Without Words

Sensing the future through our 7 caves of water is actively practicing Anticipation for Emergence!

Take a look in the mirror. You will probably find a human face with a nose, a mouth, two eyes, and two ears. One of Mexican’s ancient cultures called these ‘holes’ in our face the 7 caves of water that allow us to sense the universe. Let’s not dive straight into the divine mastery of connecting to the universe, instead let’s try and sense something.

Hold on, this will not be a spiritually convincing attack. This is a reflection of two beautiful and daring sessions on attempting to sense the future.

Starting from the future, I have been active in the global community of foresight, futures literacy, and speculative design practitioners for a few years now and what strikes me is how much we are dependent and comfortable with the medium of words. You might think, ‘Of course, everyone is!’. Yes, many people and industries are but as new terminologies and headlines such as uncertain future, futures instead of future, or decolonizing the future are enthusiastically used and shaped by the foresight/futures community, I wonder if we have the right language and communication tools available to stay true to the ideas we present to the world. Has the overconsumption of words polluted the human spectrum of sensing and communicating with and about the external and thus limited the work we do as futurists?

How do we articulate an uncertain future?
What language do we need to talk about the plurality of the future?
What tools can help us to decolonize?

In a fruitful and inspirational exchange with Abril Chimal, we decided to go on a quest to investigate new ways of practicing foresight and futures work. I circle back to the 7 caves and my observation of the pollution of words. The act of speaking uses one cave, the mouth. Ok, let’s be fair and include the written word; reading a foresight research paper involves the eyes, two more cave. 3 caves out of 7 caves.
Using words solely is a limiting practice and by far not enough to sense the complexity, nuance, subtlety, and emerging of our surroundings. All elements we, as futurists, should be especially sensible about, aren’t they? How can we approximate the future with our taste, smell, hearing, and touch? What unseen sides of the future can we see if we look up from the research paper?

These thoughts struck our attention and without having a clue where the experiment would lead us, we had a topic of investigation: Sensing the future — without words!

1st experiment: onsite workshop at the gallery Proof-of-X in Mexico City
2nd experiment: online workshop at the 25th WFSF Conference

What I learned so far:

• Sensing beyond words is difficult but expands spatial and human interaction.
• If you take words away, human interaction feels awkward at first — some people get into a disabled state unable to communicate at all.
• Without words, we have to re-learn how to communicate, understand, and sense.
• Interacting without the use of words is already a future in itself. We don’t need to actively imagine or create a scenario that takes place in the future. Using our 7 caves of water is futuristic.
• For futures literacy nerds: Sensing the future through our 7 caves of water is actively practicing Anticipation for Emergence!

And as I was driving home on my scooter and the wind was puntching into my face, I thought, how ignorant of me to write an article (words black on white) about the pollution of words and the need for sensing more! Ihhgg…

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