MA Narrative Environments

Based within CSM’s Spatial Practices Programme, MA Narrative Environments is a two-year course focused on the research and development of environments in which narratives unfold. Narrative environments are platforms, scenarios, and interfaces for communicating information, researching and testing possibilities, hosting events and experiences, and/ or generating diverse forms of intelligences. Narratives include not only stories, but rhetoric, discourse, and programs related to human and non-human languages and communication, including non-human languages, biosemiotics, artificial intelligence/machine learning and large language models. Environments include interior and exterior, physical and digital spaces and temporalities, and synthetic-natural ecological systems across scales. The course researches and develops narrative environments as immersive and interactive systems and hybrid spaces that propose, model, simulate, plan, construct, and/or perform alternative infrastructures, ideologies and worlds.

MA Narrative Environments explores the interplay between situational and speculative knowledge about narratives and environments as they are, have been, and what they might become. We start by charting and understanding the narrative environments that we find ourselves within today, critically demythologising, deconstructing, decolonising, decommodifying etc. the dominant hegemonic narratives that we tell/are told/sold about who we are, what the rest of the world is etc. This observational and systems mapping practice is the first step towards deep design research and development based on incorporating critical analysis into alternative propositions for infrastructures, ideologies, and worlds. Key research questions include: How are narrative environments transmitted and distributed across space and time? How do technologies shape narrative environments and how do narrative environments shape technologies? How do narrative environments change in the shift from screen-based narratives to spatial narratives embedded throughout cities, landscapes, virtual interfaces, and model worlds? What kinds of places can and should be narrated that aren’t, and what ideologies are reinforced by narratives that shouldn’t be? How do the tools and understandings of narrative environments reshape architecture, infrastructure, science, technology, and planning? How do narrative environments mobilize and complexify facts and fictions, models and simulations, needs and desires?