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--- future_fabulators:antipodean_musings [2014-03-05 12:09] – nik
+++ future_fabulators:antipodean_musings [2014-03-07 01:05] – nik
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 by Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney. Glenelg, Australia. 020140210 - 02140305
-A few years ago, we started to design 'seasonal programming’ for FoAM in Brussels. During winter we would focus on research, in the spring design and productions, dedicate summer to outward oriented activities (e.g. workshops and public events) and in the autumn retreat into documentation and reflection. While we feel the theory is sound, it has been difficult to implement in practice, as embedded as we are in a world that is always 'on', regardless of the weather, temperature or diurnal-cycles. In following these seasonal rhythms, the northern hemisphere winter suggests our time is primarily focused on research.
+Three weeks ago, we began our research retreat in Adelaide, Australia (in line with the 'seasonal programming’ for FoAM in Brussels, despite the summer here) with the aim of better understanding the techniques, tools and theories around 'future studies' and looking further afield to find tehcniques applicable to our current work. This delineated focus was deemed necessary since it is rare for us to be able to spend time in more or less uninterrupted reading, following interesting leads down often fractal rabbit holes. We attempted to answer questions that had arisen from the last few years of practice with scenarios and in particular prehearsals.
-<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/11645684936/" title="20131227 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5490/11645684936_0f9fa6d78d_c.jpg" width="800" height="492" alt="20131227"></a></html>
+{{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/12979291555/}}
-Three weeks ago, we began our research retreat in Adelaide, Australia (despite the summer here) with the aim of better understanding the techniques, tools and theories of 'future studies' and if they could be applied in our work. This delineated focus was deemed necessary since it is rare for us to be able to spend weeks in more or less uninterrupted reading, following interesting leads down often fractal rabbit holes. We attempted to answer questions that had arisen from the last few years of practice with scenarios and in particular prehearsals.
-Since we began working with what we call 'speculative culture' (~2009), we have crossed paths with people like Bruce Sterling, Anab Jain, Chris Luebkeman, Scott Smith, Justin Pickard, Maya van Leemput, Stuart Candy (amongst others) who are more directly involved with futures, future studies or may even call themselves futurists. We have seen many points of contact (and departure) with their work, but without dedicated time to research the field in earnest we often felt like dabbling amateurs or isolated adventures, most likely been spinning the reinventing wheels and solving well understood problems. So, these few weeks have been very precious to us: we have begun to place our practice in a wider context, understand where we can stand on others' shoulders, and where we consciously or unconsciously stumbled on possible solutions or new avenues of exploration. It has helped us to more or less answer the questions of why we working more explicitly with futures, as well as beginning to glimpse answers to a few other dilemmas, including:
+Since we began working with what we now call 'speculative culture' (~2009), we have crossed paths with people like Bruce Sterling, Anab Jain, Chris Luebkeman, Scott Smith, Justin Pickard, Maya van Leemput, Stuart Candy (amongst others) who are more directly involved with futures, future studies or may even call themselves futurists. We have seen many points of contact (and departure) with their work, but without dedicated time to research the field in earnest we often felt like dabbling amateurs or isolated adventures, most likely been spinning the reinventing wheels and solving well understood problems. So, these few weeks have been very precious to us: we have begun to place our practice in a wider context, understand where we can stand on others' shoulders, and where we consciously or unconsciously stumbled on possible solutions or new avenues of exploration. It has helped us to more or less answer the questions of why we working more explicitly with futures, as well as beginning to glimpse answers to a few other dilemmas, including:
- * how do we increase a sense of agency when faced with unknowable volatile futures?
+  * how do we increase a sense of agency when faced with unknowable volatile futures?
   * who are our historical and contemporary peers?
   * how can we increase the commitment to co-create preferred futures?
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   * etc.
-<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/12287400455/" title="20140201 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3784/12287400455_efff2019e5_c.jpg" width="800" height="548" alt="20140201"></a></html>
+{{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/12287400455/}}
 ==== Our path towards futures ====
-Our decision to work with futures so far has been heavily based on practice and intuition. We were frustrated with shorttermism and thinking in silos that lead to various contemporary crises. We agreed with many activists and thinkers that the biggest crisis today is a cultural one. We realised how much transdisciplinary co-creation helps opening up new possibilities. We wondered how to increase cultural resilience in the face of turbulence and investigated how we could prepare for whatever the future might throw our way. Were curious about behavioural and visionary adaptation and found that experiencing environmental and social effects is much more profound than preaching, showing or talking about them them. Guided by our motto "grow your own worlds", our many paths - from mixed reality, to experience design, ecological and technological arts, process facilitation and cultural resilience - all seem to converge on "speculative culture" or "culture of foresight": creating a context in which we can collaboratively create diverse images of the future as embodied experiences today.
