by Epaminondas Christophilopoulos
The exploration of the future, a tradition as ancient as humanity itself, has evolved from oracular predictions to sophisticated, data-driven forecasts, reflecting a deep-rooted concern for what lies ahead. The 20th century’s broad use of “forecast” has given way to a focus on participatory, qualitative methods in futures studies, emphasizing the importance of foresight over prediction. This shift recognizes the future’s inherent uncertainty and the value of exploring different alternative futures to inform decision-making processes and improving futures literacy among organizations and societies, and in this direction, art can make a substantial contribution.
Arts in various forms are expressions of human creativity (Gillon, 2000) and reflect people’s subjective experiences and shared social theories. Moreover, art works have the potential to unlock emotional and intellectual aspirations that cannot be expressed in a purely rational way (Clayton & Sarpong, 2013). The fields of art & foresight do converge on a common goal – to imagine and explore the future(s) – and several collaborations have emerged between artists and futurists to envision and influence the future.
One example of such collaboration is INSPIRE 2023 at MOMus[1], which integrated art and futures research to foster innovative thinking and cultivate “futures literacy”[2]. The primary objective of this collaboration was to explore the dynamics, benefits and challenges of partnering with artists, curators and museum educators in imagining and utilizing the future, as well as acquiring knowledge for the further application of art in foresight practice. A secondary, yet equally important goal, particularly for the museum, was to support the curation of a science-based art exhibition focusing on futures.
INSPIRE 2023
The MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art’s Inspire Project[3] is an extended workshop for young creators, led by distinguished European artists, aiming to promote contemporary creativity, in the frame of a hyper-intensive workshop. Since its inception in 2012 at MOMus, the Inspire project has been a hub of chaotic creativity, where emerging artists craft unique pieces within a week under the mentorship of renowned artists. This dynamic process culminates with curators assembling the exhibition mere hours before its debut. The 2023’s Inspire expanded significantly, hosting 40 young artists guided by Mikhail Karikis and Albert Barqué-Duran, while with its focus on the future, aimed to pioneer a collaborative model between art and futures studies, setting the stage for similar interdisciplinary endeavors.
The concept for the 2023’s version of Inspire originated from Areti Leopoulou, a curator at MOMus, during our encounter at Reworks Agora, back in 2019, where I showcased the Millennium Project’s Work/Tech 2050 scenarios (Glenn, J.C., Florescu, E., & The Millennium Project Team, 2019). After overcoming several postponements due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we finally formulated a comprehensive work plan and established a collaborative framework involving the UNESCO Chair on Futures Research[4], hosted at FORTH (Greece) and the Millennium Project[5], a global thin-tank performing futures research.
The primary responsibility of the UNESCO Chair was to design and facilitate two hands-on foresight workshops for the 40 emerging artists and the two resident lead artists (figure 1). These sessions were pivotal, providing the initial spark and direction for the artists to conceive and develop their pieces for the exhibition. In addition, the Millennium Project provided the three Work/Tech 2050 scenarios (Glenn, J.C., Florescu, E., & The Millennium Project Team, 2019) that were used as base scenarios, and provided advice on the overall process.
Figure 1: The INSPIRE 2023 process
The futures workshop
As mentioned above, the UNESCO Chair’s main objective was to facilitate conversations between the realms of art and science, preparing artists to delve into and conceptualize alternative futures. Invited artists, curators and educational staff of MOMus employed foresight tools to explore a range of future possibilities and were encouraged to seek out innovative ideas at the fringes, where the future often takes shape. Within the futures workshop, participants gained insights into diverse personal future visions, identified key trends and signals, and engaged in creative exercises like playing the surrealist game Cadavre Exquis to embody their future selves. They also explored the Millennium Project’s 2050 scenarios, enriching them with detailed insights through silent brainstorming sessions, crafting newspaper headlines for different future worlds. The day-long workshop ran over 6 phases as briefly presented below.
Phase 1: Introduction and Warm-up. Initially, participants took part in a simplified Polak game activity (Hayward & Candy, 2017), used to introduce them to the concept of the “images of the future” as a basic property of both cultures and individuals.
