We have an imagination gap about the future, flipping between dull progress and fears of collapse. Art can help bridge it
Click here (or on the image above) to go to the Future Narratives video presentation
We like the visionary work of Demos Helsinki, and have shared the work of its director Roope Mokke many times here (Demos Helskini were responsible for planning and researching the country’s basic income trial, and run the Untitled community).
Roope posted information on a speculate talk he was giving in Espoo last week, with the title “Future Narratives – how art can help us recreate stories of the future”. If you click the image above, it’ll take you to where the video can be played - Roope’s presentation starts at 4.55 and runs for 30 mins, followed by a panel discussion.
His thesis is intriguing:
Art, understood differently, can bridge the imagination gap in thinking about the future before us
That gap is currently between a commitment to a progressive future (flying cars/gleaming ziggurats) - and disaster/collapse. We can do better.
Art can help - but not if we think about it in the old ways. Which would be either as an input to wellbeing, innovation, the fruitful conditions for new products and services. Or, alternately, as something completely autonomous, the expression of the will of the artist, in relation to a bubble-world of aesthetic appreciation. Neither help us bridge our gaps.
Instead, Roope asks, let’s think about art in three new ways, making it useful to break down our complacency/horror about the future. Each of these ways emphasises what art can do - which is to make “extraordinary material”
MAKE NORMAL WEIRD - This is how imagination starts - by taking apart the normal and the “realistic, pointing out the underlying rules that govern it. This is about dissociation
MAKE WEIRD NORMAL - This is where experimentation starts - by establishing new rules and suppositions, connecting them to the context around t hem. This is about association
[often neglected] GIVE LIFE TO WEIRD. Roope wants to remind us that all art is material and makes an intervention into life (or could do). It builds a world around new suppositions and rules. This is about organisation
Roope speculates that “art could make real new ways of being, sensing, loving, having, working and enjoying things together”. And if so, then “art can become the new form of production and consumption after capitalism” - though in later questioning, Roope confesses he’s only started thinking about how that might practically happen or become.
But we chime with Mokke’s idea that some kind of creativity-centred practice (what might be called, classically, poiesis) should be at the centre of communities trying to imagine and realise better futures for themselves. How often are we all paralysed between The Doom and The Norm? What might happen in a CAN (community agency network) that could break that spell?