Fake Futures! A minifesto making exercise
Workshop Medienkunsttage NRW 2025
Fake Futures! A minifesto making exercise
The future has always been fake, because it cannot be verified as the future – only when it becomes our present or our past, can we verify its prediction and promises. And yet, fake futures seem to be steeped in crisis, annihilation, doomerism, more often than not in some way propelled by AI. Fake news, fake it till you make it, the fake is both threat to and condition of our contemporary moment and the next. But if futures have always been fake, then it is up to us to shift gears and enact our capacity to habituate different futures, precisely by practicing them in the now. If we do not like the path laid out, we need to identify what it is we dont like about it and change the scopes towards a different way.
FAKE FUTURES is an exercise to prompt, reflect, and manifest different futures in a collective forum. TO PROMPT means to engage with, interrogate, and potentially adapt our desire to know the future – why have we needed to know in the past, and what is suggesting this need to know can be best met by technology? TO REFLECT on these given futures as fake means to understand that its conditions are well set in the now, but also that they are alterable. What are the alternative futures floating around, and can their contradictions show us something about our own agency? TO MANIFEST means to take agency over what these futures could entail, and to collectively map out practices of repair. How can we help each other, and ourselves, to work towards our own versions of the fake and possibly even make them a reality?
The workshop will be divided into three parts broadly conceptualized around notions of prompting, reflection and manifesting.
Registration via info@medienwerk-nrw.de; in English; workshop leaders: Nishant Shah and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss.
Visit the website of More Future! MedienKunstTage NRW 2025.