Paper short abstract:

The following work is a product of the fusion of Anthropology and Art, consisting of a series of 15 collage-plates, created to understand in a single glance, the evolution of the planet and humanity as a Unit. It allows us to see our present and project ourselves into the future.

Paper long abstract:

Our participation will be centered on the exhibition of the "Andean and Global Timeline". A series of 15 digitalized collages, together with a presentation reflecting on the future.

This work is the result of many years of research and the development of an academic database from an anthropological background. As in my country, educational resources are a permanent demand, we decided to elaborate a material of easy access for education and society in general, from any part of the planet and culture.

These 15 artistic collages are read sequentially and also independently. The final product is an image that passes on knowledge and is of a high diffusion.

The particularity of this Timeline is that it is fed by the Andean Cosmovision and the importance of the primordial elements of Nature: fire, water, air, earth, and ether, or the unknown and unfathomable. Each element represents an Anthropological Era made up of three collages. Fire is the Universe, Water is Blossoming, Air is Biodiversity, Earth is Homo and Ether is Humanity and the future. The Line reaffirms the idea of the cycle and of continuity, and the unity of Humanity and the Planet.

As a reflection to the present, we consider the time we are living in as year 0, since it is the first time in the history of mankind that we are living the same event, in time and space: facing a planetary pandemic. It is up to us to project ourselves into the future, spreading knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

Can we anticipate the possible future by better understanding the indigenous frameworks of the past? By adopting an ancient lens, we can fill gaps in the historical records with the narratives, totems, and systems of peoples often forgotten by modernity and technology to model the future accurately.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores Totems as a literal and symbolic anchor point informing the evolution of technology into a new era of modernity. With concepts such as afro-futurism, indigi-futurism moving to the forefront of the public domain, how do movements that seek to bring forth the ideas, beliefs, and frameworks of a distant past begin to shape how we anticipate the future? This question presents us with the opportunity to look at totems and symbology with an anthropological lens that strips away the anglocentric position of the academic study. By identifying and adopting the value of native traditions via modern technical advancements, we radically change how we model and contextualize the future. We see a parabolic interpretation of this in the Adinkra symbol and Twi word sankofa, "return and go fetch it," which signifies going into the past to retrieve lost knowledge and ushering it into the future. This seemingly unobtrusive symbol denoted in two forms - an animal totem (bird) and an artistic rendering of a heart - signifies a timeless concept of future building that guides many tribes. It has found its way into the Civil Rights Movement for Black Liberation around the globe, and the symbol rings clear across many timelines. As technology presents itself as a new landscape, ancient traditions find themselves at the intersection of change and annihilation. Yet, if we use the wisdom and systems that have always existed, we stand a chance at rewriting a future that is already outdated--for the ancient is modern, again.

Paper short abstract:

Presenting examples of anticipation practice in sustainable futures and African futurism, this paper contributes to a wider, more diverse and contested futures discourse rooted in anthropological theory, for a more conscious and deliberate development and application of related futures methodology.

Paper long abstract:

Despite sociologists’ reluctance to establish a sociology of the future (Textor 1995, Tutton 2017), anthropology has called “for a renewed, open and future-focused approach to understanding the present, anticipating the unknown, and intervening in the world” with critical anthropological ethnography “confronting and intervening in the challenges of contested and controversial futures”, adding “to the study and making of futures an approach inflected by the ethical and participatory principles of anthropology” (Pink & Salazar 2017).

As cultural-reflexive paradigms have long substantiated futures methodology, anticipation practice has highlighted the future as “contested rhetorical domain” with social power relations defining images of the future in “a conceptual space within which political, social, and cultural change can be imagined and realized” (Dunmire 2010).

In this sense of a critical, material-discursive and action-oriented futures discourse (Masini 2006), this paper presents examples of situated, contextual and experiential anticipation projects in (i) ecosystem scenarios as diverse nature futures, and (ii) African futurism, both contesting dominant cultural notions of desirable futures. The paper relates these examples to anthropological theory of time as the embodied experience and product of concrete, temporalizing social practice, and as “symbolic process continually being produced in [people’s] everyday [anticipatory] practices” in the subjective perception of time as human temporality (Munn 1992).

Constructing images of the future as vital signs of cultural renewal (Polak 1973) asks for individual identification with these images “particular to places and groups”, and to connect to the “material and affective aspects that constitute social life” as “lived futures” (Sandford 2019).

Paper short abstract:

This work is about anticipation as a key quality of mobile infrastructure. The scales and processes that overlap between Gs, including the 5G rollout and 6G development, create a peculiar timescape. How to understand an infrastructure that tends to be configured by its historic overlapping futures?

Paper long abstract:

The following work aims to characterize and problematize anticipation as one of the main qualities of mobile infrastructure, focusing on the methodological dimension of its study. It is part of a broader research about the 5G rollout in Chile and the development of technological innovations for the infrastructure. This research uses an ethnographic approach that concentrates on the workers, public and private policies; and audiences of the process. A starting point is how the infrastructure has a peculiar timescape, where the ‘evolution’ of the technological generations is naturalized the same as the overlap between their development and implementation. 5G does not exist without the goal of creating 6G nor the technical support of 4G, the same as 4G didn’t exist without 5G and 3G in the same sense.

Here, the paper highlights the methodological challenges of investigating the techno-temporal layers of the network, for example, the rhythm of media coverage and the openness of the implementation in a convoluted world. Corporate documents, news, tweets and retweets, and reports from the tech industry become central to researching the discourses of anticipation. In terms of practices, the future is consumed as media and new technologies. Both arrive before the infrastructure, making 5G an object of desire that populates the material world. This work hopes to open the dialogue between time and mobile infrastructure (and technology) through the repeated anticipation of the next generation. How to understand an infrastructure that tends to be configured by its historic overlapping futures?