The Futurology of Cooperation

“The research project ‘The Futurology of Cooperation‘ was conceived as a training camp for our imagination. We want to sharpen our competence to imagine new possibilities of collaborating, thinking and living together. By equipping our imagination with concrete and existing tools, by inventing new ones, and by sharing them with others, we want to train the muscle of speculative imagination, and rediscover the plasticity of reality.

Futurology, Futures Studies or Strategic Foresight is a craft somewhere in between art and science that tries to imagine or predict how current trends can develop into possible futures. As this craft is often practiced in the hidden back-rooms of corporate or political offices, we want to democratize the tools it uses, and turn them into an instrument of mutant cooperation and time traveling within the reach of all.

‘The Futurology of Cooperation‘ relies on co-learning and its radical inclusion ethics, and mixes the best of collective intelligence with poetic writing, somatic practices or even the occult sciences. Concretely, the research-team hacks, remixes and prototypes new methods of open-source futurology. We invent games, exercises and tools useful to imagine and design possible futures collectively, to develop and elaborate these futures, and to explore them. We are convinced that it is in the physical, first-hand experience of these worlds and futures that we can discover what they have to teach us, and how they might even modify or influence our behavior and lifestyles today. In practicing this type of open-source futurology an immersive art-form appears, somewhere at the border of group performance and experimental consultancy.

We record existing tools and our new inventions in our ‘Grimoire’ – a book of spells and a living archive that can be consulted by anyone interested in experimenting with time-travel in collective processes.

On the 1st of April we will launch a first version of our ‘Grimoire’, and for this occasion we invite some kindred spirits to share their thoughts and practices. On the 2nd of April we invite you to ‘Tikunst’ – a full night of experiments with the tools, games and exercises we invented. ‘Tikunst’ is not a performance, but a collective and participatory experiment in time-traveling.

The research-team: Anna Czapski, Diederik Peeters, Mathilde Maillard, Adva Zakaï, Hans Bryssinck, Rasa Alksnyte, Heike Langsdorf, Marine Thévenet, Anna Rispoli, Emmanuelle Wattier et Martin Boutry, Pierre Huyghebaert en Sarah Magnan (Open Source Publishing), – with the precious help and motivation of Maja Kuzmanovic, Siti Nurjanah, Vincent Lebour – and special thanks to all the students at KASK, P.A.R.T.S. and ESA Saint-Luc Bruxelles

Anna Czapski & Diederik Peeters are affiliated as artistic researchers to KASK & Conservatorium, the School of Arts van HOGENT and Howest. The research project The Futurology of Cooperation is funded by HOGENT Arts Research Fund, with the support of the transborder cooperation fund Région Hauts-de-France & Vlaamse Gemeenschap via L’Amicale & SPIN.