"FUTURE"
Open Call for Protocols
December 13-15 2025
This December, the Imaginary Institute turns its attention to the FUTURE.
Deadline for Protocols: 5pm, 9 December 2025
THE FUTURE IS NOT A PLACE.
IT’S NOT EVEN A TIME.
IT’S A METAPHOR FOR HOW TO ATTEND IN THE PRESENT.
This, in turn, shapes the conditions by which that which does not yet exist comes into existence.
The future is therefore a protocol of becoming.
Future = Mode of attention + Protocol of becoming
The future as a hyperstitional algorithm
Prediction, scenario planning, modelling, divination, and so on, treat time as a destination we might hit or miss. But our actual relationship to what might come next is shaped by becoming. E.g. the frames, the practices, the rule-sets, formal or improvised, that we’re using right now.
The question shifts from what the future will be to how we are training our perception in the present. Whatever way we choose to frame the world in its present state, is, in effect, a protocol for effectively interacting with the world, and thereby bringing about a future state or possible states.
When we name something crisis, opportunity, ecosystem, market, commons - etc - we’re not making a claim about what it is. We’re suggesting a stance. A set of moves, strategies. A way of behaving inside a field of changing relations, a way of engaging with systems.
But then we can make the mistake of thinking that there is a definitive right and a wrong way to frame the world, in order to achieve a certain goal state. What if “the future” isn’t something to get right or wrong, but a moving field of possibilities and relationships we can train ourselves to notice and navigate? New combinations, new actions, new relationships appear because of how we attend together.
The question then becomes how to attend, and, how to surf this field in the direction we want to go?
Time-machine protocol / protocol as time-machine
A protocol (a rule-set, a score, a game, a speculative scenario, a ritual, a model, etc) is a device for navigating collective becoming.
A protocol organises intention into action, action into relation, relation into feedback, feedback into reflection, reflection into iteration of the protocol itself.
This makes protocols inherently temporal. They move us through time in particular ways. Some protocols narrow the field of possibility. Others widen. Some speed things up. Others slow things down.
This is why metaphors matter:
If we see the future as a target, we tighten up
If we see the future as a field of affordances, we explore.
If we see the future as something we’re co-producing, we start paying attention to the quality of our participation and interactions with others.
Play as Meta-Protocol
Play is the state where we can fully inhabit a given frame while knowing it’s a frame.
This double-awareness: total commitment to the frame, and total cognitive flexibility that its ‘just’ a frame.
Play lets us put things together, see how they make a system, test the logic of a system, stretch it, swap it out for another, test the consequences, keep the game alive.
Play is how new things enter the world.
Every science experiment, artistic action, philosophical, policy creatrion starts with “what if?”, ‘what if we put this and that together?’, “suppose we imagine it this way…”
This is play.
At its heart, the Imaginary Institute is an utterly serious, utterly playful attempt to support the conditions under which urgent new ideas can appear, to reach beyond the present and bring forth what does not yet exist.
This is play.
The fact that everyone involved can have a different imagination of what the Imaginary Institute is, or is for, isn’t a bug, but a feature. We’re not attempting to collapse all perspectives and imaginations into one model. We’re creating a space where multiple imaginations can be lived, tested, swaped, interact, cross-poliinate, remixed.
Are we playing seriously enough?
Are we sometimes playing too seriously, accidentally reinforcing the idea that to be taken seriously one must be pessimistic? And if so, what futures are we unconsciously rehearsing?
Are we holding our metaphors lightly enough?
Are we treating our protocols as provisional, adaptable, and open to revision?
And so– if the future is ultimately something we co-produce, then what kinds of collective protocols could help us tune into it, lean toward it, figure-out what to do with it? Maybe even - co-create it?
And what is the role of imagination in all this: today, in the next year, five years, twenty? What should we be pointing our collective imagination towards?
OPEN CALL FOR PROTOCOLS
We’re inviting proposals for protocols for collective imagination in two ways:
1. To explore the question of future, in a philosophical, artistic, scientific, existential, playful, or any other sense
2. To help us think together about the future, the next 6 - 12 months of the Imaginary Institute itself. In very practical terms.
Protocols can be instructions, rule-systems, exercises, methods, a talk, an artscience installation, or things that don’t fit any category but still help people think and act together in new ways to explore the topics. It doesn’t need to be perfect - the Imaginary Institute is an anarchic laboratory for testing, developing, and playing with ideas together.
All submitted protocols will be discussed at the next curatorial meeting on Tuesday 9 December. From there, we’ll make a collective selection that will form the score for the next Imaginary Institute on 13–15 December 2025 at CLEA house, Center Leo Apostel, Brussels.