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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. And it is not what strategic foresight is made for, useful for.

The return on investment in strategic foresight doesn’t show up where people usually expect it. It’s a bit like education — you don’t always see immediate results, but you know it creates better conditions for someone to grow and make strong choices.

Foresight works upstream. It helps us imagine the kind of world where a specific innovation could be needed, useful, or relevant. It’s not about the innovation itself — it’s about the context that gives it meaning.

That’s why foresight needs more than creativity.
It needs imagination

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

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 or Meriem Bennani or 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. It made me thinking that 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.

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 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.

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.

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 and 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.

Let's shine a spotlight on a unique work: Afronauts.

Afronauts is a 2014 short film directed by Nuotama Frances Bodomo, a Ghanaian-born filmmaker. The 14-minute black-and-white film is a speculative fiction that draws inspiration from the true events of the Zambian Space Program, which aimed to beat America in the space race to the Moon during the 1960s.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the broader context of African independence movements, Afronauts explores the complexities and challenges faced by a group of Zambian exiles as they prepare for their ambitious mission. The film is not just a historical retelling but a dreamlike narrative that contemplates the broader implications of launching a Black body into space, intertwining themes of racial and gender equity, scientific advancement, and the persistent underestimation of African nations.

I need to make a detour via another film here. Something that struck me during the release of Black Panther (a highly entertaining film, no doubt) was how it seemed to internalize the gaze of the other, as if Africa needed to prove it could be on the same level as the West. Rather than being itself, the film tells the other what it thinks it should be — a form of self-colonization and a complete internalization of the foreign gaze, as Leonora Miano pointed out in Afropea, quoting Audre Lorde: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." It is a film by Afro-descendants who want to be well-regarded by whites. I’m still talking about Black Panther here.

When I first watched Afronauts, I was afraid it might fall into the same trap. But it does not. Afronauts is far more poetic and nuanced than any Marvel film.

Beyond that, if we simply consider the lens of current geopolitics, at a time when over 15 African countries — from Uganda to Senegal — have launched satellites, and Djibouti is inaugurating a space base, the relevance of such narratives becomes even more important to watch.

Watch the film here: https://lnkd.in/eGWKFEna
Photo credit: 2025 Museum of the Moving Image

When you work in foresight with a focus on space, something shifts. Your perception of cultural works becomes filtered—not by bias, but by resonance. Some works speak directly to the futures we’re trying to navigate. One of them is Time No Longer by Anri Sala.
It’s not just an artwork—it’s a reflection on absence, silence, potential. And it offers a lesson in how space imaginaries are unequally distributed, with geopolitical consequences.

The piece centers around Ronald McNair—an African-American astronaut and saxophonist—who was meant to record music aboard the Challenger shuttle in 1986. Instead, he died in the explosion just seconds after liftoff. His music was never recorded in space. In Sala’s immersive installation, we see a record player floating, gently, in a station-like space. The needle intermittently catches the grooves. The soundtrack: Olivier Messiaen’s music, composed while the musician himself was in captivity. A dialogue between captivity and cosmos. Between sonic memory and orbital fragility.The work is poetic—but its implications are geopolitical. Why is Cape Canaveral part of the global imagination, but Kourou is not? Why does Houston carry mythic weight, while other spaceports remain culturally invisible?This asymmetry matters. Because the way we imagine space reflects the way we distribute power, memory, and futures.

Of course, these interpretations are my own. The piece itself is silent. It asserts nothing. It simply exists as a visual and sonic proposal—one that I’ve chosen to receive, and to use as a springboard to think further. That, too, is the power of art in foresight: not to say, but to open.

Time No Longer doesn’t show us a possible future—it shows us a possible past, and asks us to imagine what was lost. That, too, is the work of foresight.

It is a reminder that not all futures are born from what happens. Some emerge from what could have happened—and didn’t.

Anri Sala’s piece reminds us that strategic foresight isn’t only about projecting forward.
It’s about listening to silences. Mapping absences. And noticing who gets to be remembered in the archives of possibility. The work doesn’t just belong in a museum.
It belongs in conversations about governance, heritage, and the politics of future-making.

The studio I founded is named Mycelium Foresight Studio — and that name is no accident. It’s not a branding device. It’s an homage. An homage to the artist’s studio.
And more broadly, to what artists bring to futures thinking — not as aesthetic validators of pre-designed scenarios, but as genuine strategic disruptors.

