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Articles and thoughts on strategic foresight.

The Power of Imagination in Foresight (1)

When I started to structure my future-oriented activities, I set up a company. Initially it was called Mycelium Creative Studio. The metaphor of the mycelium is still valid a few years later and is even becoming more apt. On the other hand, the word 'creative' seemed less and less appropriate. One day I read "What if we unleashed our imaginations to create the future we want" by Rob Hopkins. Here is a passage from it. It finally made me change my mind - I knew why creativity is not the right word.

Creativity takes imagination and gives it form, turning it into something tangible, but it also comes with certain constraints. As Royal Holloway (University of London) researcher Oli Mould writes in his book Against Creativity, "the dominant narrative of creativity boils down to reproducing the same things over and over again. Contemporary capitalism has appropriated creativity to ensure its own growth and to maintain the centralisation and monetisation of what it produces".

Ursula Le Guin speaks of this phenomenon in similar terms: "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 I've given it up to the capitalists and academics to abuse as they please. But they will not have the word imagination..." From this degradation, one easily passes to innovation, which consists in making imagination and creativity into products that can be commercialized, patented and registered.

Source for the quote by Ursula Le Guin - the operating instructions in The wave in the mind talks and essays on the writer the reader and imagination. Shambhala, 2004, p. 207

Arabofuturism

Too often, art is invited into futures thinking as a decorator—an afterthought to illustrate already formed scenarios. But exhibitions like ARABOFUTURS: Science Fiction and New Imaginaries, held at the Institut du Monde Arabe, show that art can be something else entirely: a provocation, a catalyst, a companion in critical thought.

What is Arabofuturism?
Arabofuturism is a cultural movement that, like its older sibling Afrofuturism, reimagines the future through the lens of historical, political, and diasporic experience. It is not to be confused with Gulf Futurism (shaped by urbanization, oil-fueled development, and techno-optimism), though both share regional concerns.

In this small but striking exhibition, artists like Sarah Sadik and Hicham Berrada explored speculative futures where suburbs morph into strange new worlds and mycelium consumes the remains of our electrical systems. It was speculative, yes—but deeply grounded in political critique.

Notably, it engages with a region where Saudi Arabia is constructing Neom, a city of the future marketed with equal parts ambition and surveillance. And where institutions like the Museum of the Future are not just reflecting futures, but attempting to shape them.

Why It Matters
This exhibition reminds us that speculative futures are not exclusive to Silicon Valley or the Global North. They are emerging from Beirut, Rabat, Marseille, and beyond. The political, poetic, and even uncomfortable questions these works raise should not be peripheral to foresight work—they are its pulse.

Foresight is not about forecasting sterile outcomes. It’s about widening the field of possibility. ARABOFUTURS did just that. Not by illustrating scenarios, but by offering visions that are strange, plural, and necessary.

The Power of Imagination in Foresight (2)

"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.