by Luis Kramer, Laura Dehne, Felix Pioch, Leon Börsenhardt, and Sarah Drach

Our project addresses several challenges facing Homo sapiens in the 21st century. The overexploitation of our planet puts us in a very threatening situation in which we are about to lose our natural environment. The human being who increasingly no longer sees himself as part of nature and his environment, but is alienated in a way. As masters of invention, our cultural evolution has taken us through exponential growth into a world of technology that is no longer easy to comprehend. This is where artificial intelligence comes into play in our project. Winded into a fictional game in which technology has taken the lead and nature can be developed under supposedly ethical aspects, the human freedom of decision is questioned. Another aspect that we have focused on in our project is to grow beyond our very binary way of thinking. Decisions and developments are complex and often only successful in a creative, multi-layered and queer way.

by Emily Pichardo Wojtyna

Queer Mycology ✨ is a series of poems and definitions that draws parallels between Western culture’s relationship and treatment of the natural world, and, more specifically, fungi, with that of its queer communities. Through a sequence of alternating stories, Queer Mycology explores the beauty and danger of being perceived as “different” or “other” in a capitalist, colonialist, and heteronormative society.  Emily Pichardo Wojtyna, a master’s student in ecology and environmental studies at LMU, draws from personal experiences and historical events like the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the first introduction of psilocybin mushrooms to the United States to bring together this multifaceted work.

by Eda Gültekin, Gökçe Doğu, and Lilly Benedikt

Our project tries to visualize the relationship between women and the earth in poetry and an interactive poster. The poems present the common features that women and the earth share in a universe where they are captives. They express vulnerability, frustration, and pain about the poor treatment they experience. Our poster’s pictures should visualize femininity interconnected and merged with the environment. It challenges the concept of Mother Earth and the predefined feminine role of the earth. Further, our project questions the vision of beauty, femininity, and gender associated with environmentalism. We want to give incentives to redefine those representations.

by Saphira Schroers, Anastasia Grekova, and María Consuelo Pino

Our project is based on a reflection about the path that our planet may follow if society continues to live as they do today and governments continue to prioritise their own interest over the taking actions to mitigate the climate crisis.Based on this, we created a story using artificial intelligence and analoge work,that graphs the collapse of the earth’s natural ecosystem in 2700. We raise uncertainties about human survival, represented by the last human on earth and his search for a fantastic creature, called Mother CroneTree, that will answer his doubts.

by Ramona Frank and Maya von Ahnen

Imagining other worlds is an indispensable part of emancipatory and revolutionary practice, and is a key capacity to bring change into our world. Following Donna Haraway, we need to start to tell different, healing stories, to overcome the misleading, ecocidal and genocidal conceptual separation between the human and the more-than-human-world. Drawing on our own political and spiritual experience, and majorly inspired by the works of Octavia E. Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin, this eco-queer-anarcha-feminist multispecies fiction seeks to be an example of Le Guin’s famous «Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction» in dreaming a world, in which patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism never came into being. At the heart of The Forest lies the entanglement of all forest dwellers and the stories they write into each other’s life.

by Jule von Berg, Maya Nagaraj, Rebecca Stephens and Sarah Theimer

In this interactive fiction game, players practice sentient ecology by examining the relationships between human and non-human entities, and treating those non-humans as complex, feeling beings. Players move through a cyclical story as they transition between the perspectives of various entities. They can examine the environment through these different lenses and perform actions. The story progresses in response to the player’s actions, and the simple act of examining the environment triggers events and transitions. Thus, players become active agents in the story by embodying and seeking to understand other sentient beings.

---

This game was created as part of ‘Queer, sentient and visionary ecologies’, an interdisciplinary seminar by the Universidad de Concepción and the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München. It explores sentient ecology, the interactions between human and non-human aspects of environments. By practicing sentient ecology, we attempt to treat all living things (and even non-living actors) as capable of having complex feelings and relationships, even though we might not understand those experiences ourselves.

In this game, you can explore your environment from the perspective of different entities, and by examining the environment you can change to new points of view.

We hope that while playing this game you think about your connections with non-human entities. Enjoy growth!