During the E-dinges festival organised by the Instituut Samenleving en Technologie at the Flemish Parliament, Reelfutures and les Oiseaux Sans Têtes (OST) took care of two interactive installations for an audience survey on digital technologies and the digital future of Flanders.

We interviewed 21 people in the fotomaton, a black wooden box in which an invisible photographer or cameraman can talk with participants while they are being filmed or photographed. If you understand Dutch you can check out three of the interviews below.

After a decade of development, Agence Future is expanding and re-shaping its interdisciplinary and cross-media practice with archive development, collaborative and participative approaches and the production of a new series of location based items entitled Reelfutures. The first of the new series of theses video reports was shot, produced and projected at Perpignan during the professional week of the photojournalism festival Visa Pour l’Image. 

You can also watch this video with French subtitles here.

“La Belgique est un lieu intéressant: tout y est en mouvement, il n’y a aucune certitude mais obligation de s’inventer un avenir perpétuel.” (Francois Schuiten)

Sept conversations avec des Belges qui entretiennent une relation particulière au futur, telle est l’épine dorsale de ce documentaire. Un dessinateur de bandes dessinées, un prospectiviste, un homme de théâtre, un scientifique, un philosophe, un chercheur dans le domaine des nouveaux media et un entrepreneur esquissent quatre scénarios possibles pour une Belgique future.
Le premier scénario parle de perpétuation, ici les choses ne seront pas fondamentalement différentes dans soixante ans. Le second parle d’effondrement. A travers lui on s’aperçoit du fait que le pays pourrait tout aussi bien glisser dans un gouffre économique et social. Peut-être essayerons-nous de nous protéger de ce possible désastre en développant une société rigide marquée par une forte culture du contrôle? Nous aboutissons alors au scénario d’un futur autoritaire. Dans le quatrième scénario les gens évoluent profondément et introduisent des changements dans leur environnement, un des participants en parle comme d’un ‘réenchantement’. Ces scénarios parlent de développement urbain, de société du savoir, d’économie, du contexte européen et de la vie quotidienne en Belgique. Ensemble ils proposent plus d’une Belgique possible.

And again, for the other Belgians:

For the Arts Centre Vooruit's Homo Futuris festival, we created an installation entitled The Human Scale with five themed loops of interview extracts : FUTURES (shown here), AMBITIONS, BODIES, TECHNOLOGIES, POPULATIONS.
 

After talking with people all around the globe, we held 35 Agence Future interviews in Antwerp, where I grew up. MuHKA_media commisioned the montage for which we used the same structure as applied in our interview schedule: evolving from personal, to local and then global futures, to finnish with a few bold questions for the imagination.
The port of Antwerp, promising to be a strong actor in the town's futures, was a setting for the opening sequence next to the new Court of Justice, the place most quoted by our conversation partners as "where we could catch a glimps of the future today". Social housing from the outskirts and the demolished old houses of the centre of town as well as the ambitious architectictural project of the new Museum Aan de Stroom, complete the picuture.

When we returned from the first Agence Future fieldtrip, we had held and recorded in some way 382 conversations about the the futures with people in 24 countries on five continents of the globe. Our second video document opened with this sequence of portraits.

At the COST Foresight 2030 workshop in Brugges (April 1-3) one of the major subject areas treated by the group of twenty invited technology experts was health. In two paralel sessions (the individual and society) participants elected this subject as the central focus of the scenarios they were asked to build.

I pariticpated in the sesion on individuals where the observer was Aubrey de Grey. He remarked that only very few of the position papers by the experts foresaw healthy and strong elderly people for 02030, even though many of us kept an aging population in mind. It made me think of the generic milk addvertisement shown here.

The Dutch text reads: 'Everybody likes to dance to the music of their youth'

and as the scene changes 'So you know what to expect...'