A Crystal Guide

Posted April 29, 2023 by Maja Kuzmanović, Nik Gaffney, Justin Pickard, Maya Weeks, and Theun Karelse

Introduction to 'Crystal: Navigating Uncertainty', an edited reader for acting, relating, and hesitating in these uncertain times.

A guide to the crystal route, which probes different approaches to navigating uncertainty. We invite you to proactively engage with whatever crosses your path, prototype possible futures, seed new realities, and grow your own worlds.

These Uncertain Times: Collective taming of uncertainty are effortful achievements, requiring maintenance and upkeep

Hip Deep in the Thick Present: Using the tools of science fiction and social theory to explore infrastructural reconfigurations for Anthropocene futures

an owl with mechanical wheels in the background

Skirting the Adjacent Possible: From anticipation as an instrument for effective decision making, to anticipation as a metamorphic craft of selection, uncovering, re-connecting, and re-animating things already present

A guy with a backpack asking for a lift on the side of the road

Words Which Matter to People: Considering the necessity of living language and its implementation

With all Caveats: Manifesto Writing in an Age of Uncertainty

A Gonzo Futurish Manifesto: Opening the door to a futurist who seeks randomness, collapses linear thought, and ups their game

Arts Thinking in a VUCA World: Values, Understanding, Choice, and Agency, a shifting paradigm for a changing world

Dimensions of Experience: A (very) preliminary theory of futuring

Maybe We Were the Birds: Using unknown sounds to create conditions favourable to speculative thinking

Futuring at a Human Scale: FoAM’s take on the practice of Experiential Futures, as a way to explore the unknown using the wondrous aptitudes of the human sensorium in messy social situations

Calibrating Experiences of the Future: On familiar forms in unfamiliar circumstances

Making Things Physical: Considering embodied, multimodal, and playful learning in exploring possible futures

Experiential Dreamscapes: Imagining with our whole bodies what futures we might create

Food Futures: Featuring three tasting menus that explore the relationships between food, health, and the environment

A Study Room in the Desert: Crafting experiences to stimulate engagement with a library of printed books

Whispering Worlds into Being: On alternate reality narratives, partial knowledge, and the fertile edges between realms

Future Preparedness: Methods to shore up resilience amid mounting polycrises

Everyday Hedging: Distributing risks and seizing opportunities in a variable world

Prehearsals and Pre-enactments: Test sites, training protocols, and case studies interrogating anticipatory reflexes and interpersonal responses to possible futures

The Futures of Doing Nothing: Probing the negative space around “the future of work”

Tsunamipants: How to survive the meteorological horrors of our future climate? Some speculative, semi-practical wearable personal safety devices

Arka Kinari: Sounding the alarm for ecological crisis and prefiguring nomadic life in a porous and borderless future by re-engaging with the last great commons — the sea

The Flotilla: A hyperstition, a pre-enactment, and a historical account of the Guild of Resilients and their attempt to grow their own world in a melting pot of cultures and species

Circuitbreaker: Ambient soundscapes composed with field recordings from the first Covid-19 outbreak

Viruscraft: Using games to connect disparate groups and individuals with experts, before and during a viral pandemic

Certainty Ltd. The rationale behind FoAM’s uncertainty clinic, offering bespoke futuring for individuals, families, and collectives

Nothing on the crystal route should be taken for granted. Its ascents point to divergent futures, daring us to gird ourselves for the worlds to come. It suggests ways to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst; to hedge our bets, prehearse living with uncertainty, and learn when to do nothing at all.

Toying with the absurd as the route disappears beneath rising seas, we are hoisted aboard a sailing ship, joining its crew to prefigure nomadic life in a porous and borderless future. Diving deep in speculative waters, we encounter a rowdy cackle of cultural invigorators brawling over the governance of their ramshackle flotilla. While we listen to their accounts of the Anti Apocalypse Day, a circuit breaker trips, and we’re thrown back into darkness, finding ourselves all at sea. Our ears ring with echoes of the Long March of 2020, as the divisions between people widen, despite our shared predicament. Adjusting to being adrift, we gaze into the eye of the storm, where all certainty is limited.

