Researching the Future through Art

Foresight Talks webinar series

Institute For The Future (IFTF), Palo Alto, USA, 2023.

This webinar, organized by the prestigious Institute For The Future in Palo Alto, with which she had already worked in 2012, was an opportunity for RBW to present her entire ecosystem of artistic and prospective research, organized into different laboratories.-Her artistic practices, whether those of her Image Lab, or the creation of artistic diagrams, allow her to introduce artistic materials and formats into prospective research experiments, especially in her R&D labs such as Paris Galaxies (2008-17), and TAC Future Lab.-The future insights she produces also emphasize the contribution of the cultural sphere to the making of the future, and all the more for the future of resilient cities.

Webinar presentation

“When logic only gets us so far, art provides a creative free zone to explore and begin a mindset transition to future solutions”.

In this new episod of the Foresight Talks, IFTF invites Raphaële Bidault-Waddington, artist and futurist, founder of LIID Future Lab in Paris, in a conversation with Rachel Hatch, IFTF Chief Operating Officer.

During the session, RBW will come back on her hybrid background and artistic research journey, which lead her to become a futurist, and share some concrete projects – including with IFTF and Aalto University in 2012 -, showing how she designs transdisciplinary laboratories and methodologies.

As part of LIID Future Lab’s R&D, she carried from 2008 to 2017 a multi-awarded project on the future Greater Paris Metropolis at Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne University with an ecosystem of partnering schools, which allowed to experiment truly out of the box future research experiences on near and far futures (150 yrs ahead).

Since 2017, LIID’s latest R&D TAC Future Lab addresses the current Anthropocene, AI and post-humanist paradigm shift, which deeply shakes western anthropological and epistemological foundations, and explores new research strategies to co-create meaningful futures.

Recording of the webinar available on Youtube