A large cross was drawn on the museum floor for this activity. Participants began by gathering at the cross’s center and then moved to one of four distinct quadrants, each representing different outlooks on the future, based on their personal beliefs and anticipations (Figure 2 and Figure 3). Participants discussed their different viewpoints towards the future and the aspect of agency. This activity sparked small group discussions, unveiling a variety of thoughts, emotions, and viewpoints about potential futures.
Figure 2: Polak game quadrants (Hayward & Candy, 2017)
Figure 3: Polak game (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
|After the Polak game, participants were given a chance to envision and express their future identities through another warm-up activity, the game Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse) (Gotthardt, 2018), a popular surrealist activity starting in the mid-1920s. This game encouraged collaboration among three or four participants, who would each contribute to a collective drawing, collage, or sentence in turn, without seeing the previous contributions. The use of Cadavre Exquis (Figure 4), besides serving as another warm-up activity, also fostered a conducive setting for artists and curators by blending futures thinking with artistic expression.
Figure 4: Cadavre Exquis activity (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
Phase 2: Introduction to the theory of Futures Studies. Following the warm-up activities, this segment focused on the foundation of futures studies, covering the discipline’s scope and introducing essential concepts and terminology for the upcoming lab activities. This included a brief overview of methodologies for scenario development and horizon scanning (identification of major trends, emerging signals, and unforeseen events), along with an exploration of Dator’s three laws of futures thinking (Dator, 2019).
Phase 3: Horizon Scanning. In collaborative groups, participants engaged in an initial horizon scanning exercise to pinpoint key factors that could influence future changes, such as megatrends, emerging developments, and unexpected events (black swans). For this exercise, we have used a simple horizon scanning worksheet[6] (Figure 5) originally designed by the UNESCO Chair in Learning for Transformation and Planetary Futures. This phase offered the first opportunity for participants to explore the futures using a structured foresight approach.
Figure 5: Horizon Scanning (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
Phase 4: Thing from the Future. The “Thing from the Future” game, developed by the Situation Lab (Candy, 2018), is an activity that aims to ignite creativity by encouraging to collaborate and “compete” in imagining objects that belong to different futures. It serves as a creative primer and introduces Jim Dator’s four future archetypes (Dator, 2009). According to the game’s rules, participants are tasked with conceptualizing objects that would be utilized in various futures, each corresponding to one of these archetypes:
- Growth – The most prevalent future scenario, often discussed by political and economic leaders, based on the hypothesis that economic growth will continue indefinitely.
- Collapse – Not always catastrophic, this scenario could lead to simpler, less materialistic lifestyles following a significant downturn.
- Discipline – Imagines a future where societal values, possibly stemming from crises, enforce more restrained or sustainable behaviors.
- Transformation – Envisions a radical shift where life, including humanity, transforms significantly, potentially into a ‘posthuman’ existence, driven by technological advancements.
The game encouraged participants to think broadly about future possibilities and to conceptualize diverse outcomes for humanity and the world, and it served as a perfect introduction for the next phase, the scenarios development (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Playing the Thing from The Future (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
Phase 5: Scenarios Development. Participants, having deepened their understanding and imagination on potential future developments, worked in groups to draft global scenarios for 2050, guided by Dator’s four archetypes and using a template that helped them employ a structured approach to envision and outline a future scenario (Figure 7). Each group focused on a specific archetype of future development (growth, discipline, transformation, collapse) and was assigned to identify three trigger points that would serve as catalysts for that specific future. Additionally, they were asked to imagine future events across the PESTLE spectrum. This phase enabled participants to delve deeper into foresight techniques and conceive possible innovative visions of the future, which would then inform the creation of artwork for the INSPIRE project.
Phase 6: Exploring the Millennium Project’s Scenarios. The participants delved into the Millennium Project’s core research, examining the three detailed WORK/Tech 2050 scenarios and their driving forces, with a particular emphasis on transformative technologies. To enrich discussions on these alternative future paths and add flesh to the Millennium Project’s scenarios, a silent version of the Harman Fan method (Schultz, 2003) was implemented. This required participants to silently convey ideas and reach consensus using visual cues and gestures, organizing thoughts on post-its across four time horizons towards 2050, then connecting these ideas to illustrate how various changes and innovations might interweave, depicting divergent futures.
