MA Narrative Environments

University of the Arts London

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 communication, including non-human languages, biosemiotics, artificial intelligences/machine learning and large language models. Environments include interior and exterior, physical and digital spaces and temporalities, and synthetic-natural ecological systems across scales – from the intimate to the urban and the planetary. The course researches and develops immersive and interactive systems and hybrid environments that propose, model, simulate, plan, construct, and/or perform alternative infrastructures, ideologies and worlds. The course advances a planetary perspective, with considerations of climate, social equity, racial justice and class core to project development.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. The course starts by charting and understanding contemporary and historical narrative environments, critically demythologising, deconstructing, decolonising, and decommodifying dominant narratives about humans, society, machines and agency. Systems observation and mapping is then developed through counterfactuals and speculative histories, grounding future propositions for infrastructures, ideologies, and worlds.