7 January 2017
Uncertainty Scenarios: Fauna for Futures
Workshop, Enough Room for Space, BE
The amount of participants are very limited, please make sure to RSVP asap.
Location: ERforS HQ, Drogenbos
Time: 12:00 - 19:00 (on reservation only)
Avenir Institute is a think tank at the intersection of epistemology, politics, technology and aesthetics with a focus on critical analysis of potentiality in futures. In our projects we search for better questions instead of trying to find the suitable answers. We collaborate with the leaders of the different fields of knowledge and produce works in various mediums. The Institute was founded by Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen in 2015.
Agence Future
AF’s interdisciplinairy and cross-media practice has been in the making for over a decade. Agence Future grew from an independent project by Bram Goots (photographer) and Maya van Leemput (futurist) that started in 01999. During the first years of the millennium, the two travelled in 25 countries, spread over five continents to conduct interviews with more than 300 people who shared their ideas, images and feelings about personal, local and global futures. It is now more than ten years ago the team was on the road with recumbent bicycles, carrying the required technology for recording and distributing their work, interviewing in ten European countries.
Still from 'The Raven', directed by Lew Landers, 1935
When the going gets weird, the weird gets pro (Hunter Thompson).
Old traditions don’t seem to work anymore while new ones haven’t yet established. The pertaining state of uncertainty becomes uncomfortable. Rapid advancement of formal acceptance of otherness causes alienation and a renaissance of nostalgia. Black swans, elephants, jellyfish, (white) ravens, etc. are used not only as the metaphors to highlight possible emerging issues, but as alter-egos for the protection of otherness. They represent the internalised and externalised challenges and potentials that keep futures rich. Fusing futures, aesthetics and critique, Agence Future and Avenir Institute invite you to participate in an experience of creating the (un)familiar Other, that speaks of reality and ways of writing yesterday, today and multiple tomorrows.
This workshop is part of the project Uncertainty Scenarios, a collective experimental research project that explores the ways people throughout history have tried to speculate, predict and anticipate the future and different attitudes that go along with this. The project creates a common ground for a group of artists that all share interest in the concerns of the project and aims to establish a context for the development of new works. Together we reflect on possible consequences of current global socio-political or ecological issues and question our position as artists towards these. Uncertainty Scenarios tries to become an artistic tool to grasp the ‘futurity’ that is already, and increasingly, a part of our present.
Collectively we research for instance notions of speculation, methodologies used to predict the future, strategic thinking and scenario planning, risk and crisis management, divination and spiritual forecasts, Big Data, artificial intelligence or science fiction. How do these phenomena affect our thinking, behaviour and acting? What operations are we dealing with when we speak about speculation? How have technologies, like for instance computer modelling and calculating, affected our thinking about the future?