The Studio as a Model of Foresight
In the art world, a studio is not a place for linear production. It’s a space for trying, failing, testing, shifting. A space where both matter and ideas are shaped.
And in that sense, it is deeply analogous to what foresight should be: not predictive, but generative. Too often, foresight is practiced like a lab. Clean. Controlled. But we need the studio — messy, nonlinear, full of wrong turns and sudden insights.

Fulgurance as Method
Artists often experience what the French call fulgurances: sudden, intuitive flashes that reveal a truth or a future possibility in one blow. They don’t always last. They don’t need to. Recently, I encountered one of those flashes — in a work by Dutch artist Hella Jongerius. In a 2001 piece shown at MAD Paris, she presents a pillow with a built-in screen.
A soft interface. A hybrid object — part-rest, part-work. At the time, it may have seemed odd or speculative. Today, it feels uncannily real.

Because in our world of remote work, blurred boundaries, and domestic digital life, we’re now living the world Jongerius merely sensed. A world where the bedroom becomes the boardroom.
Where comfort and productivity are fused into one flickering image.

Beyond Illustration: Toward Conceptual Attitude
This is why artists matter to foresight. Not because they predict the future, but because they help us feel the conditions of emergence. They allow us to spot blind spots. To catch what’s just below the surface. To feel what rational models often flatten.

Foresight doesn't need more dashboards. It needs more studios. Places where form and vision can collide. Where an image, a tension, a strange object can reroute an entire scenario. Art doesn't illustrate futures, it unlocks them. And in doing so, it offers exactly what strategic foresight often lacks: conceptual altitude.

Strategic foresight doesn’t only deal with what’s likely. It also deals with what’s excluded. What gets labeled impractical, irrational, or utopian — and who decides that?

Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector is one of those projects that seems marginal to space policy — and yet speaks directly to its blind spots.

What It Was :
A 30-meter-long diamond-shaped sculpture made of reflective mylar.
Designed to float in low orbit and shine in the night sky for several weeks.
No sensors. No data. No military purpose.
Just light. Just presence. Just wonder.

The project was ultimately cancelled drowned in a sea of technical and regulatory constraints. But its resonance endures.

Why It Matters :
Why do we accept the invisible presence of surveillance satellites, but not a visible, poetic object in orbit?
Why is function a prerequisite for legitimacy in space?

In foresight, especially when dealing with space futures, we need to question our defaults. Paglen’s sculpture offers no solution but it offers a rupture. It interrupts. It reframes. And in doing so, it reveals how tightly controlled our orbital imaginaries have become.

Paglen’s work is a reminder that the future of space should not be shaped only by national security agendas or commercial ventures.
It can — and should — include symbolic, aesthetic, and philosophical propositions.

In a utilitarian age, Orbital Reflector makes space strange again. And by doing so, it reclaims it as a place for humanity — not just hardware.

Conclusion
Projects like this may never reach orbit — but they reach something just as important: the imagination.

And for anyone shaping long-term space strategies, that’s not a distraction.
It’s a resource.
Because the future is not only a question of technology.
It’s also a question of what we’re willing to see as possible.

Who Gets to Shape Space? Reflections from Astronaut Jesus by Tavares Strachan

We talk a lot about exploration. About space. But we rarely ask: who gets to explore? Who is even allowed to exist in space?

In continuing my exploration of cultural works through a spatial lens, I came across a piece that deserves attention: Astronaut Jesus by Tavares Strachan.

This sculpture, made of blown glass and neon, honors Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. The body, suspended and reduced to a glowing circulatory system, evokes both the physical strain of space travel—and something deeper: erasure.

Because this piece is not just about visibility. It’s about invisibility. Sally Ride’s legacy has often been downplayed, in part due to her sexual orientation. Strachan’s work interrogates this absence. He restores it. He lets us see what was deliberately left out: the bodies, the stories, the pioneers.

Since Valentina Tereshkova’s historic flight in 1963, nearly 80 women have traveled to space (excluding billionaire suborbital joyrides—that’s another story). And yet they remain a small minority among astronauts. But beyond spaceflight: how many women are actually shaping the future of space in Europe today? Very few.

We’re at a turning point. And yet we keep recycling the same formulas, with the same familiar faces, in the same closed circles.

Are we really convinced this is how we’ll build the future? What blind spots remain as long as women are out? How many ideas are we sacrificing? Through comfort? Inertia? Habit?

The space sector often presents itself as open—as long as you're willing to knock on the door. But space policy remains tightly locked.

How do we finally break these patterns—and push for real, lasting change?