The Scenario Mode | The Alternative Futures Approach – Modelling the Unthinkable

Presentation by Sebastian Vehlken

Scenario techniques are mediators of crises. This holds true for historical examples like the Thinking About the Unthinkable (H.Kahn) of atomic warfare or the Limits to Growth (D. Meadows et al), as well as for contemporary discussions about climate change. Scenarios generate “hypotheticalnarratives dealing with the causation, initiation, course and termination of future crises” (B. Bruce-Biggs). Central to such ‘synthetic histories’ (C. Pias) is their specific Eigenzeit, a course open for all sorts of “bizarre actions” (H. Kahn) which links the “broad present” (H.-U. Gumbrecht) to a plurality of possible futures. Instead of proposing a right way into a better future, scenario techniques heighten the awareness for the contingencies, the bifurcations, and the precipices lurking ‘on the way’. My presentation will pick out five historicalscenes which are exemplary for this mode of futurological exploration—down to computer simulations, the ubiquitous ‘scenario-media’ of today.

A meeting of the Nobel laureate in literature Wole Soyinka and the film theorist Manthia Diawara to discuss the notion of truth against the background of global postcolonial conflicts. What role does the truth play in the context of violence and human rights violations, of reconciliation and reparations? What forms of truth speaking are linked to personal freedom and what create new ostracizing power structures? Are there universal truths? And what truth is generated by fiction or documentaries? The Négritude movement and Glissant’s poetry of relation will be the starting point for Diawara and Soyinka’s examination of techniques of assertion and methods of truth production.

© Film and Production by Dusan Solomun