JCG Lunchtime Talk: Futuring through Speculative Entanglements

A lunchtime panel with Curtin’s Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab, in response to Regional Arts Triennial - Radical Futures at John Curtin Gallery.

What does it mean to imagine a future from within the material practices, places and relationships we inhabit? In this conversation, members of Curtin's Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab, Monika Lukowska-Appel, Claudia Westermann, Pia Interlandi and Beck Barlow, read the works of Radical Futures through the lens of speculative entanglement.

Drawing on their research through practice, they propose that a form of serious everyday play can open what already exists to other possibilities. Across the regional voices gathered in the exhibition, the panellists trace how care, cultural continuity and ecological responsibility take shape through making. They relate these works to their own practices: coastlines translated through AI and lithography, installations that set technology in dialogue with place, garments that return to the soil, and sewing as a way of carrying relationships and knowledge. Futuring, they suggest, requires trust in practices that embed the uncertain in the now.

Header Image: Monika Lukowska-Appel, Pia Interlandi and Claudia Westermann, Shelled and Feathered, 2026. Screenshot from documentary by Claudia Westermann.

The Ecologies of Imagination Micro Lab at Curtin University’s School of Design and the Built Environment brings together researchers whose practices sit at the intersection of fashion, art, architecture, graphic design, and sustainability. A shared orientation holds these practices together. Investigating how creative practice can respond constructively to ecological crises and rapid technological transformation through a more-than-human speculative design approach, the Micro Lab’s members engage with processes of living in ways that resist simplified models. Even if living can be conceived as animated by scripts, whether genetic codes, algorithmic programs, or other instructions, they do not execute themselves but require interpretation, improvisation, and at times resistance. Looked at through this lens, other-than-human biological organisms and computational systems raise related design questions, even though they remain ethically distinct kinds of agents, approached and cared for in different ways. Holding the two side by side as a method, rather than one category, is revealing: when, for example, Monika Lukowska-Appel's practice translates coastal fragments into AI-generated forms, the results return our attention to coastline fragility, and to what it might mean to make maps that let other-than-human life remain illegible to full human control.

The Lab draws on feminist and decolonial design frameworks, care ethics, and cybernetic conceptions of conversation as the fundamental structure of learning, holding that agents – human and non-human alike, though never in the same way or degree – interpret, interrupt, and transform the scripts that shape their worlds rather than merely execute them. This capacity for interruption is the generative core of relational practice; the resulting ecological imagination, sustaining incompatible futures in constructive tension, is as much a design competency as a political one.

Funded by Curtin University's School of Design and the Built Environment, the Micro Lab is led by Claudia Westermann and Monika Lukowska-Appel, with Lab members Pia Interlandi, Jo Li Tay, Andreas Pfeifle, and Beck Barlow.

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