#future fictions

Exercise 1: Fictional Movement Improvisation.  Telling stories through hand and finger gestures and patterns. Multiple dimensions and reflections through characters and emotions that give life to fiction.

Exercise 2: Fictional Movement Improvisation

Bioluminescent jellies float silently in space,

A deafening whirl of creations connecting outer space and the underworld together,

Eyes of a blackhole,

Jelly heads fusing and diciding like cells,

Mutating and warping,

We speculate from a distance with tears of joy and sorrow.

- RSY Cheung, 2018

October 22, 2016 Reykjavik Art Museum

During 13 – 16 October, 2016 A___Zooetics (a project exploring intersections between human, non-human and poetic knowledge spheres—zooetics.net), invited an international group of scientists, artists, designers, theorists and writers to stay and work at Ásbrú, the site of a former NATO base on the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland. The three days of explorations that took place on and near the base will be staged and performed at Reykjavík Art Museum in conversation with a keynote lecture by sociologist Jennifer Gabrys (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, author of Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet).

The transition of Ásbrú from a fenced-off military zone to a creative-economy incubator inspires a lot of questions about the technoscientific imaginaries feeding this transition and fueling our sense of the future. These kinds of military infrastructures are already incorporated into the future fictional narratives of a seamless transition towards innovation, resource extraction and subservience to global market forces. The Future Fictions Summit enacted a think tank that performed a variety of excavations into past and future narratives of Ásbrú as a laboratory of Iceland and the high North. The findings of this gathering comprise of a series of models that invite a reprogramming of relations between the body, territory and nonhuman forms of life, opening up alternative temporalities and uncanny sensorial powers. In these models, algae that resides on Hafnir shores in the vicinity of Ásbrú are offered as a source of transformation on a variety of scales—from the intimate to the oceanic. 

October 13 –16, 2016: Future Fictions workshop by Zooetics

During 13 – 16 October, 2016 Zooetics invited an international group of artists, designers and writers to stay and work at Ásbrú, the site of a former NATO base on the Reykjanes peninsula, Iceland. Its transition from a fenced-off military zone to a creative-economy incubator inspires a lot of questions about the technoscientific imaginaries feeding this transition and fuelling our sense of the future. One core element of such an imaginary could be called the ‘quantified self’ with its ‘technologically enhanced body’. This workshop scales up ‘the self’ from the human body to the ecological and the geopolitical. It considers a range of forms and practices—from wearable technologies to bioindication to social engineering—that weave and mash together past and future fictions for Iceland and the greater Arctic.