Hidden Futures – Prediction and Promise

Which futures are possible, which are probable, and which are desirable? Whether it’s the Oracle of Delphi or the butterfly effect – people have always grappled with the question of to what extent the future can be predicted and shaped.

The second edition of ›Hidden Futures‹, developed and organized in collaboration with the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) at RWTH Aachen, focuses on the logics of prediction and promise. Today, the future appears not only as a hope or a canvas for projection, but also as something that is calculated, modeled, and managed. In data-driven systems, political programs, and social narratives, what is to come is constantly being shaped – and with it, what is already considered probable, desirable, or possible in the present.

Over two days under the title ›Prediction and Promise‹, we will explore how visions of the future emerge today. The focus is on the tensions between prognosis and imagination, between technical control and the open space of possibility as well as between what is made visible and what remains invisible.

On May 8, we are taking a bus tour into the Rhenish Mining area: Where the massive pit of the Hambach surface mine still stands today, a new lakeland is set to emerge in the coming decades – one rich in ecological, economic, and tourist potential. In Elsdorf, Manheim, and Bürgewald, we meet people, including artist Silke Schatz and landscape and open space planner Daniela Karow-Kluge, who are planning, accompanying, or questioning this structural transformation.

On the second day of ›Hidden Futures‹ at PACT, artists and researchers will engage in a dialogue to explore different forms of knowledge and practices that go beyond the promises of technological developments. The future is conceived here as a present shaped by predictive systems that already organize and yield reality. With Choy Ka Fai, Ren Loren Britton, Nonhuman Nonsense, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Yi Gu, Tomas Percival, Sarah Ciston and Chelsea Haramia.