This research interconnects three case studies to examine survivability as a framework through which to explore historic, current, and future collaborations in the face of existential threats, social-ecological-technical uncertainty, and indeterminate futures. Leveraging archival research, document analysis, and ethnographic field work, this study focuses on artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s mid-20th-century construction of a nuclear fallout shelter, the COVID Tracking Project’s response work in the first year of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and three decades of future-facing scientific research performed at Biosphere 2. These cases demonstrate multidisciplinary collaborations across individual, organizational, and institutional configurations at local, national, and international scales in threat contexts spanning nuclear weapons, pandemics, and increasing climate catastrophe. Within each of the three cases, I examine protagonists’ collaborations within knowledge systems, their navigation of scientific disciplinary boundaries, their acknowledgement and negotiation of credibility and expertise, and how their engagements with these systems impact individual and collective survivability. By combining complex adaptive systems (CAS) framings with Science and Technology Studies concepts, I explore ways in which transformations of hierarchy and epistemological boundaries impact, and particularly increase, social-ecological-technical systems (SETS) survivability. Including notions of who and what systems deem worthy of protection, credibility, expertise and agency, imaginations, and how concepts of systems survivability operate, this work builds a conceptual scaffolding to better understand the dynamic workings of quests for survival in the 21st century.

Image depicts nearly ten glass specimen jars, but centers on three in the front. One contains small rocks or pebbles, and the other two contain dried plant matter. Each jaw has a handwritten blue tag tied to the top of the bottle with blue string. 

Spring 2019 Course: Approaches, to Light (Taught by Edward Finn)

Approaches to Light traced the fundamental questions of James Turrell’s work to their origins in philosophy, literature, physics, and art. By engaging with light as a medium for human imagination, we explored the ways in which we make meaning from the physical universe and the aesthetic frames we impose on it. Students created their own artistic expressions of light, landscape, and imagination in the form of physical artifacts, audiovisual experiences, and other vessels of meaning that responded to the work of Turrell and Roden Crater.

Spring 2019 Course: Approaches, to Light (Taught by Edward Finn)

Approaches to Light traced the fundamental questions of James Turrell’s work to their origins in philosophy, literature, physics, and art. By engaging with light as a medium for human imagination, we explored the ways in which we make meaning from the physical universe and the aesthetic frames we impose on it. Students created their own artistic expressions of light, landscape, and imagination in the form of physical artifacts, audiovisual experiences, and other vessels of meaning that responded to the work of Turrell and Roden Crater.

Spring 2019 Course: Approaches, to Light (Taught by Edward Finn)

Approaches to Light traced the fundamental questions of James Turrell’s work to their origins in philosophy, literature, physics, and art. By engaging with light as a medium for human imagination, we explored the ways in which we make meaning from the physical universe and the aesthetic frames we impose on it. Students created their own artistic expressions of light, landscape, and imagination in the form of physical artifacts, audiovisual experiences, and other vessels of meaning that responded to the work of Turrell and Roden Crater.

Spring 2019 Course: Approaches, to Light (Taught by Edward Finn)

Approaches to Light traced the fundamental questions of James Turrell’s work to their origins in philosophy, literature, physics, and art. By engaging with light as a medium for human imagination, we explored the ways in which we make meaning from the physical universe and the aesthetic frames we impose on it. Students created their own artistic expressions of light, landscape, and imagination in the form of physical artifacts, audiovisual experiences, and other vessels of meaning that responded to the work of Turrell and Roden Crater.

Glass jars with natural specimens, handmade book (cyanotypes, watercolor paint, paper, colored pencil, vellum, linen thread), single layer screen prints with etched acrylic, postcards of three-dimensional imagery, narrated story and site-specific field recordings on cassette, cassette case with printed image, cassette player, Quartz crystal radio antenna, labels made of watercolor paper, red-blue glasses, handmade sleeves and boxes.

Spring 2019 Course: Approaches, to Light (Taught by Edward Finn)

Approaches to Light traced the fundamental questions of James Turrell’s work to their origins in philosophy, literature, physics, and art. By engaging with light as a medium for human imagination, we explored the ways in which we make meaning from the physical universe and the aesthetic frames we impose on it. Students created their own artistic expressions of light, landscape, and imagination in the form of physical artifacts, audiovisual experiences, and other vessels of meaning that responded to the work of Turrell and Roden Crater.