Futures Brought to Life

In times such as these, we need to be interested in ‘What if...?’ questions and ‘As if...’ experiences. Not as ‘mere speculation’ but as an exercise of our imagination: To develop Arts Thinking processes that help us anticipate multiples and options, to work with ambiguity and contingency. Actively training this faculty will give us agency and prepare us to step confidently into the future, thereby creating a basis for the democratisation of the future.

The Future Brought to Life (FBTL) symposium offers applied and theoretical insights into practices that aim to create experiences of futures. The symposium covers a wide spectrum of Experiential Futures practices, from Speculative Design via Mutant Futures to Physical Narratives. Meanwhile, its focus on Futures Literacy will make the diversity and plurality of possible futures accessible to all interested parties. This literacy fosters the capacity to imagine how things could be different and how these differences could be meaningful.

The field of Futures Literacy aims to bring the capabilities of futures thinking to a broader public. The capacity to ‘think out loud’ about possible futures has escaped from the ivory towers, government buildings and large corporations and is becoming part of all our lives.

Futures Literacy takes many forms, including the emerging field of Experiential Futures. Experiential Futures create direct encounters with possible futures. This unmediated experience removes the barriers of complexity, fear and paralysis, which often emerge when imagining possible futures. The immersive experience of being part of a possible future cuts through that obstacle.

This symposium investigates the ways experiences of a possible future enable engagement with futures in general and thus provide a sense of agency. Bringing together some of the most innovative and experimental future practitioners from the fields of Speculative Design, activism, policy, business and the arts, this symposium will broaden our horizons.

LINE UP
12 May 2022, 10:00-17:00

• Superflux (Anab Jain) – You Can Only Be The Revolution
• Extrapolation Factory (Chris Woebken & Elliott P. Montgomery) – A decade of participatory futures
• Katharina Unger – Farming insects: from speculation to industrial technology
• Alex Davies – The Present Edge of a Very Near Future
• Time’s Up – Sweaty Futures, Snooping and Joy: Social Immersion in Experiential Storyworld Futures
• FoAM (Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney) – Life, life support and the afterlives of (im)possible worlds

Link to Stream

13 May 2022, 10:00-17:00

• José Ramos – What Can we Learn from a Conversation with Three Mythological Beings from the Futures?
• Paul Graham Raven – The limit(ation)s of literacy: meandering toward a (trans)media ecology of futures
• The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum / Jacques Servin) - Fiction can sometimes lead to reality
• Lucy Kimbell – Prototyping social and policy futures
• Changeist (Scott Smith & Susan Cox-Smith) – Calibrating Experiences
• Sophie Howe – Why [do] we need a Future Generations Commissioner[?]

Link to Stream

About Time’s Up:
Time's Up investigates the possibilities of haptic interactive human scale immersive environments. As a laboratory for the composition of experimental situations, Time's Up creates narrative spaces, especially in the context of constructing experiential models of possible futures and building physical narratives that explore contemporary sociopolitical issues.

Futures Brought to Life is part of Curiouser and Curiouser, cried Alice: Rebuilding Janus from Cassandra and Pollyanna (CCA), an art-based research project by Design Investigations (ID2) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Time's Up. It is supported by the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK) of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR561.
All Time’s Up activities are also kindly supported by Bundesministerium Kunst, Kultur, öffentlicher Dienst und Sport BMKOES, Linz Kultur, Kultur OÖ und LinzAG.

Programme: https://ail.angewandte.at/program/futures-brought-to-life