The Future as a Moving Panorama

“Toward Alien Cosmologies, prospective of an anthropological reset” is an on-going art-based future lab initiated by LIID Future Lab in 2017 to explore radically new ways of creating and questioning futures in the Anthropocene, AI and Post-truth era. This unprecedented paradigm shift is shaking all our anthropological grounds (human condition, relation to nature, time and space, values and belief systems, etc.) and requires to emancipate from western anthropo-centrism, materialism and epistemological frames, which still dominate conventional foresight practices. Post-humanist and non-western philosophies are important cognitive resources in that regard, but also art and aesthetics to liberate imagination, adventure into more free-style cognitive paths, and generate ex-centric future vocabularies at the periphery of dominant futures.

Through iterative research, the lab developed a fluid and non-hierarchal conceptual canvas to design or appreciate, individually or collectively, future worlds or rather “cosmologies”.  These stand as borderless, hybrid (real, virtual and fictional) future universes where alternative rationalities, life-styles, hybrid ecosystems and modes of existence can be designed as speculative experiments.

In these future and more-than-human cosmologies, the alien is as much the human who needs to reinvent sustainable ways of living on Earth, as AIs’ mysterious black-boxes, avatars, non-humans, viruses and other strange species fashioned by bio-engineers, and more generally the unknown and the future.  How to live in the future and make a society with the alien factor?

For the conference, we will introduce the canvas, which works as a “polygonal” critical topology.

RBW

Option (if additional time or space): we will perform a narrative system of five entangled stories created with the canvas, to prototype and simulate a first and most likely dysfunctional future cosmology. These stories are narrated along a visual demonstration made of artistic photomontages but also include real-life characters, places or stakeholders. Instead of falling into radically alternate worlds or science-fiction aesthetics (where world-building approaches often lead), the experience searches to play with the ambiguity between reality and fiction, and with the make belief mechanisms at the heart of our relation to the future. The stories will also include a theoretical dimension, half way between philosophical tales of the future and theory-fiction experiments, in order to touch on and relate key critical future topics in an un-orthodox way. As far as now, we have no clue of where that will lead us…

What do futures look like from the margins? The 2022 SFRA Conference is dedicated to visions of human futures that center and foreground the issues of those from the margins, including Indigenous groups, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and any people whose stakes in the global order of envisioning futures are generally constrained due to the mechanics of our contemporary world. For many people around the world imagining radically different futures has a life or death quality, as their presents are beset by societal discrimination, poverty, inequality, and precarity, as well as the acute effects of climate change and the global environmental crisis. How can futures from the margins speak to power in presents?
We are especially interested in contemporary “futurisms” that foreground the margins, expose market processes in manufacturing majoritarian futures. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• Speculation and Demanding the impossible
• Theories of contemporary futurisms
• Indigenous Sciences and speculative worldbuilding
• Neo-colonialism and speculative futures
• Worldbuilding the Otherwise
• Climate change and futures from the margins
• Critical dystopias in climate change thinking
• Pleasure Activism and Speculative Thinking
• New philosophies of time in futurisms
• Resistance and politics of hope
• Cofuturisms

Site et programme de la conférence : conference.cofutures.org/2022-conference/