futures pokeR (2016)
Futures Poker is a Strange Telemetry project consisting of a card deck and ruleset designed to pry open plural futures. The cards are available for download here. Futures Poker has been exhibited at In The Now And The Far. Middlesbrough Art Week (2024); Everything Will Be Fine, Deutsches TechnikMuseum, Berlin (2022); Lost Lisbon, micronetworks, Lisbon (2017), and ATM, Somerset House (2016). It has been translated into Portuguese, Russian, and Taiwanese.
The deck comprises 20 locations; five different years spanning 2018 to 2100; and 50 cards denoting different trends and drivers. Accompanying the technoscientific sheen of modular nuclear reactors, cheap sensors, and desktop genetically modified organisms, the deck includes a range of ‘partly broken realities’ (cf Nick Foster) – bug-ridden everything, resource scarcity, and antibiotic resistance. The cards are illustrated with historical engravings – in part to circumvent issues of copyright, but also to steer away from the aesthetics of “shiny earnest futures nonsense,” stripped of friction and seams.
Spectacular and emerging technologies often draw light and noise, thrown up on travelling billboards as icons of innovation policy, with promises of bright futures used to marshal investment. We wanted to encourage a whole-systems approach, drawing out discussions about the cross-implications of emerging trends and issues. How might the rise of a cashless society interact with pervasive augmented reality, as overseen by increasingly super-national government bodies?
By forcing the collision of economic, political, social, and environmental factors with technological subjects, Futures Poker asks us to consider how different forces can magnify and mitigate each other. Including time and location draws out further discussion on what can happen over five, ten, or fifty years; how the presence of, say, Radical Transparency and Modular Nuclear Reactors may play out differently in Shenzhen, Jaipur, or Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Rather than a clean linear pathway into some shiny future – in which, too often, forms of social and political life seem stolid and unchanging, a status quo society as scaffold for fantastic new technologies – Futures Poker draws out the complexities, frictions, and contexts of the interlocking socio-technical systems from which futures emerge.
