Institute For The Future

Artists are constantly looking at the world around them and imagining possibilities ...
just like futurists do.

Artists create work that raises questions, criticizes, or provokes us to consider alternatives. Futurists call these possibilities ‘signals.’ Things that are all around us today that may seem quirky, or different, but we can identify as clues to what's possible in the future. Artists often have such open, creative minds, that they are skilled in spotting these signals—intuitively understanding those clues to the future.

Like an artist who uses brushes and paints, a futurist uses various techniques—scenarios, historical analysis, surveys, intuition, and signals (things around us that point to future directions) to create foresight.

At IFTF we do not believe in being passive bystanders to the future. The future doesn’t just happen—we all have agency to make the future.

As a nonprofit committed to helping people envision and make a better future, we explore the vast range of future possibilities, connecting humanity’s greatest challenges with the greatest opportunities for transformation. In our work, we often look to artists to provoke our imaginations, call attention to the assumptions by which we live our lives in the present, and create a window into possibilities for our future. We also create our own original visual frameworks and Artifacts from the Future to give life to our forecasts and make them more tangible.

We invite you to experience the future with us at the Future Gallery.

IFTF’s Future Gallery presents the work of multidisciplinary artists who engage with temporality through new media tools and creative approaches to design and aesthetic production. Our rotating exhibits relate to the same futures themes that we approach through our research and labs, from the future of cities and technology to human identity, to inspire all of us to think differently about the future. Visit our Future Gallery at 201 Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, California to see our latest installations once it reopens with our new exhibit.

In addition to our installations and ongoing public events, our aim is for the Gallery to catalyze all kinds of conversations about the future. Contact Julie Harper ([email protected]) for more about how to organize your own strategy session, workshop, or public event in our space.

Untitled: A Speculative Future
By Wiena Lin

Ongoing

In this speculative future humanity has exhausted all natural resources. Societal collapse lead to the loss of ancestral knowledge. These future humans gather artifacts from an ancient consumer-industrial society, creating totems of worship and divination.

Wiena Lin is a Brooklyn-based artist who strives to create stunning sensory experiences which extend traditional forms with emerging technology, driving social impact. Her immersive installations and sculptural relics explore themes of the Anthropocene, the Singularity and spirituality in the contemporary epoch of explosive innovation.

 

The Last Pockets Of Blue Collar

By Vance Jacobs 

Ongoing

The Last Pockets of Blue Collar aims to document a segment of San Francisco residents that is rapidly disappearing.

Until relatively recently, the population that lives and works in San Francisco has been diverse in terms of the types of jobs we hold and the small businesses we own. As the cost of living continues to climb, more businesses in fields that are often colloquially called blue collar, or simply the trades, are closing their doors. This project aims to document some of the amazing people and skills we are at risk of losing as a community.

Vance Jacobs is a fifth generation Californian. His desire to document what soon could be lost, started when he found a box of old family photographs taken around the turn of the century and a newspaper clipping about his great-grandfather delivering photography supplies to stores throughout Northern California via a horse and buggy.

 

Trust Objects

Ongoing

How do we navigate a world rife with bootleg knockoffs, multi-layered and morally ambiguous supply chains, and increasingly polarized ideologies? Trust Objects begins to answer this question through a series of speculative objects that explore what technologically mediated trust could look like in the future. Shopping for new products, watching the nightly news, or visiting a new city are all experiences that can be enhanced through Trust Objects. 

 

Animals Inc.

Ongoing

This series of Artifacts from the Future come from the year 2046, a world where cybernetically augmented animals have teamed Artificial Intelligence to dominate global markets. Pigs have gained intellectual property rights over their own DNA, and the only way to buy pork products is through pig-owned proprietary devices. Endangered animals control the distribution of their image through DRM-enforcing jewelry. The bees have unionized and negotiated fair wages for pollinating crops - and only those that are pesticide free, of course. Mans best friend will still play fetch, for a fee. Dogs have taken to startup culture and offer a wide variety of on-demand app-used services. 

 

Artifacts from the Future

Ongoing

Artifacts from the Future is an ongoing installation of IFTF’s original artwork that brings our forecasts to life. Artifacts from the Future give us a tangible experience of the future. They make the details of a scenario concrete, helping us to understand, almost first-hand, what it will be like to live in a particular future. Artifacts from the Future provide a rich starting point for strategic discussions, whether for a new products team in a technical organization or a community group looking for ways to engage young people in building a stake in their own neighborhood. They are at-a-glance tools for exploring the fundamental question, what is possible?

