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Artikel und Reflexionen über strategische Zukunftsforschung (nicht immer auf Deutsch)
Von der Kreativität zur Vorstellungskraft - Warum Mycelium Creative Studio zu Mycelium Foresight Studio wurde
Als ich begann, meine zukunftsorientierten Aktivitäten zu strukturieren, gründete ich ein Unternehmen. Sie hieß zunächst Mycelium Creative Studio. Die Mycelium-Metapher ist auch nach einigen Jahren noch gültig und wird sogar immer treffender. Andererseits schien mir das Wort "kreativ" immer weniger passend. Eines Tages las ich "Was wäre, wenn wir unsere Vorstellungskraft entfesseln würden, um die Zukunft zu erschaffen, die wir wollen" von Rob Hopkins. Hier ist eine Passage daraus. Sie brachte mich endlich dazu, meine Meinung zu ändern - ich wusste, warum Kreativität nicht das richtige Wort ist.
Kreativität nimmt die Vorstellungskraft und gibt ihr eine Form, verwandelt sie in etwas Greifbares, aber sie bringt auch gewisse Zwänge mit sich. Wie der Forscher Oli Mould von der Royal Holloway (University of London) in seinem Buch Against Creativity schreibt, "läuft die vorherrschende Erzählung über Kreativität auf die Reproduktion der immer gleichen Dinge hinaus. Der zeitgenössische Kapitalismus hat sich der Kreativität bemächtigt, um sein eigenes Wachstum zu sichern und die Zentralisierung und Monetarisierung dessen, was er produziert, aufrechtzuerhalten".
Ursula Le Guin äußert sich ähnlich zu diesem Phänomen: "Auf dem Markt bedeutet das Wort Kreativität heute die Produktion von Ideen, die auf praktische Strategien anwendbar sind, um größere Gewinne zu erzielen. Diese semantische Einengung ist so weit fortgeschritten, dass das Wort Kreativität kaum noch weiter entwertet werden kann. Ich benutze es nicht mehr, ich habe es den Kapitalisten und Akademikern überlassen, es nach Belieben zu missbrauchen. Aber sie werden das Wort Phantasie nicht haben...". Von dieser Degradierung kann man leicht zur Innovation übergehen, die darin besteht, Phantasie und Kreativität in Produkte zu verwandeln, die vermarktet, patentiert und registriert werden können.
Quelle des Zitats von Ursula Le Guin - die Gebrauchsanweisung in The Wave in the Mind Gespräche und Essays über den Schriftsteller den Leser und die Phantasie. Shambhala, 2004, S. 207.
Von der Kreativität zur Vorstellungskraft - Warum Mycelium Creative Studio zu Mycelium Foresight Studio wurde
Von der Kreativität zur Vorstellungskraft - Warum Mycelium Creative Studio zu Mycelium Foresight Studio wurde
Von der Kreativität zur Vorstellungskraft - Warum Mycelium Creative Studio zu Mycelium Foresight Studio wurde
"But they will not have the word imagination..." — Ursula Le Guin
In foresight, we often speak of innovation, trends, and scenarios. But we speak less often of imagination—its origins, its abuses, and its emancipatory power. This short reflection is rooted in a line I first encountered through Rob Hopkins, quoting Ursula K. Le Guin. The quote has stayed with me, not just as a provocation, but as a principle.
The Quote That Anchors Me
"In the marketplace, the word creativity today means the production of ideas applicable to practical strategies in order to generate greater profits. This semantic restriction is so advanced that the word creative could hardly be further degraded. I don't use it anymore... But they will not have the word imagination."
In a world that commodifies everything—even ideas—Le Guin’s distinction between creativity and imagination matters. Creativity, in its market-friendly form, is about optimization. Imagination, by contrast, is wild, radical, subversive. It doesn’t fit neatly into a business case.
As a foresight specialist working at the intersection of culture and strategy, I’ve learned to protect the imaginative space. It’s the ground from which the most important questions arise. It’s where disobedient futures germinate.
Foresight needs more than data, trends, and dashboards. It needs imagination—untamed, unprofitable, and deeply human. Le Guin’s words are a reminder that defending imagination is not nostalgic. It’s political.
Science Fiction in Museums: A Missed Opportunity or Foresight Catalyst?
Science fiction is often cited in foresight as a way to imagine futures—sometimes speculative, sometimes critical. But when it enters museum spaces, what happens? Is it reduced to a visual spectacle, or can it offer more? One year ago, I visited the exhibition Les Portes du possible – Art & science-fiction at Centre Pompidou Metz, and it stayed with me.
More Than Visual Effects
With over 180 works spanning from the 1960s to today, the exhibition was both abundant and political. It challenged how we think about power, technology, the body, and utopia. It did not merely showcase flying cars or dystopias; it offered windows into deep social, ecological, and technological questions.
What struck me most was how the artworks refused simplification. Whether through Mary Sibande’s costumes, Jeannette Ehlers’s searing photographs, or Sandy Skoglund’s radioactive cats, each piece suggested a disruption of dominant narratives, a reconfiguring of possibility.
Afronauts, Again
Among these works was Afronauts, which I address more fully in another article. It deserves its own space because it demonstrates how art can reposition the political, racial, and imaginative stakes of who owns the future.
Museums are not neutral ground. They curate the future as much as they preserve the past. Exhibitions like this one remind us that science fiction isn’t just a narrative genre—it’s a method of foresight. One that decenters, provokes, and activates.
Thinking With Machines: Art, Latency, and the Ethics of AI
When a new technology like AI emerges, the first wave of art often stumbles. It struggles to find depth beyond novelty. That’s why the exhibition at Jeu de Paume was such a surprise: it refused to decorate AI. It demanded that we think with it.
