You can’t trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it. – W.C. Fields

London has a wacky relationship with water. It turns its back on the very river that runs through it. It has just survived one of the rainiest summers on record, and its inhabitants have yet to acknowledge the rising sea levels that could threaten to submerge parts of the city this century. Kevin Kostner’s mid-90’s film Waterworld could yet become our future reality, though hopefully without the bad fashion.

This year’s AA Summer School will speculate on the future relationship London will need to develop with water: how it runs through, falls on, and may soon forever engulf it. Our programme will work on this new Waterworld inventing projects ranging from small-scale on site installations to larger scale re-imaginings of the city’s future.

The Summer School will invent and describe this new hydro-phenomenon through compelling spatial, social, economic, ecological, cultural or technological visions. London is our experimental laboratory of ideas and actions. The brief and intense course—based on the renowned AA Unit System—emphasises techniques of interpretation, recording, drawing, making and thinking through diverse and evocative media types, both analogue and digital.