Forward Remembrance

The creation of speculative future scenarios has long provided opportunities for artists to bring their creative and philosophical visions to bear on society, with safely sandboxed thought experiments that provide society with accessible mental models through which such thought experiments can be safely approached and engaged with. In a similar vein, scenario planning has provided a process for businesses, economies, and governments to have a measure of the possible outcomes of different combinations of possibilities, on different future scenarios. Such exercises have helped in the formulation of public policy, the creation of iconic and widely impactful product designs and technologies, the creation of different story telling and media franchises, artistic and architectural movements and tangible premises for debate and contemplation. 

‘Forward Remembrance’ is the title of an artistic research project which will, by taking advantage of the unique affordances offered by the process of envisioning speculative future scenarios for artistic, creative, technological and socio-political explorations, attempts to create a context and the social architecture for collaborative co-creation and exploration of different concepts of utopia.  

As the chosen title suggests, the project's approach to speculative futures will derive from the notion of a persistent flow between the present, the past and the future, extrapolating deductions about the future scenarios being explored using artistic research methodologies, aided with creative writing and world building techniques and creative technology tools.  

The research project incorporates machine learning and generative AI resources for both analysis and representation. It is also utilizes telematic solutions for remote collaboration between geographically dispersed participants. The use of these digital solutions inform the research process to a fair extent and a portion of the reflective thinking carried out would be on the creative use of technology in facilitating the research objectives, mirroring at a fundamental level, how deeply entrenched technology is, and would continue to be, to the evolution of human society. 

The Metapunkt process and the Metapunkt Foundation are inspired by the Forward Remembrance research project and are conceptual vehicles for its progressive unfolding.