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--- future_fabulators:antipodean_musings [2014-03-05 12:30] – 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.
+{{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/12979291555/}}
-<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>
-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 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.
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+{{>http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzkt/12287400455/}}
 ==== Our path towards 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>