Abstract
In the beginning was the image. There were ochres on a cave wall or scratches on a piece of ivory or bone (Figure 1). The image itself was usually of an animal and is assumed to have had relational significance. The one creating the image was communicating with this animal. “To be able to hunt” notes Roberto Calasso, “one has to draw” (2020, p. 14). In depiction there is a silent agreement, establishing a relationship in which identities shift and hunter and prey exchange roles in that moment and in moments past and yet to come. The image held, and still holds, temporal power. It stretches out into the future guaranteeing a degree of stability and (perhaps) success in an uncertain world and back into the past acknowledging the centrality of exchange in the lives of both animal and human. And so, the future emerges through the creative act and we, the human species, enter time via the image. Bison licking insect bite (15k to 13k BP).
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Entering time was not a one-off thunderclap moment. It took place over thousands of years and occurred time and again around the planet. It was cumulative, a layering of temporality into human consciousness. It involved community, memory and repetition. Innumerable mistakes, trials and insights. This emergent temporal consciousness seems to have been triggered by shifts in the environment and nascent technologies like fire and language (Christian 2004; Wells 2010, p. 89). Our species has a knack for adaptation which is linked to creative problem solving. It is also linked to our communicative capacity. We never create in a vacuum. Creativity is dialogical, even polylogical in nature. Rick Rubin sums this dimension up well when he declares: “Nothing begins with us!” (2023, p. 89). Human creativity is emergent and complex. Arising from encounters with an ‘other’, it spins out thin tendrils of possibility that either work or fizzle out. As the millennia rolled by, we humans built up a stock of responses to the complex worlds we co-created. And as these worlds changed so we either adapted or fell back on earlier life ways. This was never a solo affair but involved a dance between individuals, their communities and the environment.
Montuori in his reflection on postnormal creativity sums this up nicely: A complex world does not merely require the ability to address complexity individually, to be able to think about it and think it through, but it also requires the ability to engage in dialogue in a way that reflects this complexity, and to envision complex and pluralistic futures. This in turn requires what was lacking from the creativity of Modernity, namely
This special issue builds on these insights offering the generative environment Montuiri points to. We cannot understate the role of creativity within Futures Studies practice. And creativity takes many forms. An image may form, as we suggest, in the mind and be transformed into visual representations, but an image might also be linguistic, haptic, sonic, or even fragrant in nature (Han 2009). In Art the social and the personal encounter one another, weaving creative expression and skill into products that connect people together around elements that have aesthetic power and vision. Indeed, it is vision and its anticipatory elements that informs the personal, social and anticipatory imagination which Futures Studies engages with (Bussey, Song, & Hsieh, 2017).
We would argue that much of the social imagination and individual conceptions regarding the future comes from works of art: film, literature, television, music genres, poetry, comics. Whether through representation or abstraction, Art can enable people to understand and engage with the complexity of futures concepts and bring the unseen to light. This special issue arose out of a curiosity involving such Art:Futures encounters.
As humanity faces issues of existential and ecological precarity, we are being forced to rethink our relationship with our futures. Modernity, which proposed the future as an empty space that was filled with ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’ has lost its ability to provide the deeper meaning and sense of agency that is required of a present fractured by contradictions and birthing new relational and complex possibilities. Art:Futures encounters provides some hopeful, creative, even fun tools to navigate such complexity.
Visual storyteller, Linnéa Humble sat in on a futures lecture in 2023 and made visual notes such as the one here in Figure 2. The image, this time on an iPad not a cave wall, captures her intrigue. She is present in the image but so too are a range of provocations. Futures needs to be provocative. Thinking with time (Linnéa Humble 2024).
As she explored the futures thinking, she doodled her way through a number of futures tools, shown in Figure 3. This creative engagement with futures thinking is what we mean when referring to Art:Futures encounters. Such encounters open up futures to a range of alternatives. The visual, sensory, imaginative processes that are in many ways definitional of our humanity can develop new grammars of the future, new expressive approaches to futures-making. They enhance futures literacy (Miller 2018). Doodling with futures tools (Linnéa Humble 2024).
Futurists rely on creativity to navigate uncharted territories of human experience, to find and forge connections, and to foster transformation. Many of the tools and methodologies within Futures Practice are designed to unleash the individual and collective imaginings required to seed alternative futures. This special issue of World Futures Review is a celebration of art, poetry and the sensory in Futures Studies; exploring the role of creativity and inspiration in Futures Thinking, and applying Futures Thinking towards art, and Art towards futures thinking. In short art, poetry and the sensory can be used to enhance futures work, and futures literacy can be a lens from which to view art.
Overview of Contents
There are 17 contributions in this special issue, and we have organised them into three sections as follows: Part 1: Creative Futures Part 2: Futures Poetics Part 3: Reflections on the Creative
Both Eve and Illustrating Tomorrow extend our opening reflection on cave painting, time and creativity into areas rich in possibility for Futurists. One is illustrated by hand whilst the other is the product of generative AI. It is clear these are not mutually exclusive domains of creative expression. What we see here is collaboration not competition. Creativity knows no bounds. Like photography and Photoshop before them, proponents and opponents of generative models with many declaring that “The End of Art” is upon us. We would beg to differ. Technology is a vehicle for human expression. What limits, shapes or determines this expression is human intention.
The third offering in Part 1 is from Elissa Farrow, who explores the use of the Japanese poetic form of haiku. In Haiku Horizons, Farrow probes fixed and growth mindsets through hand-drawn images and poetry creation within a participatory research study. Just as MacGeorge shows us how comics can be used to interrogate feelings about the future, Farrow demonstrates a successful case for the use of haiku. Poetry remixes the way we commonly use and access language, carefully selecting words to act as new access points for traversing thoughts and sharing emotions. Poetry - there is a lot to be found in Part 2 - can be a unique form of visioning the future, each of us forming our own abstract image, relying on our own experiences and associations behind the same words and phrases to arrive alongside the author.
