Paper short abstract:

In the spirit of this panel’s effort to think about the analytical and representational capacities of multimodal collaboration in the era of AI, we propose a multimodal remix experiment based in our shared interest in climate communication.

Paper long abstract:

In the spirit of this panel’s effort to think about the analytical and representational capacities of multimodal collaboration in the era of AI, we propose a multimodal remix experiment based in our shared interest in climate communication. We begin with two existing projects. The first is Campbell’s Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene, which explores the greeting card as an everyday cultural form with a tradition of helping people work through difficult feelings. Imagining a space in the greeting card section for “climate catastrophe,” this project leans on the expertise of scholars and creatives to generate, activate, and publicize the work of scientists and others engaging in the problems associated with anthropogenic climate change. The second project is Howe and Boyer’s Sister Cities of the Anthropocene initiative, which seeks to make visible emergent Anthropocene connectivities, such as the transformation of cryospheres into hydrospheres that distantly connects communities losing ice to communities gaining water in the form of sea level rise. The program hopes to foster new kinds of affective and epistemic relations between places experiencing Anthropocene vectors (e.g., drought, wildfires, air pollution and similar phenomena). In the remix phase of the project, Campbell will explore creating AI-assisted postcards related to the Sister Cities project, while Howe and Boyer wish to develop an Anthropocene playing card deck inspired by the Greeting Cards project.