In the context of climate emergency and growing mistrust in knowledge institutions, both science and documentary practice have often been positioned as neutral authorities. Yet the knowledge they produce is shaped by political, social, and material conditions. This paper presents a creative practice research project that uses speculative documentary to trouble dominant narratives of truth and objectivity. Rather than rejecting science, it critiques the authority of singular truth claims in both scientific and documentary domains, asking how knowledge is constructed and maintained. The analysis centres on It Will Not Be Pure, a multi-channel video installation created as a form of climate fiction. Set in a near-future where soil is scarce and arable land is gated for the privileged, the work follows a researcher documenting life beyond these enclosures. Fiction and documentary language are blended to examine environmental collapse, purity politics, and socio-economic exclusion. Accompanied by video documentation, this paper reflects on speculative documentary as both aesthetic strategy and research method. Within environmental education, such approaches offer critical ways of engaging with uncertainty and imagining otherwise. The work draws on feminist, queer, and anti-colonial scholarship to explore interdependence and alternative futures.

This research explores concertinaing past, present and future interventional creative and pedagogical practices to address the challenges of the Post-Anthropocene era. We argue that the Post-Anthropocene is marked by biotechnological entanglements, environmental violence and digital overstimulation. The discussions herein critique a hyperattentive achievement society characterised by a scattering of attention, a near-constant screen-mediated stream of digital material and tasks and the commodification of leisure time. Enlisting Byung-Chul Han’s concept of hyperattention and themes and motifs from David Cronenberg’s films, the authors propose “FUTURE PROOF re(image)ining” as a collaborative Cli-Fi narrative concept. The project reimagines objects from an initial art installation with a diffusion-based machine learning model. By drawing on a constellation of Taoist philosophical practices, Zen garden design, scholars’ rocks and Cronenbergian themes, the authors propose an exhibition featuring reimagined cave-like gongshi rock structures and objects. A triangulation of spaces for FUTURE PROOF participants to inhabit facilitates an unfolding contemplative-creative trajectory. The concept includes a sensory deprivation cave, a View-Master cave for focused stereoscopic image viewing and a haiku/soundscape cave to initiate experiences. FUTURE PROOF aims to promote deep contemplation, challenging some of the deleterious aspects of Western digital-algorithmic screen culture and cultivating relationality with an always more-than-human world.