“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

In recent years, a growing number of researchers from the field of the Arts, are developing, in and beyond academia, innovative approaches to address the future and its critical challenges, such as the environment, post-coloniality or technologies, and have an increased impact on society.

The arts are a universal language. In our education systems and research methodologies, these essential tools and perspectives the arts offer have been underutilized. This group of creative futurists and arts-integrated researchers are working to re-integrate the arts to benefit learning and understanding of the earth and each other. Artists and creatives are known for methods that are speculative, non-reductive, and attend to both humanistic and natural concerns. This session will explore the promise and the power of the arts to address systemic problems.

For this exploratory round-table at the Learning Planet Festival, a2ru is pleased to invite four art-based researchers who are pursuing pioneering research practice, platforms and strategies to contribute to future research and positive change. Together, they will share their experience, and discuss how to better value and amplify that movement.

Participants in this roundtable are actively exploring and practicing creative integration in the public sector, higher education, and industry.

Speakers:
Aaron Knochel, Professor, Penn State University
R. Benjamin Knapp, Director, ICAT, Virginia Tech
Raphaële Bidault-Waddington, artist-researcher, futurist, LIID Future Lab
Theo Edmonds, Associate Dean/Co-Founder, University of Colorado Denver/Imaginator Academy

Moderator: Maryrose Flanigan, Executive Director, Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru).

Recap : https://a2ru.org/recap-a2rus-artistic-research-for-future-challenges/

A2RU welcomes French artist and futurist Raphaële Bidault-Waddington to present her expanded art and future research ecosystem. Building on the heritage of conceptual art, her initial statement in 2000 was to consider art as a vast laboratory to explore, question and open critical perspectives on the world, and as a way to produce knowledge, eventually disrupting conventions, borders or disciplines.

Exhibited and published, her image laboratory addresses topics ranging from aesthetic speculation and value(s) creation to cities, metaverses and future world-building, from the digital transition to the post-truth paradigm. Her idea laboratory (renamed LIID Future Lab in 2016), also occasionally published or exhibited, experiments collaborations with organizations at the frontier of art with knowledge, economy, critical design, urban design, innovation and future studies.

From 2008 to 2017, her R&D lab on the future Greater Paris metropolis, hosted at ACTE Institute (Arts Research), Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne University, was laureate of several selective academic research and pedagogic innovation programs. Her latest R&D future lab Toward Alien Cosmologies focuses on post-human and post-colonial futures, the Anthropocene and the related anthropological and epistemological reset.

Watch the Webinar: https://a2ru.org/event/introducing-an-art-based-and-future-research-ecosystem/

About the Speaker

Raphaële Bidault-Waddington is an artist-researcher, author and futurist based in Paris and working internationally. Since 2000 she has cultivated an art-based research ecosystem organized in “labs” exploring the borders of art, contemporary world transformations, and hypothetical futures.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries such as Apex Art, in New York, Over Gaden Art Center in Copenhagen, gallery Forde in Geneva, and Colette and La Villette in Paris, and published in art and theory reviews such as Marges (Paris St Denis University), Pylone in Brussels, Les Cahiers Européens de l’Imaginaires in Paris and Susch Muzeum Magazine in Switzerland. Via LIID Future Lab, she has experimented collaborations with universities (e.g., CNRS, Aalto University Helsinki, Parsons School, Science-Po Paris, Lausanne University, IHEST, etc.), urban projects (Copenhagen, Montevideo, Shanghai, Tehran, etc.), cultural places (e.g., Atelier LUMA Arles, Geneva Museum of Art and History) and companies (e.g., Peclers Paris, Bouygue Real Estate, Chanel).

She is a member of international research networks on knowledge economy and futures studies.

All her exhibitions, publications, conferences and collaborations can be viewed on www.rbidaultwaddington.net

Time is a deeply multi-dimensional, complex and paradoxical experience. On one hand, our senses are able to experience several parallel or entangled forms of time, through events progression inside the real time, whether in the physical environment, in vehicles, via sound, screens and technological devices, images, windows or the distant landscape.

On another hand, and simultaneously or not, our mind is also capable of disrupting the timeline to travel backward and forward, in various dimensions (history, fiction, metaverse, immaterial, cosmos, future, etc.), and thus generating other time shapes and more dynamic time experiences.

Using images, artworks and theoretical concepts from different fields (philosophy, aesthetics, musicology, urban design, etc.), we propose to draw a taxonomy of time shapes and experiences, via a multi-faceted and diagrammatic approach (polygonal research).

RBW

PRIMER, the conference designed to prepare you for the future

In 2022, PRIMER seeks to explore a theme as old as philosophy: we want to share perceptions, experiences, and current state-of-the-art futures practices to look deep, wide, and far into what might soon become the next paradigms.

Experiences of Time
In an era of growing parallelisms and of age-old notions yearning to be redefined, we are brimming on a nexus where our individual and collective consciousness and our presences are increasingly manifesting in – and through – hybrid experiences.
It is certainly a defining time, one of those “perfect storms” in which we can proactively apply our speculative competences to the many challenges ahead envisioning futures with full awareness, with a sense of urgency, or doom. Or, simply, with inertia.
Our theme this year focuses on the experience of time.

Conference program on Instagram

Building on her recent chapter ‘Designing post-human futures’ in Knowledge for the Anthropocene (eds, Carrillo, J. & Koch, G.), and current exhibition/lab ‘Toward Alien Cosmologies, prospective of an anthropological reset’ in Geneva, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington will introduce the diversity of emerging philosophies that she mobilizes to open, think and structure new future perspectives.

The Anthropocene, but also the AI era and the post-truth paradigm, currently shake all our anthropological foundations, ranging from our terrestrial anchoring and (toxic) lifestyles, to anthropocentric value-systems, rationality principles and forms of consciousness. How can we design resilient future worlds, or even cosmologies, to navigate these uncertain and blurry horizons? As Professor Carrillo will highlight in the introduction, the epistemological (and ethical) challenges raised by this unprecedented planetary context require innovation in both our foresight and cognitive practices.

Presenting LIID’s on-going R&D future lab, Raphaële will highlight non-conventional philosophies, such as post-humanist philosophies (Ferrando), speculative and non-standard philosophies (Meillassoux, Laruelle) and theory-fiction (Negarestani) among others, to explore new future rationalities and methodologies.

This research also includes reflections on knowledge formats and art-based experiments. Mixing her experiences in knowledge economy, conceptual art, urban design, academic research and pedagogy, Raphaële will show how she designs hybrid future labs and heuristic devices (conceptual maps, artistic installations, fiction and image-based speculative experiences, etc.) to address the complexity and cognitive challenge of the future. Her practice resonates with current foresight explorations on world-building and transition design (Zaidi), and with futurescaping practices (Jain).