Amplifier presents a three-day symposium offering transformative and practical visions for near-future ecological governance of the world.

As the animal Homo sapiens came to dominate the Earth’s terrain over the course of its history, the planet experienced accelerating extremes. Every kind of natural ecosystem suffered degradation from its activity: ocean, forest, lake, plain, river, mountain, valley, wetland, tropic, desert, semidesert, permafrost. Extinction of plants and wildlife increased the velocity of violent changes already underway to the point where Homo sapiens came to threaten its own existence as a species.

Amplifier has convened a group of artists, designers, architects, cultural theorists, critics, ecologists, and thinkers to imagine a new system of hyper-local and planetary governance that makes use of contemporary technology, social research, scientific knowledge, worldviews, and assumptions.

An ongoing collection of references shared during Amplifier worldbuilding discussion

An application using socially-concerned design parameters to produce alternative eco-socio-political policy scenarios and shape improved outcomes for the planet and local communities.

Our screenwriting proposition argues for the creation of a science-fiction imaginary for an optimistic near future.

The Worldbuilding curriculum is the intellectual foundation of a global imaginary that transcends existing physical, political, and ideological boundaries. It seeks to respond to the question: what must all people know and how can we lay the groundwork for a new episteme of global future-flourishing.

Amplifier pide el reconocimiento oficial del derecho de los pueblos indígenas a cruzar las fronteras que atravesaron históricamente.

Indigenous people have suffered from historic injustices due to colonization, dispossession of their lands, and deprivation of resources. For thousands of years before the creation of sovereign states by European migrants to the Western Hemisphere, indigenous people traded, traveled across, and lived throughout the lands now divided by international borders. Amplifier calls for official recognition of the right of indigenous people to move across the borders which they traversed historically.

Amplifier will propose a series of initiatives that aim to use emerging ideas, media, design, and aesthetic strategies to raise the visibility of alternative political and economic frameworks, and advance institutional transformation.

Amplifier’s board of directors met weekly during the spring and summer of 2020 to reevaluate its mission and programs in response to pervasive institutional failure.

Algorithmic Landscapes of the Upper Delaware Valley takes the disused railway station as an opportunity to expose alternative relationships between ecology, landscape, and technology that aim for more redemptive and socially useful ends.

Amplify! activates vacant property in Newburgh and increases the impact of initiatives by local arts organizations with light-based performances, time-based installations, and contemporary form-making projects.

Exploring the un-designed landscapes and wilderness found in abandoned spaces, post-industrial sites, and landfills.

The project documents and amplifies the many ways local residents, businesses and institutions are transforming Flint.

A large-scale public art festival that temporarily reclaims the former Flint-Chevy manufacturing site.