Possible Worlds: Towards a New Imaginary

We are drowning in daily dystopian images, creating a sort of ”future fatigue.” Now, more than ever, we must use scientific knowledge, artistic fantasy, and our human capacity for new imaginaries to articulate the possible options for future generations.

The seminar Possible Worlds: Towards a New Imaginary will be a space where art meets research and future scouting to discuss how to tackle future developments with imagination.

A diverse range of perspectives will be represented by Timothy Morton (participating via video link), ecologist and philosopher; Michela Magas, innovation advisor; Karim Jebari, philosopher; and Doris Rusch, game designer and researcher. The panel’s combined expertise—spanning disaster scenarios, human-centered gaming, dark ecology, new technology, creativity, and innovation—will create a unique platform for envisioning possible future scenarios. The audience will also be invited to contribute their visions through AI-generated images, which the panel will respond to.

The seminar is held in English.

The panel

Timothy Morton (participating via link)

Timothy Morton, ecologist and philosopher, is part of the new object-oriented philosophy. The book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World is a queasily vertiginous quest to synthesize the still divergent fields of quantum theory (the weirdness of small objects) and relativity (the weirdness of big objects) and insert them into philosophy and art. Morton is the author of 25 books, translated 47 times into 20 languages, and has over the years collaborated with artist like Björk, Laurie Anderson, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton’s peculiar conceptual vocabulary – “dark ecology”, “the strange stranger”, “the mesh” – has been picked up by writers in a cornucopia of fields, from literature and epistemology to legal theory and religion. Morton is active at the Rice University and recognizes that “a person who is losing a fantasy is a very dangerous person”.

Michela Magas

Michela Magas bridges the worlds of science and art, design and technology, academic research and industry, with a track record of 30 years of innovation. She is innovation advisor to the European Commission and the G7 leaders, creator of the Industry Commons Foundation and Member of President von der Leyen’s High-Level Round Table for the New European Bauhaus. She sits on the Advisory Board of CERN IdeaSquare – the CERN space for frontier innovation (ISAB-G). In 2017 she was awarded European Woman Innovator of the Year and in 2016 she was presented with an Innovation Luminary Award for Creative Innovation by the European Commission and Intel Labs Europe. Magas is also the founder of MTF Labs, a global community platform of over 8000 creative innovators and scientific researchers.

Karim Jebari

Karim Jebari is a researcher at The Institute for Futures Studies. His research interests are highly interdisciplinary, combining philosophy, political theory and future studies. His research at Mimir concerns ideas and issues related to global catastrophic risks and the long-term future of earth-originating life that he believes have been neglected in the X-risk community.

The Mimir Center for Long Term Futures Research is based at The Institute for Futures Studies, an independent research foundation that promotes future perspectives in science and public debate.

Doris Rusch

Dr. Doris C. Rusch is a game designer, researcher and play aficionado with a humanities background who holds a position as Professor at the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University. Her games have won numerous awards, and she has been an international keynote speaker and presenter including Clash of Realities, DiGRA, Game Developers Conference, Meaningful Play, Nordic Game Conference, FDG and TEDx. She authored Making Deep Games – Designing Games with Meaning and Purpose (Taylor & Francis 2017).