Alice Bucknell

Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer in London and Los Angeles. Working primarily through game engines and speculative fiction, she explores architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence interconnections.

The Alluvials is a video work and interactive game environment examining the politics of water scarcity and drought from the perspective of the Los Angeles River.

Taking inspiration from the climate crisis facing the city of Los Angeles at a moment when its greatest monument to geoengineering, the Los Angeles River, is slated for a lucrative redevelopment project, The Alluvials addresses water’s relationship to both human society and nonhuman life across scales. The project focuses on the slippery interplay between engineered ecosystems, nonhuman characters, and speculative financial systems that define the future of Los Angeles and its river. It is narrated by a series of nonhuman characters, including the ghost of the celebrity mountain lion P-22, a pack of wolves that have returned to the desertified city after it has been abandoned, a joshua tree and yucca moth infiltrating a dried-up Lake Mead, and a hummingbird taking up residence in the glistening Malibu HQ of Next LA's private water company, Aquarius. The narration is bookended by two elemental hyper-intelligences: water and fire.

Ultimately, The Alluvials asks after the future of water systems in Los Angeles by looking into the region’s deep past. Acknowledging Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the Tongva People of the Greater Los Angeles Basin, and their understanding of the LA River as an ever-morphing entity, the project underscores that nature is an intelligent system, a technology in its own right. Through the emergent practice of worlding, or the co-construction of new worlds with human, nonhuman, and machine intelligence, The Alluvials expands on the idea that the end of an anthropocentric world-view is not the end of the world but a beginning for many other forms of life.