+Our decision to work with futures so far has been heavily based on practice and intuition. We were frustrated with short-termism and 'thinking in silos' that has contributed to various contemporary crises. We agree with many those who see that the crisis-beneath-the-crisis is a cultural one. We saw first hand how significantly transdisciplinary co-creation help open up new possibilities. We wondered how we could increase cultural resilience in the face of turbulent unknowns and investigated how we could prepare for whatever the future might throw our way while not having to rely on predictions about what that may be. Were curious about behavioural change and visionary adaptation and found that experiencing environmental and social effects is often much more profound than preaching, showing or talking about them them. Guided by our motto "grow your own worlds", our many paths - from mixed reality, to experience design, ecological and technological arts, process facilitation and cultural resilience - all seemed to converge on "speculative culture" or a "culture of foresight" creating a context in which we can collaboratively create diverse images of the future as embodied experiences today.
-Our futures practice has a peculiar history: it evolved from a range of parallel and disparate threads of our work, some dealing with (direct) experience, others with creating our preferred futures as artistic experiments and others again with preparing for and living in environmental, social and economic turbulences today and in the times ahead. In retrospect, we were always circling around the edges of the futures field, but have never explicitly researched it. To begin with, we were creating immersive, responsive environments where people could experience the effects of their actions 'on a human scale' (t* series). At the same time we worked on speculative human-plant-interactions in groWorld, as an alternative to industrial monocultures and patenting of life. Over time this work grew into an alternate reality narrative called Borrowed Scenery where we immersed our guests in a parallel reality where plants are a central aspects of human society. In another thread, we designed and hosted transdisciplinary Luminous Green workshops to address systemic environmental and cultural challenges through participation and co-creation. And finally, the closest we came to futures studies was during Resilients, where we our field of investigation was 'future preparedness', hypothesising that we could increase personal and collective resilience by rehearsing a range of possible futures.
+Our futures practice has a peculiar history: it evolved from a range of parallel and disparate threads in our work, some dealing with (direct) experience, others with creating our preferred futures as artistic experiments and yet others with preparing for and living in conditions of environmental, social and economic turbulence. In retrospect, we were always circling around the edges of the 'futures field', but had never explicitly researched it. To begin with, we were creating immersive, responsive environments where people could experience the effects of their actions 'on a human scale' (t* series). At the same time we worked on speculative human-plant-interactions in groWorld, as an alternative to industrial monocultures and patenting of life. Over time this work grew into an alternate reality narrative called Borrowed Scenery where we immersed our guests in a parallel reality where plants became a central aspects of human society. In another thread, we designed and hosted the transdisciplinary Luminous Green workshops to address systemic environmental and cultural challenges through participation and co-creation. And finally, the closest we came to futures studies was during Resilients, where we our field of investigation was 'future preparedness', hypothesising that we could increase personal and collective resilience by rehearsing a range of possible futures.
-Our romance with the futures has always been entangled with storytelling, but also more eclectic practices as meditation, divination and invocation (that most futurists are careful to stay very clear of nowadays). Not having a professional futurists’ background, we have not shied away from these fields - we see them as different aspects of knowing-, relating to- and having agency in the world. So, with this weird collection of conceptual and practical baggage, in the beginning of February 2014 we embarked on a journey through the unwieldy terrain of the futures studies. We had less than a month to do something that could take several PhDs (I guess we have never outgrown Alice’s plans for doing six impossible things before breakfast). Luckily, we had two very useful filters: a set of practice-based questions that we collected from various debriefs from future preparedness workshops and a more or less defined direction for the Future Fabulators pre-enactments we’re planning to design in the coming months. Whatever we researched had to be furthering our practice, in one way or another.
+Our romance with the futures has always been entangled with storytelling, but also more eclectic practices including meditation, divination and invocation (which most futurists are careful to stay very clear of nowadays). Not being professional futurists, we haven't shied away from these fields - we see them as different aspects of knowing-, relating to- and having agency in the world. So, with this weird collection of conceptual and practical baggage, in the beginning of February 2014 we embarked on a journey through the unwieldy terrain of the field which calls itself "futures studies". We had less than a month to do something that could easily have taken several PhDs (I guess we have never outgrown Alice’s plans for doing six impossible things before breakfast). Luckily, we had two very useful filters: a set of practice-based questions that we collected from various debriefs from future preparedness workshops and a more or less defined direction for the Future Fabulators pre-enactments we’re planning to design in the coming months. Whatever we researched had to be furthering our practice, in one way or another.