 

 

Past Exhibits

Afrofurures

March 2019 - December 2019 

 Afrofuturism is an artistic, media-based tradition of futures thinking that has developed in parallel to IFTF’s academic methodology. Visions of AfroFutures live at the nexus of technology and ethics, and add to the capacity for building more imaginative human-centric scenarios, making future forecasts more resilient, building a path to real-world action.

The exhibit featured work by Miriam Hillawi Abraham, Nyame O.  Brown, Lance Coleman (AKA FuzeTheMC), Ajuan Mance, Joshua Mays, Karen Seneferu, and  Malik Seneferu.

 

2030: Artifacts from the Future of America’s Cities

December 2018 - March 2019

As part of the Austin Civic 1/0 Mayors Summit held during the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, 18 mayors from U.S. cities participated in a series of '' civic imagination'' workshops to teach them concepts and methods in strategic foresight. 

Led by IFTF's Governance Futures Lab, Civic 1/0, and CMU's Situation Lab, the mayors worked through a series of hands-on exercises to uncover their hopes, fears, dreams, and legacies they wished to leave for their cities. Inspired by the insights generated in conversation with the mayors, futurists and artists collaborated to create original posters that might appear in each city in the year 2030. The posters presented here - a birthday invitation, a festival announcement, a roadside attraction, a wayflnding kiosk, a map out of homelessness, and a political advertisement, among others - are the first of these artifacts to appear in the present.

Read more at civic i/o.

.

Time is a Dimension

September 2017 - July 2018

Time is a Dimension is a series of photographs by Fong Qi Wei that challenge the concept that a single image can only show a freeze-frame of time. When showing a flow of events, we instinctively think of a video. But artist the artists aims to do that in this series with a single print.

In this series, an entire sunrise/sunset is compressed into a single printed image. The intervals between frames are not regular, in keeping with the artist’s subjective experience of that day’s sunrise/sunset. In a way, the artwork is like a meditation on what he experienced for a period of time of 2 to 4 hours for that particular day. In these busy, highly networked times, how often do we stop and actually stay still to see a sunrise/sunset from start to end? Everyone just wants to get to that “perfect moment” as soon as possible—but the fact is there isn’t one perfect moment. Our lives flow, and we should take time to be still, experience, and reflect.

Past Futures of Howard Rheingold: A Retrospective of Art and Ideas

February 2017 - May 2017

Howard is a Distinguished fellow, long-term research affiliate, intellectual fellow traveler and friend of IFTF and he has a deep history in the world of futures thinking. He is called the First Citizen of the internet, and in 1993, he published The Virtual Community, the first book to anticipate that computers were not just for computing, not even primarily for information sharing, but also for creating communities. 

Howard's artwork is a playful counterpoint to his thought - artifacts of his imagination and the exploratory spirit that have led to such compelling visions of what might be possible. 

Terreform

January 2017 - May 2017

Imagine a city that was designed to meet the needs of people in an environmentally sustainable way. Terreform ONE is a non-profit architecture group out of New York that has imagined just such a city. Through their creative projects and outreach efforts, they aim to illuminate the environmental possibilities of human settlements and inspire solutions in areas like it around the world. They are a unique laboratory of specialists with diverse disciplinary backgrounds that explore and advance the larger framework of socio-ecological design. The group develops innovative concepts and technologies for local sustainability in energy, transportation, infrastructure, buildings, waste treatment, food, and water.  

The Apocalypse Project: House of Futures

September 2015 - April 2016

The Apocalypse Project: House of Futures is an exhibition from artist Catherine Sarah Young that explores our environmental futures in the anthropocene under the guise of a boutique store. The audience can view and interact with wearable products, such as clothing, shoes, hats, jewelry, and perfumes. They can engage in interactive experiences through interdisciplinary projects. The exhibition will welcome audiences of all ages and include free public events.

Microbe Mart

May 2015 - September 2015

Microbe Mart is a physical Artifact from the Future in the form of a future retail space created as part of IFTF’s 2015 Ten-Year Forecast. The Microbe Mart contains a series of real and speculative products based on our forecasts about the microbial health economy that will emerge by 2025. From cosmetics like Mother Dirt’s AOBiome bacterial spray to a resistant starch sleep aid, the products in the Microbe Mart describe a possible world in which microbiotic lifestyles drive consumer products and microbiotic medicine begins to transform medicine.

Global Lives Project

May 2014 - September 2015

Global Lives Project is a video library of life experience, designed to cultivate empathy across cultures. It curates an ever-expanding collection of films that faithfully capture 24 continuous hours in the lives of individuals from around the world to explore the diversity of human experience and encourage discussion, reflection, and inquiry. The project’s goal is to foster empathy and cross-cultural understanding. This exhibition is a part of a longstanding collaboration with IFTF. More about this exhibit »