Reframing Creative Practices to Participate in Planetary Regeneration : How to infuse Ecology in Creative Media Education View Digital Media

Workshop Presentation
Alexandra Bal,  Afsoon Soudi,  Tatyana Terzopoulos  

The wildfires burning across the world may seem catastrophic to humans, but from an ecological constructivist approach, they are a normal part of planetary adaptations to current climate changes. Nature is highly creative; it continuously reshapes and regenerates itself, life forms adapting to new landscapes to maximize their capacity to thrive. Fire is a regenerative force, a sign of this planetary creativity at work. If adaptation to climate changes is a normal part of planetary life, many western humans have stopped understanding change and diversity as essential to healthy life conditions, leading to destructive practices such as monoculture in forestry. Could wildfires be nature’s way of erasing human imprints on forests, redesigning them for the diversity ecosystems need to thrive. While many communities and countries across the world are moving towards an ecological civilization, adjusting and reshaping their ways of life in significant ways, in Ontario, Canada, ecosystems are under threat from a government that is favoring uncontrolled urban sprawling to sustainable futures. This session explores how Ontario higher education, focused on creative practices, can foster the reshaping of human values, the rethinking of materials and of design itself through sustainable and regenerative learning principles. The workshop reports on our experiments in three first year university courses where we reframed the idea of creative practices to be embedded in natural emergence and regenerative principles and reposition humans as part, instead of in control of, planetary ecosystems.