Conference “Toward Alien Cosmologies (Version 4), prototyping a future conceptual canvas of the AI era”
Nordic Summer University, Winter Symposium “Prototyping Futures”, Study Circle “Cybioses: Shaping Human-Technology Futures”, Diffrakt, Berlin, 2020
Images: selection of conference slides
Presentation and discussion of the latest conceptual plannisphere designed by RBW to spatialize and map the future challenges addressed in the lab Toward Alien Cosmologies, prospective of an anthropological reset”.
See presentation of the planisphere’s following version in article “Toward Alien Cosmologies, prospective topology of an anthropological refoundation” (in French), in FuturHebdo Anthologies Prospectives review #4, 2020.
About the lab
Toward Alien Cosmologies, prospective of an anthropological reset in the AI, Anthropocene and Post-Truth era
This lab was born in 2017 from primary research on the future of AI, showing how it impacted all domains of existence and life-styles, from the intimate sphere to greater planetary challenges, and even the making of truth and of beliefs. AI requires new visions and philosophies of the world and the future, which anthropologists call cosmologies. The lab being future-oriented (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t look at the past), we associate the concept of cosmology to the idea of designing future worlds, toward which we can look and aim (or not). These future challenges are vast and spectral, and rejoin the one raised by the Anthropocene, which requires us to emancipate from anthropocentric humanism and rethink the human condition at large.
In this “post-human” paradigm and in the future cosmologies yet to be explored, the alien factor represents as much these AIs as other non-human life forms, or even as humans whose body, mind and consciousness remain fully mysterious beyond the limits of science. In a bigger picture, this alien factor can be seen as the unknown, the uncertain and the future, that escape our control.
The vocation of the lab is thus to open future horizons and explore how to design new worlds addressing these challenges and the complexity of a hybrid, multi-dimensional and infinite reflection.
In this lab, the free, aesthetic and bold artistic research, allowing to think with images, forms, fiction and theory-fiction, and even performance, is meant to dialogue with more systemic, methodological and rationalized foresight research.
The lab also seeks to innovate at the crossroads of the two polarities of Art and the future, starting with the design of both artistic and heuristic conceptual maps.
Since 2017, the lab includes a series of shorter or longer research episodes, in artistic and academic contexts, and takes the shape of conceptual diagrams, pictorial research, mood-boards, installation, workshops, future camp, conferences, publications and exhibition.
