New York–based artist Josh Kline connects the smallest details—the curve of a police helmet, the grain of 3D-printed resin—to vast systems of technology, money, and ecology. His latest work, Climate Change (2019), is the fourth chapter in a larger science-fiction cycle depicting daily life in a catastrophic future. In conversation with Michelle Kuo, who included the artist in the recent exhibition New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century, Kline discusses his new film and his desire to understand human emotion in the face of colossal problems.

So what is it that we desire, but never fully get? In times of intensified political factions, joined by the repression of collective memory and mutual care, it might be self-understanding and—perhaps—unity. A central question for most humanism and activism today is how to come together beyond populism while not simply preaching to the choir.