It’s worth mentioning that the author has utilized the silent variation of the Harman Fan method on multiple occasions, demonstrating two significant benefits:
-Engaging: It catches participants off guard that they must “communicate” and agree through gestures, adding a playful element.
-Practical for certain environments and needs: Conducting the activity in a large space with numerous groups can become overly noisy and uncomfortable. Conversely, the silent version can be completed more quickly, making it more efficient when time is constrained.
The conclusion of this phase of the workshop, allowed the artists to dive deep into the three WORK/Tech 2050 scenarios and visualize specific snapshots that acted as inspiration springboards.
Figure 7: Scenario Development (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
The exhibition
Following the foresight workshop, the 40 emerging artists collaborated with 2 resident artists and the curators at MOMus to create novel artworks inspired by the exploration of the future towards 2050. This collaborative effort spanned six days, culminating in the unveiling of the INSPIRE exhibition (Christophilopoulos et al., 2023) to the public on the seventh day amidst a challenging and chaotic process (Figures 8 & 9). Typically, in a museum setting, a curator is familiar with the artworks and selects them well in advance while, after an extensive collaborative process involving museologists, architects, and lighting specialists, orchestrates the exhibition design—a process that often spans several weeks.
However, for the INSPIRE project, the artworks were created over a span of 6 days, with most completed on the final day before the exhibition opened. Therefore, the layout of the exhibition underwent significant transformations in parallel with the development of the artworks (that was taking place in the exhibition space), and the final exhibition design finalized just a few hours before the official opening.
The Millennium Project’s three WORK/Tech 2050 scenarios served as the foundational inspiration, yet artists had the liberty to choose the theme and technique for their creations. The exhibition showcased a diverse range of future-oriented images, some of which were directly tied to particular scenarios, while many artists concentrated on capturing the emotions evoked by contemplating the future (e.g. anxiety or hope), whereas a few derived direct inspiration from the foresight tools employed in envisioning futures.
The exhibition not only showcased the created artworks but also invited visitors in an entertaining Dotmocracy[7] activity (Figure 10), stemming from research by 4CF that had identified a list of contemporary barbarisms that will disgust our ancestors (4CF, 2023). The activity was decided in collaboration with the museum curators as an innovative intro to the theme of the exhibition. Each visitor to the museum, was provided with three dot stickers, while in a playful process, visitors at the exhibition were invited to close their eyes, envision a utopian future and identify present-day actions that might be considered barbarisms 100 years from now and disgust our descendants.
The INSPIRE exhibition ran at MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art over a period of 6 months (7April 2023-28 September 2023) attracting 9268 visitors in total, making INSPIRE on of the most successful exhibitions at MOMus for 2023.
Figure 8: INSPIRE 2023 exhibition (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
Figure 9: INSPIRE 2023, Performance by Natasa Mavromatidou (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
Figure 10: INSPIRE 2023, part of the wallpaper in the museum hosting a visitor’s voting on contemporary barbarisms (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
The aftermath
From the initial stages of this multidisciplinary collaboration in 2019, involving artists and foresight experts, I was plagued with anxiety and various fears. Concerns whether we would find a common language to communicate and collaborate with the artists. Concerns whether the artists and curators would be ready to accept such an “intervention” on the process of artistic creation. Concerns whether the futures workshop would have a meaningful impact, identifiable in the created artworks. This fear persisted throughout the artwork creation process and only subsided upon witnessing the final artworks and reading the artists’ reflections.
The results of this experiment have been extraordinary. The young artists were fully engaged in the futures workshop, while the two lead artists were also actively involved and embraced this collaboration between art and foresight. The majority of the artists have managed to create though-provoking snapshots of different futures depicting different aspects of future realities or created artworks expressing our deeper feelings for the future (artwork examples, Figures 11-13). The complete list of the produced artworks is included in the exhibition publication (Christophilopoulos et al., 2023). A complete list of the artworks is included in the exhibition publication (Christophilopoulos et al., 2023). The accompanying text produced by the artists, along with the artworks themselves, supports the observation that the futures workshop significantly impacted both the artists and their creations in most cases.
