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23 Platform Human Matters;

In challenging times, we often are geared towards finding solutions in what technology has to offer. However, this offering often does not take into account messy realities, and it limits us from seeing other possibilities. But if we are to focus on building humane futures, we have to centre the human.

For this reason, we adopted the slogan Human Matters as the core of our programme. In collaboration with the University of Humanistic Studies (UHS) in Utrecht, we are establishing Platform Human Matters to foreground artistic and academic inquiries into the human experience and move towards future proposals. For example, how does technology and the internet of things influence the relationship between humans and their environment? What would an alternative to our current economic system look like if we aim for social equality instead of financial growth? And perhaps most significantly for Platform Human Matters: what productive position does the artist take in these questions, and where do academic research and artistic practice meet?

In December 2019, ArtEZ and UHS signed a memorandum of understanding to consolidate our shared ambitions, marking a promising start to this unique endeavour. At its core, Platform Human Matters believes in the complementary approach of its founders, with the platform functioning as a centre where ArtEZ and UHS become coworkers in both education and research, thereby exploring and experimenting with new humanistic forms and structures. One of the planned outcomes is the collective MA programme Human Matters that seeks to even further elaborate on the connection between artistic and academic research practices. In addition, the Platform will also engage with a diverse network of collaborators, from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), and the research consortium Simagine (Utrecht) to smaller art initiatives like TAAK (Amsterdam).

Website:: https://www.artez.nl/dit-is-artez/academies/art-design-zwolle,
Connections—internal:: Academy of Art & Design Zwolle,
Connections—external:: Het Nieuwe Instituut, TAAK, University of Humanistic Studies (UHS) Utrecht (consortium Simagine), Vrije Universiteit Brussel,
Values—being:: Complexity, Propositional, Reflexivity,
Values—doing:: analysing, collaborating,

Practicing Possible Futures; Research, School, Platform; ArtEZ University of the Arts;

We begin with a question: What possible futures do we want to make? It is a question that raises uncertainty and provokes complexity. As practitioners in the arts, we practise occupying uncertainty and taking on complexity to create new possibilities. We want to use the power of possibilities to create new forms of expressing the future. As researchers in the arts, we strive to produce new ways of making sense of the future that we want to make together.

Futures have always been the realm of the unknown, subject to predictions and projections, fashions, and forecasts. However, the current state of emerging urgencies is also making them precarious—scarce, uneven, and not commonly available. At the same time, our global social, political, economic, human, and environmental resources face depletion. The need to make another future possible is apparent.

The clarion call for future-making has to be heard with caution. Overemphasis on the future as a resolution of contemporary crises abandons our responsibility for action in the present. Utopian visions of the future as a safe space can encourage the suspension of civil rights and liberties and even foster authoritarianism. The resignation to imminent threat can normalise apathy towards our collective well-being. These predetermined scripts for futurity reduce the future to a commodity and a finite resource.

And yet, deep in the heart of art is the capacity to create futures that are infinitely creative and chimerical, whimsical and wondrous. The ArtEZ Research Centre is premised on the foundational belief that art is a force of change and imagines new others—other worlds, ways, times, spaces, bodies, us—other futures. This capacity to imagine, visualise, formulate, and materialise the future, not just as a function of time, but as a possibility of collective hope, is what we call practice.

Practice is a continuous conversation that takes critical, aesthetic, and political positions. It is a dialogue generated by bringing together different needs, questions, opportunities, interests, knowledges, expertise, and processes to create possible futures. At ArtEZ, research in the arts is an articulation, analysis, and critique of the expression of resilience, equity, diversity, in the making of these futures. What kind of futures? Whose futures? Who do we make them with? Who are we when we step up to make them?

Research in the arts emphasises that these practices of possible futures are incomplete, just-begun, and in-the-making. They need a glossary of common values and a lexicon of methods to identify what we do and how. Simultaneously, it needs critical reflexivity that questions the foregrounding of certain voices and makes space for missing experiences, to unsettle our knowledge and create conditions for collective futures.

Practicing Possible Futures is a portfolio of research in the arts at ArtEZ that illustrates the capacity of our artistic expression to shape the world we live in, our commitment to imagine and expand the possibilities of collective intervention, and our role as researchers in the arts to bring forth futures worth fighting for.

Team Practicing Possible Futures—ArtEZ; Anniek Brattinga, Carin Rustema, John Johnston, Krista Jantowski, Leon Filter, Marie Trei, Nishant Shah, Vincent Zhong,
Text; Krista Jantowski, Leon Filter, Vincent Zhong,
Design Website; Dorothee Dähler, Simon Rüegg,
Development Website; Simon Rüegg,
Design Identity; Dorothee Dähler, Yeliz Secerli,
Last Update; 10/12/2020,

ArtEZ University of the Arts;
Onderlangs 9, 6812 CE Arnhem, the Netherlands;
Postbox 49, 6800 AA Arnhem, the Netherlands;

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