Xenofutures: Alternatives to Hegemonic Imaginaries

Enfoque

Following the methodologíes of Future Studies, the classification of scenarios into probable, plausible, possible, and preferable (Hancock & Bezold, 1994) and their subsequent updates (Voros, 2003) seem to be insufficient for contemporary reality. This study arises from the following causes: the constant mutation of reality (Berardi, 2021; Zafra, 2022), the lack of future imaginaries (Berardi, 2019; Fisher, 2018; Haraway, 2020), and the turn of anticipatory sciences toward neoliberal ends (Dator, 2022; Davis, 2023).

Through antecedents such as Crazy Futures (Schultz, 2015), we propose the becoming of the Weird as a way out of the imaginal collapse we have been suffering since the early 1990s (Demneh & Darani, 2020; Davis, 2023; Fisher, 2016). Aware of the growing commitment to the liminal in the field of foresight (Dator, 2022) as salvation to the exhausted counterculture (Jameson, 1994; Zafra, 2022), we propose the theoretical and practical implementation of Xenofutures. A term found in cyberfeminism theories (Hester, 2018), and the concept of the Weird (Fisher, 2016). 

This is an art-based futures research that relies on the subversive appropriation of existing technological tools to create new future possibilities (Laboria Cuboniks, 2023). Specifically, we modify generative artificial intelligence tools that have been trained with a normative collection of image datasets, and we mutate the results to generate weird entities. The result is an ongoing dataset with 18.000 images which represent bodies stripped of any possible classification into species, sex, and class (Dator, 2022). 

Is the resultant visual cyborg-queer scenario allowing anticipation to the futures of mutant identities? Can operative images (Parikka & Gil-Fournier, 2019) act as activators of the pretentious imagination, as a mental representation of a world that is different from reality (Özgün & Schoonen, 2022)? This exercise has raised an ongoing generative imaginary that emerges in an exercise of ”thinking with” human and non-human individuals (Haraway, 2020), capable of overflowing the current limits. This overflow proposes to generate posthuman cyberfeminist fabulations (Braidotti, 2015) as speculative tools to think outside the established and to imagine other possible futures.