The fourth piece is from Marguerite Westacott and offers a delightful visual journey into a CLA of self. Drawing on her multiple experiences as artist, educator and counsellor she brings in a range of visual cues as she ponders: “Future selves occupy a space of anticipation. Thus, the ‘What if?’ of my current PhD research is, what if, our embodied anticipatory aesthetic that underpins our relationship with futures, is offered a seat at the career education table too?”
Her iceberg is a clever play on Sohail Inayatullah’s use of the iceberg to represent the futures method Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) (Inayatullah and Milojević 2015). This deepened sense of self is the ‘elephant as iceberg’ in the room explored by Westacott. Her essay is followed by a similarly reflective essay from Justyna Doherty in which she journals on her experience in curating the exhibition ‘About Time’ undertaken at the Institute of Art, Design + Technology (IADT) in Ireland. For Doherty, this research was deeply personal. Like Westacott, she draws on visual images as a powerful Art:Futures device. Her stated goal was “to delve into the roots of human resilience and acknowledge the power of open communication and futures thinking, to create and reimagine a ‘better tomorrow’”.
Here we say, slow down and listen to the tides of life, linger on the coast of consciousness where becoming, emergence and spiritual possibilities may unlock our creativity and find pathways towards richer futures. Snowber captures this aspect of being in her Bodypsalm for Resilience Return to the tides of your own lives the ebb and flow of shifts, loss or fatigue. Invite an ecology of heart and mind let the earth support your body swirl and soften with the currents of all moving through you.
Few media have influenced how society references the future as much as film. While we typically turn to science fiction to show us the future, Kevin Jae reminds us, this doesn’t always have to be the case. In Films as a Signal, Jae blends Futures Literacy with Media Literacy in an analysis of the highly-acclaimed Japanese film, Shoplifters. On the other end of the spectrum, Simeon Spearman examines community defined tropes of the future within science fiction films through a meta-analysis of the crowdsourced knowledge base, tvtropes.org. Here he offers considerable detail in terms of tropes and suggesting that it is possible, and useful for futurists working with science fiction to develop “a science fiction tropesphere” to better understand the potential of the sci-fi genre.
Changing focus, next we turn to a duoethnography in which Trudi Flynn and Marguerite Westacott explore their (supervisory) relationship through sand tray work. Returning to visual and poetic inquiry this essay offers an ‘emergent poesis’ in which both authors explore the learning spaces afforded through a system of discipline (the PhD path) and the creative openings they generate through both the duoethnographic and sand tray processes, to plumb the possible emergent knowings they yearn for.
In Works of Art and The Future, Roberto Poli looks at the core of art itself, weighing aesthetics against approaches to the future and encouraging practitioners to utilize art in their futures work. His interest is in “Works of art as gates to the future” and his approach is theoretical. Temporality is central to Poli’s thinking thus he notes that “For every real situation, the past is not just ‘past.’ There are pasts that are alive and active, and there are pasts that are dead and silent.” It is in the space of indeterminacy that sits between these points of alive/dead that emergence resides. Poli concludes that: …works of art can definitely improve futures exercises, because both aesthetic objects and the futures are unreal objects and presents irreducible points of indeterminateness.
In the final piece of this special issue, Timothy Dolan looks at the role of aesthetics in human choice. He argues that humanity meddles with their environments and that domestication is a very clear example of the impacts of this meddling over time. He points out that we need to be aware of how our aesthetic judgements impact on our lifeworld. To understand that choices in the past have transformed wolf into poodle and palaeolithic humans into couch potatoes. Thus, he concludes “our aesthetic sense applied to biotech in general and genetic modification should not be seen as a vice. Rather we should simply be aware of where it might take us.”
Conclusion
Though it is a relatively nascent field when compared to other academic fields, we can think of the evolution of Futures Studies in different waves or stages. The first two stages can be referred to as validity and viability. Validity has to do with the need for Futures Studies to establish itself within the social sciences and academic communities. The hallmark of this stage is represented in works such as The Foundations of Futures Studies (Bell 2007), The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies (Slaughter 1996), and an array of methodologies, acronyms and tools.
The next stage was viability, turning futurists into strategic foresight practitioners; carving career paths with corporate and government work, demonstrating the value of our work. Our tools and methods bled out into other fields and were adopted by other industries. This cooperation with capitalism shouldn’t be taken as negative, and we have the deepest appreciation for those who came before and remained throughout, developing the tools and forging the paths we walk down today.
That being said, we find it worth acknowledging that both of the previous stages could be seen as particularly homogenous 2 ; though this was likely a circumstance of demographics, rather than by design. Things however are changing.
Over the past decade, we’ve been reading work and listening to discussions that indicate a new shift is taking place. If we want to stick with the alliteration of validity and viability (futurists love our wordplay), we could call it ‘variety’. Not just an open mind for new ways of thinking, but a hunger for it. Indigenous modes of thought, different voices, the nascent and the ancient. Terranascient, regenerative, feminine and post-gender. You could put it like this: We helped define the disruptive, taught industries to fear and covet disruption, now we are actively disrupting our own field. It feels like a return to what made Futures Studies exciting and alluring when we first learned about it.
That’s what this issue on the Art:Futures encounters is about, taking a step back from the ego, and probing the id. In these pages, you will find bright pockets of colour, personal reflections, first time tries, experiments, honesty, play and optimism. We hope you get excited and invite more art and creativity into your lives, explore it in your practice, share your poetry. We are lucky enough to be in a field that embraces the pragmatic while being wildly idealistic and it's rare to find spaces where the two can walk hand in hand.