According to the renowned science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin “The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in, a means of thinking about reality, a method” (Gunn, 2014). This experiment showed that artists relished this conceptual space to trial both new and familiar ideas, exploring various future scenarios. The allure of the future, being a construct beyond current existence, also resonated with visitors, contributing to the public appreciation and financial success of INSPIRE 2023. Thus, both objectives of this multidisciplinary collaboration were met, laying the groundwork for a more organic collaboration between arts and foresight.
Selective artworks
Figure 11: Foivos Mingas, At least the rent was cheap. Wood, cement, metal, shoes. “The ice caps have melted, the water levels have risen, the sea claimed previously inhabited areas.” (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
Figure 12: Stefanos Zafeiriou. “The theme of the work revolves around a future scenario in which human communication takes place entirely through the internet. The installation presents the digitization of emotions as they are recorded in brain activity through an EEG.” (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
Figure 13: Marilena Papakyriakou, Post apocalyptic performing machine (photo: Stefanos Tsakiris)
References
4CF. (2023). How will we disgust our descendants. 4CF. https://4cf.eu/how-will-we-disgust-our-descendants/
Candy, S. (2018). Gaming Futures Literacy: The Thing From The Future. In R. Miller (Ed.), Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Transforming-the-Future-Open-Access-Anticipation-in-the-21st-Century/Miller/p/book/9781138485877
Christophilopoulos, E., Misirloglou, T., Leopoulou, A., Barque-Duran, A., Pappas, G., & Karikis, M. (2023). MOMus INSPIRE 2023. Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377951722_MOMus_INSPIRE_2023
Clayton, D., & Sarpong, D. (2013). The epistemological relevance of the arts in foresight and futures studies.Futures. Futures, 47, 1–8.
Dator, J. (2019). What Futures Studies Is, and Is Not. In: Jim Dator: A Noticer in Time. Anticipation Science, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17387-6_1
Dator, J. (2009). Alternative Futures at the Manoa School. Journal of Futures Studies, 14(2), 1–18.
Gidley, J. (2017). The Future—A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Gillon R. (2000). Welcome to medical humanities–and why. Journal of medical ethics, 26(3), 155–156. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.26.3.155
Glenn, J.C., Florescu, E., & The Millennium Project Team. (2019). Work/Technology 2050: Scenarios and Actions. The Millennium Project. https://www.millennium-project.org/projects/workshops-on-future-of-worktechnology-2050-scenarios/
Gotthardt, A. (2018, August 4). Explaining Exquisite Corpse, the Surrealist Drawing Game That Just Won’t Die. Artsy. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-explaining-exquisite-corpse-surrealist-drawing-game-die
Gunn, E. (2014). How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-americas-leading-science-fiction-authors-are-shaping-your-future-180951169/
Hayward, Peter & Candy, Stuart. (2017). The Polak Game, or: Where do you stand?. Journal of Futures Studies. 22. 5-14. 10.6531/JFS.2017.22(2).A5.
Schultz, W. (2003). Scenario Building: Harman Fan. Infinite Futures. http://www.infinitefutures.com/tools/sbharman.shtml
UNESCO. (2023). Futures literacy & foresight: Using futures to prepare, plan, and innovate. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000386511.locale=en
- Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki, www.momus.gr ↑
- This term refers to the ability to utilize futures to prepare, plan, and innovate, as defined by UNESCO (UNESCO, 2023). ↑
- https://www.momus.gr/en/exhibitions/inspire-project-2023-entasi-senaria-mellontos-kai-alles-istories ↑
- www.futures.gr ↑
- https://www.millennium-project.org ↑
- https://tulevaisuuspaiva.fi/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/FD-worksheet-Horizon-Scanning-Wheel.pdf ↑
- https://dotmocracy.org/what_is/ ↑
