It took us a while to get back, but here is a new Speculative Futures event!

Agenda:

19:00 CEST - The Design Futures Initiative

19:10 CEST- Grace Leonora Turtle Polifroni (Talk)

19:45 CEST- Q&A

"The future as a mirage disorienting the present. Truth is a matter of the imagination" Ursula K. Le Guin

BUT

"We live in a state of impasse, a moment where existing social imaginaries and practices no longer produce the outcomes they once did, but no new imaginaries or practices have yet been created" Lauren Berlant

Fiction is a reflection on reality. As paraphrased by Le Guin, science fiction is often described as extrapolated from the present, intensifying trends from the here and now for dramatic effect and extending them into the future. But extrapolation is not the end game. It is far too rationalistic and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind and variables are the spice of life. Extrapolations engender the future, creating a mirage disorienting the present. Variables create coordinates for traversing expansive imaginaries that give way to unknown possibilities for how we act on the world differently.

With this in mind, Grace from Becoming will be sharing some recent projects and experiments aimed at expanding imaginaries, including the upcoming C-19 Control Wars (CW) used to invoke futures vibrating on our present through performative, adversarial and collaborative fiction as input to simulate emerging scenarios, test transitions, and critic present conditions.

Who is Becoming? Becoming is an adventurous research studio messing with emerging scenarios to reframe our world otherwise, interrogating the real-but-as-yet-unnamed, and the imagined-but-as-yet-not-real to consider dynamic shifts in our society and create the conditions to become otherwise. As a society and a species.

https://becoming.network/

On this occasion we will have the next speaker:

- Grace Leonora Turtle Polifroni: A post-disciplinary designer and researcher using experimentation, performativity and play to explore futures, expand imaginaries, and give insight into how we might interface with the world differently. Grace’s practise focuses on creating conditions for collective action and systems-level change towards alternative realities. Her research engages with sociotechnical imaginaries and mutating postures and mindsets surrounding queer theory, feminism, posthumanism, decoloniality, accelerationism and their material expressions and implications on the world.

Hurry up! We only have space for 200 attendees at Zoom. We will send the connection details the same day of the event.

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Are you a designer, artist, scientist, futurist... No matter what you are, you just have to be interested in speculative design, futures design, critical design, science fiction or any other approach that uses design to help imagine and speculate on alternative futures.