About

The FluxKit for Energy Transition is a component of a larger project initiated by Speculative Energy Futures (SEF), an interdisciplinary, intercultural, multi-year (2017-2025) research-creation team brought together under the banner of the Just Powers project based in Treaty 6 territory, with participants from across Canada. 

SEF uses arts-based practices to imagine alternative futures. We bring together scholarly inquiry and creative processes to explore diverse perspectives on the topic of energy transition, so we can re-imagine energy futures beyond what we currently understand to be possible. A collaborative, multi-year research-creation project started in 2017, it brings together artists, activists, Indigenous legal experts and knowledge keepers, scientists, engineers, policymakers, social science and energy humanities researchers to investigate the challenges and potentials of energy transition through artistic means. 

The FluxKit for Energy Transition is inspired by Fluxus, the 1960s conceptual art movement. The iconic Fluxus Fluxkits were often suitcases full of art-making prompts to be disseminated to as many different communities and audiences as possible. Our FluxKit nests nine distinct but interdependent and interdisciplinary projects designed to catalyze participants as they unpack and encounter the kit’s contents. All of the pieces of the FluxKit share research and knowledge the SEF team co-constructed over many years, and each contribution to the kit provides a prompt or a set of instructions to encourage individuals and groups who engage with the kit to collaboratively act on climate justice and build the local knowledges necessary to get through this epochal transition.

In December 2019, developmental aspects of the kit were animated for the exhibition Prototypes for Possible Worlds and in November 2022, the Speculative Energy Futures showcased and animated the FluxKit for Energy Transition in St. Gallen, Switzerland, as the first visiting artists-in-residence at SQUARE — the University of St. Gallen’s new interdisciplinary space dedicated to fostering dialogue between science, society, business, politics, and culture. 

The FluxKit for Energy Transition is a toolbox to help citizens, policymakers, community organizers, engineers and scientists, teachers, and students think about energy transition as not simply a technological issue, but a social and cultural shift. It is available to be shipped to various communities willing to participate in the experiment. Alternatively, instructions for making your own kit at home are downloadable on each project page. 

We await the richness of texture that you and your communities will bring to the kit. Together, we must address the unfolding crisis of our modern petrocultures.