Several pieces stood out:
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Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI System and Calculating Empires mapped AI as a “hyperobject”: a tangle of capital, labor, energy, and power.
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Hito Steyerl’s Mechanical Kurds unearthed the lineage of the Mechanical Turk, from 18th-century trick to Amazon’s invisible labor force.
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Trevor Paglen’s Fanon used facial recognition on historic portraits, showing how machine vision reshapes even our understanding of the dead.
This was not an exhibition of smooth experiences. It was dense, speculative, and intellectually challenging.
Latent Spaces and Renaissance Echoes
One concept particularly resonated: latent space -a mathematical zone where potential images, ideas, and patterns are stored and recombined.
The intellectual use (as a metaphore) of the concept of latent spaces — a concept I was vaguely familiar with but had never truly explored. These spaces, which are mathematical objects, allow for the organization and generation of images within a multidimensional space. Simply put, it's like a place where images are stored, reactivated, and from which new images can emerge.
It reminded me, by analogy, of the Renaissance attempts to understand perspective. Many artists' drawing at that time where in between. It feels thre were following the same process manually. What interests me here is not so much to fully grasp these concepts, but to see how much they compel us to generate thought — even from misunderstanding.
I love the idea that “latent” means “hidden,” “secret,” and refers to something dynamic. For me, all of this is deeply fertile ground for foresight: it pushes us to think not just as users of tools, but as beings embedded in a constantly shifting technological ecosystem.
Foresight, too, deals in latent futures. Not yet visible, but quietly forming.
These works don’t provide answers. They raise the right questions: Who is training AI? What histories are encoded in data? What futures are we building, knowingly or not? This is art as strategic inquiry. And for foresight, it’s indispensable.
What does the horizon promise?
That’s the question asked by the recent exhibition by the EDF Group Foundation, titled Ce que l’horizon promet. It explores how we relate to the future—from superstitions and AI, to personal decisions and collective prediction models.
This was not an exhibition about foresight. But it was absolutely an exhibition that feeds foresight.
What the Exhibition Explores
The show touches on multiple registers of anticipation: rational, irrational, algorithmic, intuitive. Upon entering, visitors are even invited to drop their own ideas for the future into a small box. One can’t help but wonder what becomes of those ideas afterward.
Three short films delve into our relationship with collective and artificial intelligence. One particularly stimulating thread: how these hybrid forms of intelligence might extend human evolution, just as reading and writing once did—by externalizing a part of what we know.
Two Works That Stood Out
— Agnieszka Kurant’s Lottocracy: an automated lottery that assigns probabilities to real-life outcomes—winning the lottery, being struck by lightning, getting published. It proposes a radical thought experiment in governance, inspired by the idea of sortition in democratic processes.
— Dorothy Iannone’s intimate and offbeat piece, where she simply asks fellow artists what art means to them. A small work, but deeply touching.
Frustration—and Relevance
Like many such exhibitions, this one falls into a familiar trap: artworks are sometimes instrumentalized to illustrate pre-set theses. Some are forced into intellectual gymnastics that don’t always suit them. Do we even know what artworks “say”? The strongest works resist interpretation. They glow, they interrupt, they arrive like extraterrestrials (a nod to Saâdane Afif).
Yet despite its shortcomings, the exhibition plays a valuable role. It captures the cultural atmosphere. It asks the right questions—without claiming to offer definitive answers.
This is what makes exhibitions like Ce que l’horizon promet essential for foresight practitioners: not because they confirm our frameworks, but because they complicate them. They remind us that the future is never just a timeline—it’s also a tangle of beliefs, emotions, and provocations. And sometimes, a good question is more precious than a clear answer.
Thinking With Machines: Art, Latency, and the Ethics of AI
When a new technology like AI emerges, the first wave of art often stumbles. It struggles to find depth beyond novelty. That’s why the exhibition at Jeu de Paume was such a surprise: it refused to decorate AI. It demanded that we think with it.
Several pieces stood out:
-
Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI System and Calculating Empires mapped AI as a “hyperobject”: a tangle of capital, labor, energy, and power.
-
Hito Steyerl’s Mechanical Kurds unearthed the lineage of the Mechanical Turk, from 18th-century trick to Amazon’s invisible labor force.
-
Trevor Paglen’s Fanon used facial recognition on historic portraits, showing how machine vision reshapes even our understanding of the dead.
This was not an exhibition of smooth experiences. It was dense, speculative, and intellectually challenging.
Latent Spaces and Renaissance Echoes
One concept particularly resonated: latent space -a mathematical zone where potential images, ideas, and patterns are stored and recombined.
The intellectual use (as a metaphore) of the concept of latent spaces — a concept I was vaguely familiar with but had never truly explored. These spaces, which are mathematical objects, allow for the organization and generation of images within a multidimensional space. Simply put, it's like a place where images are stored, reactivated, and from which new images can emerge.
It reminded me, by analogy, of the Renaissance attempts to understand perspective. Many artists' drawing at that time where in between. It feels thre were following the same process manually. What interests me here is not so much to fully grasp these concepts, but to see how much they compel us to generate thought — even from misunderstanding.
I love the idea that “latent” means “hidden,” “secret,” and refers to something dynamic. For me, all of this is deeply fertile ground for foresight: it pushes us to think not just as users of tools, but as beings embedded in a constantly shifting technological ecosystem.
Foresight, too, deals in latent futures. Not yet visible, but quietly forming.
These works don’t provide answers. They raise the right questions: Who is training AI? What histories are encoded in data? What futures are we building, knowingly or not? This is art as strategic inquiry. And for foresight, it’s indispensable.