with Ivar Maskutov (PostNauka), Denis Maksimov (Avenir Institute), Agency of Singular Investigations, Benjamin Bratton (Strelka, The New Normal), Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (Radical Imagination, UCL and The New School), Natalia Akhmerova (Agency Mars Dreams), moderated by Igor Akhmerov

Screening of videos artworks, curated by Avenir Institute, in the intermissions between speakers’ addresses: “Pandemonium” (each about 5 mins) by GVN908, «Кровь, что течет в нас» by Sonny Sanjay Vadgama, the teaser of “Hypernormalisation” by Adam Curtis

Do you remember the future? The dreams of interplanetary escape from the Earth and its problems are not a novelty. Utopian thinking is a form of critical dissection of the real, as well as mental escape from the political impotence. What the the utopia of leaving the Earth tells about our present? The convention and normality are in the centre of preserving everlasting stability of the everyday. The reluctance to change and fear of conscious adaptation to rapidly changing environment is enforcing the wall of ignorance, which finds its most vivid visualisation in recent political turbulence. The end of history hasn’t happened: instead ‘the real’ had scattered in pieces like a broken looking glass, opening potentiality for infinite subjective interpretations. How the promise of multiplicity of possible futures is reflected in arts and engages with the disciplines beyond it? 

In the context of the launch of Agency Mars Dreams this year, the invited speakers represent the broad spectrum of contemporary approaches to futures as a subject of transdisciplinary investigations. Each of them is invited to shortly address the raised questions in individual and free form. The only limitation is time: 10 minutes. After the panelists will join the conversation, moderated by Igor Akhmerov, and after the floor to the questions from the audience