The research project ‘The Futurology of Cooperation‘ was conceived as a training camp for our imagination. We wanted to sharpen our competence to imagine new possibilities of collaborating, thinking and living together. 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 wanted to democratize the tools it uses, and turn them into an instrument of mutant cooperation and time traveling within the reach of all.
By equipping our imagination with concrete and existing tools, by inventing new ones, and by sharing them with others, we wanted to train the muscle of speculative imagination, and rediscover the plasticity of reality.
‘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. During 3 years, the research-team learned, hacked, remixed and prototyped new methods of open-source futurology. We invented games, exercises and tools useful to imagine and design possible futures collectively, to develop and elaborate these futures, and to explore and experience 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 recorded existing tools and our new inventions in our ‘Grimoire’. You can also read some more about the research project there.
