Ithaca College

If you are still looking for a class in Art, there 2 spots open in Intermediate Drawing-Speculative Futures. The class runs Tues/Thurs 9:25-12:05 and centers on story telling and world building while honing your drawing skills and learning new techniques. There is a prerequisite for the class of any Introduction to Drawing section, including the ICC sections (Map It, Triple Eye, Or Intro to Drawing: Seeing the World, etc). Please fill out an override form in Workflow if necessary or email ssutton@ithaca.edu.

Course Description The term Speculative futures alludes to creative works that use imagination to consider ethical, cultural, environmental and political impacts of life in the Anthropocene, an epoch that is claimed to start when human activities began to have a significant global impact on Earth's ecosystems.  Thinking and creating ‘speculatively’ serves to answer the questions of what future we want and what are the implications of the choices we make today. In this class we will use drawing as a way to picture contemporary realities and imagine the future.

The class is organized like a bottom-up world-building exercise. There are five broad sections: plants, places, people, technologies and myths. For each section you will be prompted to address a more specific scenario through a singular drawing or a series of drawings. Your final piece will be a culmination of all 5 sections – and will result in a speculative future world of your own through which you attempt to address some of our world’s problems.