 <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/9367569207/" title="20130725 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7407/9367569207_287ceb9eff_c.jpg" width="800" height="532" alt="20130725"></a></html>
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 ==== But why…? ====
 We began by interviewing each other using the "5 whys" technique. From this conversation it became clear that we’re interested in examining the futures tools and techniques that can help us adapt to uncertainty (in its many guises). We believe that a culture where foresight is embedded in daily life would be more adept to living in a world of probabilities without anxiety, away from rigidly linear 'cause and effect'. Being able to envision alternative futures in the present could allow us to embrace uncertainty more easily. It could also open up new possibilities that would shake up the currently unacceptable status quo and attempt to steer it towards a future where holistic, inclusive and anti-fragile values prevail. We want to investigate experiential futurism as a way to (re)connect future visions with realities, where humans aren’t separate from planetary "others". Our conjecture is that by experiencing what it would be like to be ourselves in a range of future scenarios we could observe our present situation more clearly, adapt to the world as it evolves and experience the agency to navigate our present in the direction of more preferred futures.
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 ====Studying Futures====
-From this rather idealistic and ambitious starting point, we delved into the literature of future studies, hoping to generate a mental map of the field. This lead us down labyrinths of military strategy departments and corporate think tanks, with pathways through dusty academic paper factories and glitzy design [[:/forecasting]] blogs leading us towards [[the future of futures]] and [[non predictive strategy]]. We learned buckets of jargon and found out that futures studies has many faces and inconsistencies, as well as an interesting histories and promising futures. From what we could grasp from skimming through papers and websites, the field seems somewhat fragmented and insular, comprised of various cliques and schools of thought and action. There are the Europeans (in France, Netherlands, Germany, UK…) and the Americans (such as the RAND think tank or the Global Business Network), with quite formalised methods designed for policy and strategic planning originating in the (cold) war era of the 40s and 50s and more recently looking at digitally enhanced [[crowdsourced futures]]; there is the Pacific strand with the Manoa School in Hawaii and several Australian futurists enclaves, proposing methods that are perhaps more culturally and philosophically closer to what we’re interested in (such as causal layered analysis, or [[integral futures]]) and finally there are interesting futurists from Mexico, India, the middle east and parts of the Global South, with interesting views on de-colonising futures.
+From this rather idealistic and ambitious starting point, we delved into the literature of future studies, hoping to generate more coherent mental maps of the field. This has lead us down labyrinths of military strategy and around corporate think tanks, with pathways through dusty academic paper factories and glitzy design [[:/forecasting]] blogs leading us towards [[the future of futures]] and [[non predictive strategy]]. We learned buckets of jargon and came to see that futures studies has many faces and inconsistencies, as well as interesting histories and promising futures. From what we could grasp from skimming through papers and websites, the field seems somewhat fragmented and insular, comprised of various cliques, schools of thought and modes of action (which in fairness, is true of many academic disciplines with one foot in the practice-based). There are some obvious geographic and lingusitic differences; the Europeans (in France, Netherlands, Germany, UK…) and the Americans (such as RAND or the Global Business Network), some with quite formalised methods designed for policy and strategic planning originating in the (cold) war era of the 40s and 50s and more recently looking at digitally enhanced [[crowdsourced futures]]; there is the Pacific strand with the Manoa School in Hawaii and several Australian futurists enclaves, proposing methods that are perhaps more culturally and philosophically closer to what we’re interested in (such as causal layered analysis, or [[integral futures]]) and finally there are interesting futurists from Mexico, India, the middle east and parts of the Global South, with interesting views on de-colonising futures.
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 ==== What next? ====
-As our current research phase comes to an end, we can only conclude that we’re just beginning. We have left many threads open, messy and unknotted, which is somewhat frustrating, yet we know that some of our investigations have found fertile ground. We plan to get back to the research between our practical experiments, but we’d also like to encourage all of the Future Fabulators, and anyone else interested in these subjects to keep feeding these pages with interesting, relevant and/or surprising information and insights.
+As our current research phase comes to an end, we can only conclude that we’re just beginning. We have left many [[background]] threads open, messy and unknotted, which is somewhat frustrating, yet we know that some of our investigations have found fertile ground. We plan to get back to the research between our practical experiments, but we’d also like to encourage all of the Future Fabulators, and anyone else interested in these subjects to keep feeding these pages with interesting, relevant and/or surprising information and insights.
 <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/8647294919/" title="20130412 by zzkt, on Flickr"><img src="https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8102/8647294919_2141d7e13d_c.jpg" width="800" height="463" alt="20130412"></a></html>