Faculty Alice Bucknell Awarded 2024 Graham Foundation Grant

SCI-Arc is proud to share that faculty Alice Bucknell has just been announced as a 2024 recipient of The Graham Foundation’s 56 new grants to individuals. Selected from nearly 600 submissions submitted annually to the Foundation in September 2023, the funded projects include publications, research, exhibitions, films, site-specific installations, and digital initiatives that expand contemporary ideas of architecture through innovative rigorous interdisciplinary work on design and the built environment.

The projects are led by 84 individuals that include established and emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, and writers, based in cities such as Beijing, China; Bogotá, Colombia; Cairo, Egypt; Delhi, India; Houston, TX; Kampala, Uganda; London, United Kingdom; Los Angeles, CA; Melbourne, Australia; New York, NY; Paris, France; Washington, DC; and Chicago, IL, where the Graham Foundation is based.



Bucknell’s fiction-theory research project examines the possibilities and pitfalls of solar geoengineering—a deliberate, large-scale modification of the Earth’s climate systems—through the lens of Derecho, a $35 million supercomputer unveiled in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 2023. As the most powerful climate supercomputer in the world, Derecho is tasked with evaluating the likely outcome of various solar geoengineering strategies. Staring at the Sun blurs the borders between fact and fiction, reality, and simulation, unfurling across a “sci-fi documentary” shot across Derecho’s headquarters, corporate geoengineering facilities in Switzerland, and inside a game engine environment.

Folded into the project’s narrative is Earth Engine, an infinite video game also developed by Bucknell that integrates real-time simulation and climate data to collapse boundaries between technology and ecology, present and projection, player, and planet. Taken together, the project examines the implications of planetary-scale engineering projects and the paradox of predictive technologies in foreclosing other possible futures. Staring at the Sun is also supported by the Enter the Hyperscientific residency program at EPFL and Mudac in Lausanne.

“I am very grateful to the Graham Foundation for their support of this project, which I look forward to developing further at EPFL this autumn and debuting at the Solar Biennial at Mudac in early 2025,” Bucknell says. “At a time when mapping and simulation technologies are being utilized for particularly pernicious ends, it is all the more important to leverage speculative fiction as a critical method for cultivating more just futures.”

The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, founded in 1956, fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and producing exhibitions, events, and publications.

The 2024 grantees join a worldwide network of individuals and organizations that the Graham Foundation has supported over the past 68 years. In that time, the Foundation has awarded more than 44 million dollars in direct support to over 5,100 projects by individuals and organizations around the world. To read more about each grantee project, visit the Graham Foundation website.

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Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their recent work has focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations, and forms of knowledge. Their work has appeared internationally at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Gray Area, San Francisco; Singapore Art Museum; and Serpentine, London, among others. Their writing appears in publications including ArtReview, e-flux Architecture, Frieze, and Harvard Design Magazine. In 2024, they are the recipient of the Collide Residency at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, in residence at EPFL in Lausanne, and a mentor at the Algorithmic Ideation Assembly (ARIA) Summer School in Ljubljana. Bucknell received a master’s degree in contemporary art practice from the Royal College of Art and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.