constructively to ecological crises and rapid technological transformation through a more-than-human speculative design approach, the Micro Lab\u2019s members engage with processes of living in ways that resist simplified models. Even if living can be conceived as animated by scripts, whether genetic codes, algorithmic programs, or other instructions, they do not execute themselves but require interpretation, improvisation, and at times resistance. Looked at through this lens, other-than-human biological organisms and computational systems raise related design questions, even though they remain ethically distinct kinds of agents, approached and cared for in different ways. Holding the two side by side as a method, rather than one category, is revealing: when, for example, Monika Lukowska-Appel’s practice translates coastal fragments into AI-generated forms, the results return our attention to coastline fragility, and to what it might mean to make maps that let other-than-human life remain illegible to full human control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Lab draws on feminist and decolonial design frameworks, care ethics, and cybernetic conceptions of conversation as the fundamental structure of learning, holding that agents \u2013 human and non-human alike, though never in the same way or degree \u2013 interpret, interrupt, and transform the scripts that shape their worlds rather than merely execute them. This capacity for interruption is the generative core of relational practice; the resulting ecological imagination, sustaining incompatible futures in constructive tension, is as much a design competency as a political one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funded by Curtin University’s School of Design and the Built Environment, the Micro Lab is led by Claudia Westermann and Monika Lukowska-Appel, with Lab members Pia Interlandi, Jo Li Tay, Andreas Pfeifle, and Beck Barlow.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Photography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This event may be photographed and\/or videoed and images may occasionally be used for promotional and marketing purposes, including social media. If you do not wish to be photographed or videoed, please notify staff at event registration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Venue Information<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone is welcome at the John Curtin Gallery. Plan your visit<\/a> to the John Curtin Gallery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Header image: Monika Lukowska-Appel, Pia Interlandi and Claudia Westermann, Shelled and Feathered, 2026. Screenshot from documentary by Claudia Westermann.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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