Staring at the Sun
Alice Bucknell, still from "Earth Engine", 2024. Single-channel 4k video, made in collaboration with Anna Norelius, Brandon Tay, Carlo Udina, Cocompi and Juan Pablo Pacheco as part of Medialab Matadero's Synthetic Minds collaborative prototyping lab, Synthetic Minds.
From Solar to Nocturnal
20.03 – 27.04.2025
EPFL Pavilions – Pavilion A
Staring at the Sun
Staring at the Sun is a research project and multimedia “sci-fi documentary” that’s rooted within an unfolding dialogue around planetary-scale climate modification projects. Toggling across scales, political agendas, technologies, and temporalities, it critically examines contemporary solar geoengineering proposals including stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) that are currently undergoing research development in both the United States and the European Union.
Embedded inside the fiction-theory narrative of Staring at the Sun is a video game called Earth Engine. Earth Engine onboards concepts of posthuman playability in gaming, leveraging climate projection data to spawn an open-ended environment where the planet is the player. Taken together, Staring at the Sun and Earth Engine broadly examine the paradox of predictive technologies in foreclosing other possible futures. The project also taps into the burgeoning political economy of Earth Visualization Engines (EVEs)—digital twins of the Earth built with AI and gaming hardware that will run complex climate simulations. EVEs are proposed as “global modeling centers”, bastions of “international excellence” meant to “educate and empower” an imagined global audience of climate stewards. Of course, within the gamification of climate forecasting, there are winners and losers. Such biases are reinforced through climate data itself, which has massive data gaps in countries most vulnerable to climate change, while countries like the US and Switzerland are teeming with data.
While in residence at EPFL, Bucknell will research alternative solar futures developed by Global Majority researchers, scientists, and policymakers, as well as collaborate with CLIMACT to better understand how such data is visualized. The project works towards alternative protocols for atmospheric governance by drawing on the work of prominent scientists, scholars, and theorists including Lynn Margulis, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Karen Yusoff, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing, alongside the work of organizations including the Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement and the Indigenous Environmental Network. The final iteration of this project will take the form of a “sci-fi documentary” video work set between Wyoming and Lausanne.
Partner : CLIMACT
Alice Bucknell
Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their recent work has focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge. Their work has appeared internationally at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Gray Area in San Francisco, Singapore Art Museum, and Serpentine in London, among others. Their writing appears in publications including ArtReview, e-flux architecture, frieze, Flash Art, the Harvard Design Magazine, and Mousse. In 2025, they are a Creative Capital awardee and Y11 member of NEW INC. Bucknell received a MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles where they teach courses on worlding, gaming, and philosophies of technology.