Alice Bucknell

The Art Room 03
Soho House Rome

May 23, 2023

In a world experiencing severe climate disruption, Swamp City pivots around a corporate dystopia, imagining the Everglades in Florida as a luxury eco-tourism retreat, whose development is commented by an alligator refusing to migrate, an enterprising celebrity architect, and a 3,500-year-old Bald Cypress Tree resurrected with the AI.

Climate crisis anxiety and rampant development coexist even in The Alluvials, conceived as an interactive game environment examining the politics of water scarcity and drought from the perspective of the Los Angeles River. By approaching the present from a near-future perspective, Cones of Uncertainty expands on the ecological matter and its relationship with predictive super-intelligence, which takes the shape of a post-human meteorologist details the hurricane season of 2097 in the daily news channel. The relationship between human society and more-than-human life takes a turn in The Martian Word for World is Mother, where the colonial act of terraforming a new planet collides with alien intelligence and language production.

Alice Bucknell (b. 1999) is a North American artist and writer based in London and Los Angeles. Working primarily through game engines, she explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and nonhuman and machine intelligence. She is the organizer of New Mystics, a platform exploring magic, mysticism, ritual, and technology.

Giulia Colletti is curator of Public and Digital Programs at Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and is in charge of Special Media Projects at CURA.

The Art Room is a program of talks and video screenings conceived by CURA./Basement Roma for Soho House Rome.