How Dare You

There is no question more pressing than that as to the world in which we want to live. Being able to think out loud about possible futures supports and enables this. Thinking out loud allows us to share hopes and visions, to develop possible futures together. Thinking out loud is thinking together about possible, preferred and desirable futures for us all. Thinking out loud is valuable, and experience is the best teacher. So we adapt the old adage to obtain I hear futures and I forget. I see futures and I remember. I do futures and I understand This is the power of experiential futures. Experiential futures explore the embedded, subjective nature of possible futures. Embedded, subjective experience is the realm of the arts. Arts-based futuring is comprehensive and experiential, less purely analytical or reductive. The world is perceived by many to be one filled with dangers. To imagine the future is to imagine apocalypse. While many future visions avoid these negatives with naive utopian thinking, arts-based research allows eyes-wide-open utopian thought. This project imagines, creates, uses and develops arts-based strategies for maintaining useful hope. The climate emergency, geopolitical tensions, ecosystem collapses, resource limits and the sixth mass extinction are a few of the fundamental risks that we face. Experts note that our times are VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. We say our times are ripe for arts thinking to create positive visions, to face up to these developments. We need to learn, to change our parameters, to re-define the problem, re-define VUCA. We need Volition, Understanding, Choice and Agency. Our research question How to maintain hopeful and positive visions in times like ours? arose from an artists talk: How dare you be utopian, visionary and positive in devastating times like the current ones? This intended provocation has been transmuted into an invitation, intertwined with impulses emerging in current research. T h e p r o j e c t w i l l l