A Lab Approach: Facilitating collaborative processes with surprising results, by conducting experiments and fostering emergence

A Future of the Lab: Guidance and suggestions for creating labs that support innovation and creativity

Taking Risks or Making Risks: Complexity, uncertainty and possible futures in the context of technological innovation and entrepreneurship

Some Notes on Transdisciplinarity: How to work through and across disciplines

The Circle: Technologically-augmented group practice to face and withstand a prolonged winter.

Recovering Experts: Working across fields and sectors to collectively create knowledge

Breaking Down the Economy: On emulsification, and how to act when all seems congealed.

Rolling up our sleeves, we make contact with the world. Gathering what we know about acting in unfamiliar environments and fast-changing situations, we start to experiment. Our makeshift lab holds space for the unexpected and unforeseen, evoking the smell of ozone, the energy of shared purpose, and the promise of adventures to come. Yet how do we pick a direction? Should we break from the trail?

One of us unfolds a map and moves sideways, picking a direction. He trips over a crumpled notebook. In it, a scrawled list of things to consider when embarking on transdisciplinary pursuits. The list encourages us to work through our differences, to take our places in the circle, where we linger. A gathering of recovering experts, we coach each other to break through siloes, piercing closed archways of evidence and expertise.

Grey Skies Thinking: Concerning the Institute for Experiments with Business (Ibex)

Radmin: Reclaiming administration as a space for action, play, and intervention.

Does it scale: A preoccupation with scale permeates the contemporary market economy; what other mechanisms might produce the conditions for meaningful change?

Tiny Mining: Dispatch from a community of practitioners exploiting the interiors of the human body for rare earth and other mineral resources

Granting: On wielding fundraising strategies as a form of magic

Models to Magic: Using the vessel and paraphernalia of business to manifest the worlds we want

Communing with Externalities: Contemplating the external forces that affect a financial ecosystem’s balance

Absorbed in our experiments, we miss the sky turning a foreboding shade of grey, a herald of looming trouble. We can’t turn back, but there is no clear way forward. All we can do to survive well together is to start where we are. First, we reclaim administration as a space for play and intervention. Then we venture to reframe business as unusual. Diverting and obfuscating, pursuing beauty and complexity over size or scale.

We mine the human body’s creviced interior, seeking rare earths and mineral resources. We wield the dark arts to petition the faceless bureaucracy, using the vessels and paraphernalia of business to manifest the worlds we want. We commune with externalities, opening lines and channels to other-than-human worlds.

Further Adventures in Practical Ontology: And other ponderings on existing and engaging with the crystalline fragmentation of the world into many incoherent, jostling realities

A More than Human Manifesto: Calling time on human exceptionalism, urging contemporary creative spirits to make our practices less destructive, and adopt a vocabulary that can better support our planet’s ecosystems

Within the Screened Circumference of the Minds Eye: Nature's perfect solution to spatial optimisation; a floating, shimmering thin-filmed sphere of almost nothing

The Naming: On the experience of moving into a new identity; a stretching and extension

Desakota Uncertainties: Navigating and dwelling within the novel, hybrid geographies of the urban-rural fringe.

Life, life support, and the afterlives of (im)possible worlds: Setting the stage for improvisational and palliative futures, among other possibilities for surrendering to and moving through uncertainty.

Apero: Yielding to the glitches and lag, noise modifying signal as participants slide in and out of sync.

Just when we thought that we knew where we were going, our vision blurs and the world shifts on its axis. Everything is cracking, fragmenting, blocking old paths while opening new kaleidoscopic vistas. Where there is life, hope remains. Multitudes persist as ghosts upon the bubble’s shell. A carved green pebble with a hole in it, rough to the touch. Part of the network, in the moment, aware of the times.

Time becomes momentary, time cycles and spirals, time slips from the now into the now… and the now. Here, and now, and tomorrow. Quietly, persistently, drawing our attention. Then: a poet is yelling. A multilingual polyphony of voices ricochets through the troposphere, entwining raw hope with the darkening times. Futures written in wisps of smoke. Resolutions shattering into scores of micro-revolutions. An invocation, a seed crystal. Shards of grace for graceless times.

$Prismatic Refractions$

Prismatic Refractions: Soundscapes for navigating uncertainty, from a series of soundtracks for FoAM's Anarchive.

Created: 27 Apr 2023 / Updated: 25 Jul 2023

A Crystal Guide

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