Model Fatigue: role-playing climate infrastructural imaginaries

For this panel, I introduce the role-playing card game Model Fatigue, which invites participants to assume different socio-political perspectives to reimagine stories and visual representations (cosmograms) of climate futures. The game's goal is to build collective cosmograms that reimagine the infrastructure that organises how knowledge about climate is produced and represented. This speculative climate infrastructure is developed under conditions determined by the different types of cards that each player's team draws at the beginning of the game (belief systems, features, entities).If many games about climate from the fields of geosciences or the arts focus on raising awareness or representation of imaginaries, the game Model Fatigue opens a conversational and transdisciplinary space among climate practitioners—people who inquire into Earth’s climate—to critically reimagine climate infrastructure. With the game, I argue that developing tools about the representation and communication of climate change are no longer sufficient to enable climate actions; rather, the modalities through which we produce, interpret, and represent climate knowledge need to be reconfigured and reimagined. Model Fatigue aims to collectively reimagine the entanglement of technical systems with the politics and cosmological imaginaries of climate infrastructure.In this panel, I will introduce the game's modalities and draw cards from Model Fatigue to build climate cosmograms of other possible imaginaries of climate infrastructure.