alternative futures
art as a toolkit for survival
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Intellect
Published:19th Oct '26
Should be back in stock very soon
What if art is not just a mirror of the world but a factory for its futures?
This project brings artists and writers into dialogue, exploring how each generates knowledge through distinct but complementary methods – philosophic fabulation on the one hand, perception and affect on the other. In an age where we are drowning in data yet starved for meaning, we argue that art is an urgent toolkit for survival: a laboratory of sensation and imagination that equips us to feel, not just forecast, the worlds to come.
This conversation asks not how to predict the future, but how to inhabit it – together, creatively, critically, and sensuously.
We do not reason our way into new worlds. We imagine them into being. When the future has been reduced to algorithmic predictability, it is urgent that we reclaim imagination as the essential force of the subject: not as a faculty for speculating on what the future might be, but as a weapon for shaping it into what we want it to be. This book helps us to do just that.
-- Julian Reid, Professor of International Relations, University of Lapland, Finland. Co-author of Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the AnthropoceneHerzogenrath’s collection of Alternative Futures confronts us with a fantastic oscillation
between utopia and dystopia. It presents us with the essence of what it means to engage in
artistic research – in fact, research tout court: the desire to get away from a present
perceived as deficient, if not disastrous, and looking out for something that cannot be
anticipated.
ISBN: 9781835953174
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
316 pages