Temple of Futures Thinking in London
Avenir Institute. “…thing”, 2015
The future is a pastiche of relational and extrapolative images of expectations, desires and fears. Avenir Institute was founded in summer 2015 with the mission of exploring the questions on potentialities in possible futures. This was a gesture towards challenging the prevailing linear thinking in philosophy, politics, technology and arts.
As a summary of the think tank’s transdisciplinary researches between 2015 and 2016, Avenir Institute presents the total installation Temple of Futures Thinking. The political theologist Carl Schmitt argued about the nature of political as inherently religious. The belief in the sacred nature of the non-visualisable notions of ‘social contract’ or ‘democracy’ is quite proximate to the assurance in life after death, the existence of karma and so forth. Why then to settle for a limited one-dimensionality of monotheistic and autocratic teachings of the books?
The Temple of Futures Thinking is critical: it does not offer answers on the eternal questions, but it twists the processes of reflection about their roots. Knowledges are infinitely plural as are the possible interpretations of thinking patterns. Just like in Ancient Greek mythology, the literal is poetic and the poetic is literal. It is the superposition of human intellectual and emotional intelligence. The total installation consists of 7 brass mind maps with the core terms for contemporary futures thinking introduced by the Institute, the lecture- performance “Futures: Plural, Queer & Rhizomatic”, which digs critically in the nature of enclosed systemic thinking, and the publication “Against the Future”.
In the midst of the socio-political search for a new modernity, triggered by the perceived collapse of the postmodern promise, and the settling for the convenient refuge in nostalgia, we offer a focus on futures thinking as the way to replace the blind simplicity with a beautiful and multidimensional complexity. If we are anthropologically inclined to believe in something, let it be the belief in the limitlessness of human potentiality.
The installation is on view from June 17 - July 2 at Studio 24, 87 Crampton Street, London, SE17 3AZ (by appointment only: shtagergallery(at)gmail.com, +44 7541 251979
Imperialism post-ex-ante
Avenir Institute. “Imperialism post-ex-ante”, lecture-performance/installation, Sao Paulo (BR), 2017
The lecture-performance took place at the opening of the exhibition of Avenir Institute “Against the Future” on February 16, 2017. The exhibition is a result of the residency of co-founders of the Institute, Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen, at Atelier Fidalga (Residência Paulo Reis) in February-March 2017.
video of the lecture-performance
text, published by Avenir Institute in the aftermath of the lecture
Against the Future
Avenir Institute. “Against the Future”, publication (limited edition, signed), 2017
The publication contains mind maps of futures thinking terminology and the selection of the texts, written by the Institute in 2015-2016 in different contexts, where the terms are directly or indirectly employed.
The aesthetic form of the book is a “working paper”: the reader is invited to deconstruct the book physically, intervene with her comments, writings and doodles; share pages or parts of the book.
We have hardly yet begun
We have hardly yet begun, 2015, Joseph Popper
Originally produced for The Victoria & Albert Museum, London
© The V&A
Can you begin to remember the futures? Every single moment of the present creates potential and desirable scenarios. The history of progress is a continuous endless race from the point of ultimate uncertainty towards a fictional finish line of total predictability. Today, we enjoy the possibility of keeping in touch with people across the planet, crossing vast terrains and oceans, while simultaneously gluing a sticker on the web camera of laptops, afraid of being spied upon by Big Brother. The idea of the technological panopticon* as an instrument of an omnipresent observation system is therefore sublime: both fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
There are many ways of dreaming about the future. For some, it can be an escape into individual reality as a consequence of an unwillingness to face the currents. The realm of aesthetic freedom seduces science when non-hierarchical thinking is evolving faster than the institutions of knowledge verification within the field of science will allow. Scientific thinking enters the mode that it appears to despise in our present-day: fiction, which can be considered the result of an extrapolative doodle about the potential application of something the scientists haven’t even closely approached.
Today, knowledge creation and its verification mechanisms are still predominantly separated by disciplines: economics, literature, physics, history and so on. This separation of knowledge limits the speed of human pace towards possible progress. The mental gap between the image of a possible future and the institutional restrictions of its arrival becomes unbearable. The frontier between the ‘fictional’ and the ‘real’, so evidently uncrossable before, is violently penetrated in the moments when formerly fictional ideas become suddenly materialized: air flight, voyage into space, etc. These moments liberate the mind into free float. We have been finally heading into the future of infinite possibilities and abandoned restrictions. When will we arrive there and if it happens – how is it to live there?
There is a Soviet anecdote: “the future is certain, it is only the past that is unpredictable”. The ultimate certainty of the future is plain: it is going to come regardless of whether we have a place in it. The future is a flimsy construction subjected to anthropological gravity at a certain point of intersection between time and space. The strength of the pull towards the usual ground is defined by human-centrism in acting, thinking and dreaming. And we have hardly yet begun to depart from fundamental egoism behind the conviction that the Universe is turning around us. The future is fascinating, merciless and situated within the perfect chaos of storms.
*A panopticon is a proposed architectural model for the most effective prison. Developed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the structure requires one single guard in a central observation tower who is able to watch any prisoner at any moment of time. This creates the feeling for the prisoners that they are indeed being watched at all times, effectively constantly controlling their own behaviour.
– text by Denis Maksimov
original publication via Node Centre for Curatorial Studies, Prophecies
Fermeture exceptionnelle
The book is the result of spontaneous photo project that was produced by Avenir Institute on the morning of November 14, 2015, following the night of so-called ‘Paris attacks' that claimed lives of 137 people. It documents the life in the city several hours after the attacks. Traces of the media hype and official emergency safety measures (including closure of all public institutions) enter in dialogue with “business as usual” scenes of Parisian morning.