Mycelium Foresight Studio met en œuvre et facilite la prospective stratégique

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Articles et réflexions sur la prospective stratégique.

De la créativité à l'imagination - Pourquoi Mycelium Creative Studio est devenu Mycelium Foresight Studio

Quand j’ai commencé à structurer mes activités en prospective j’ai fondé une société. Elle s’est d’abord appelée Mycelium Creative Studio. J’ai expliqué dans divers posts le pourquoi du mycelium. La métaphore reste valide après plusieurs années, voire de plus en plus pertinente. En revanche le mot de “creative” me semblait de plus en plus erroné. Un jour j’ai lu “Et si on libérait notre imagination pour créer le futur que nous voulons” de Rob Hopkins. En voici un passage ci-dessous. Cela a achevé de me faire changer d’avis - en sachant pourquoi le mot de créativité n’exprimait plus mes activités.

“La créativité prend l'imagination et lui donne forme, la transforme en quelque chose de tangible, mais apporte avec elle certaines contraintes. Comme l'écrit Oli Mould, chercheur au Royal Holloway (University of London), dans son livre Against Creativity, "le récit dominant autour de la créativité se résume à la reproduction des mêmes choses. Le capitalisme contemporain a réquisitionné la créativité en vue d'assurer sa propre croissance et de maintenir la centralisation et la monétisation de ce qu'elle génère".

Ursula Le Guin parle de ce phénomène en termes similaires: "Sur le marché, le mot créativité désigne aujourd'hui la production d'idées applicables à des stratégies pratiques en vue de générer des bénéfices plus importants. Cette restriction sémantique est si avancée que le mot créatif pourrait difficilement être davantage dégradé. Je ne l'utilise plus je l'ai abandonné aux mains des capitalistes et des universitaires pour qu'ils en abusent à leur gré. Mais ils n'auront pas le mot imagination." De cette dégradation, on passe aisément à l'innovation, qui consiste à faire de l'imagination et de la créativité des produits qui peuvent être commercialisés, brevetés et déposés.

Source de la citation d'Ursula Le Guin - le mode d'emploi dans The Wave in the Mind Conversations et essais sur l'écrivain le lecteur et l'imagination. Shambhala, 2004, p. 207.

De la créativité à l'imagination - Pourquoi Mycelium Creative Studio est devenu Mycelium Foresight Studio

"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:

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.

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.