The Future Mind Project

Esprit Futur was born from the meeting of doctoral students and academics from several disciplines who asked themselves an initially very simple question: why do we imagine the future?

This question is related to psychology, history, literature, philosophy or visual arts. The particular capacity of our brain to anticipate, to foresee, to produce hypotheses and to engage in foresight, allows us to adapt by envisaging the worst as well as by trying to imagine the best that could happen. 

We are all stochastic humans, to hijack the title of Robert Silverberg’s novel . From soothsayers to teams charged with imagining the future , through writers, whether science fiction or not, this ability has been widely expressed in politics as well as in art. It was imposed in visual productions from the second half of the twentieth century, even if earlier works had explored the genre, such as Metropolis (1927) or Woman in the Moon (1929) by Fritz Lang.

Based on this vast project, Esprit Futur will propose in 2022-2023, and we hope in the future, seminars, colloquiums, meetings, bringing together specialists from several disciplines who have the objective of reflecting, creating, thinking about our relationship with the future. 

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