Symposium: Futures Brought to Life

On 12 and 13 May 2022, the artists' group Time's Up, in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts Vienna, invites you to the symposium Futures Brought to Life at AIL, the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab in Vienna.

Futures Brought to Life: From Immersion via Agency to Engagement
12 and 13 May 2022, from 10:00 am to 05.00 pm (CET)
Angewandte Innovation Lab, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna / Austria
https://timesup.org/CCAHybrid

In times such as these, we need to be interested in “What if..?” questions and “As if...” experiences. Not as “mere speculation” but as exercises for the imagination, developing the Arts Thinking processes of anticipating in multiples and options, ambiguous and contingent. Actively training futures thinking, create agency and futures preparedness, leading to a democratisation of the future.

The FBTL Symposium offers applied and theoretical insights into practices for creating experiential, mutant and hybrid futures. The symposium integrates a wide spectrum of Experiential Futures practices, from Speculative Design via Mutant Futures to Physical Narratives. Having a strong focus on Futures Literacy as a means to make the diversity and plurality of possible futures negotiable for all interested. This literacy fosters the capacity for imagining 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 broad public. The capacity to “think out loud” about possible futures has escaped the ivory towers, houses of government and large corporations, it is becoming integrated in all our lives.

Futures Literacy takes many forms. The emerging field of Experiential Futures is one. Experiential Futures create direct encounters with possible futures. This unmediated experience removes the barrier of complexity, fear and paralysis that is often felt when imagining possible futures. The immersive experience of being in 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 lead to agency. Bringing together a range of the most innovative and experimental futures practitioners, involved in speculative design, activism, policy, business and the arts, the symposium will expand our horizons of imaginable futures practices.

Preliminary Line Up 12 May 2022 10:00 – 17:00
Superflux (Anab Jain) - You Can Only Be The Revolution
Extrapolation Factory (Chris Woebken and Elliott 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

Preliminary Line Up 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[?]

Details: https://timesup.org/sites/default/files/publications/FBTL_SpeakerDetails.pdf

Participation in the two-day event is free of charge and open to all interested parties, subject to the applicable Covid rules. For all those who are not able to attend the event on site in Vienna, the individual presentations will be streamed live and active participation in the Q&As via chat will be offered.
Stream URL for 12 May: https://youtu.be/Yl4JJ4LTuIs
Stream URL for 13 May: https://youtu.be/biT5mHzv-Ro

Futures Brought to Life feeds Curiouser and Curiouser, cried Alice: Rebuilding Janus from Cassandra and Pollyanna (CCA) - an artbased research project from Design Investigations (ID2) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna und Time's Up. It is supported by the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK) from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR561.

Time’s Up is a nonprofit organisation founded in 1996 in Linz Austria, to investigate the possibilities of haptic interactive human scale situations. As a laboratory for the composition of experimental and experiential situations, Time’s Up creates explorable, narrative spaces, especially in the context of constructing models of possible futures and building physical narratives that explore contemporary sociopolitical issues.

Time's Up is supported by the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport BMKOES, Linz Kultur, Land OÖ & Linz AG.