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Curated by Jon Sueda and featuring 37 projects by Bay Area and international artists, All Possible Futures is the first of three SOMArts Commons Curatorial Residency exhibitions in 2014. The group exhibition explores the potential of graphic design and celebrates a questioning of boundaries regarding concepts, processes, technologies, and form. Contemporary speculative pieces take the form of both physical objects and restaged installations.
Is another future possible? So called ‘late modernity’ is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social–natural, techno–scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only critically account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities and that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention, and experimentation.
The first three volumes of the series, available for purchase as a set now! The Possible Futures Series gathers together leading social scientists to address the significance of the global economic crisis in a series of short, accessible books. Each volume takes on the past, present, and future of this crisis suggesting that it has an informative history, that the consequences could be much more basic than the stock market declines, and that only fundamental changes -- not fiscal band-aids -- can head off future repetitions. CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, James Kenneth Galbraith, Manuel Castells, Nancy Fraser, Rogers Brubaker, David Held, Mary Kaldor...
If the present alienation of mind from nature, i.e., the Cartesian reality principle, is to be overcome, there surely must be a climate of extreme depression amounting in many quarters to despair One way or another there is an opportunity here for a good writer who should fill out in terms of concrete events and experiences the issues If a society is really faced with startling changes and fairly imminent ones (and there is a good deal of evidence that ours is) it cannot be amiss for a few people here and there to be peering ahead, however inadequately, by way of preparation for them. Owen Barfield: The Coming Trauma of Materialism
An exploration of the utopias and dystopias that could develop from present society Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism and extermininsm might actually entail. Could the current rise of the real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender's Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of wealth—but there's no guarantee that social hierarchies, governed by an economy of "likes," wouldn't rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through science fiction, social theory and the new technologies are already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a balance sheet of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.
In a spine-tingling new collection, the unique and wickedly funny Helen Phillips offers an idiosyncratic series of "what-ifs" about our fragile human condition What if you knew the exact date of your death? What if your perfect hermaphrodite match existed on another planet? What if your city was filled with doppelgangers of you? In these remarkably inventive stories Helen Phillips' characters search for solutions to the problem of survival in an irrational, infinitely strange world. We meet a wealthy woman who purchases a high-tech sex toy in the shape of a man, a mother convinced that her children are from another planet, and orphaned twin sisters who work as futuristic strippers. As they s...
Mathematical modelling and simulation is an increasingly powerful area of mathematics and computer science, which in recent years has been fuelled by the unprecedented access to larger than ever stores of data. These techniques have an increasing number of applications in the professional and political spheres, and people try to predict the results of certain courses of action as accurately as possible. Computing Possible Futures explores the use of models on everyday phenomena such as waiting in lines and driving a car, before expanding the model's complexity to look at how large-scale computational models can help imagine big scale " scenarios like the effect self-driving cars on the US ec...
The edited volume New Economies for Sustainability: Limits and Potentials for Possible Futures brings together a range of alternative views on economy and organization to illustrate different perspectives on how to work towards more sustainable solutions to production, consumptions and economic organization more generally. The book brings chapters from the most renowned scholars in the field, who bring their perspectives on how alternative schools theorize politics, society, organization, nature and ethics in their attempts to develop theories with a strong focus on sustainability. The book aims to contribute with a platform for gathering and collecting these theories in a pluralist economic framework, which can provide a strong alternative voice to mainstream economic theories in sustainability debates.
Possible Futures A collection of science fiction short stories Includes: - RUMORS OF MY DEATH - Kim Taylor never expected to read his own obituary in the newspaper. Or that he would have trouble proving he was still very much alive. - FIRSTDAWN - The discovery of Misha Kif's real identity as the Synth, Brianna Rei, puts a longstanding friendship to the test. - TENDRILS - Oma knows the humans on the space freighter will kill her if they catch her. But when an engine malfunction puts them all at risk, she must make more than one difficult choice. - THE NIGHT OF BRAHMA - Historical predictions of the end of the world vary widely across cultures and beliefs. But what if they're all correct?- BURNING BRIGHT - Tala and her grandson travel to a dead post-apocalyptic city in search of supplies for a metalworking project, only to find that the city isn't so dead after all.