FUTURITY NOW! invited us to create new templates for the future and ask not what the future has in store for us, but what is it that we have in store for the future?

Much of 20th century society strove to depict 2010 as a shining example of a future framed by technological progress and social harmony. But as 2010 arrived it was clear that global society was neither the utopia nor the dystopia traditionally presented in the fictions, architectures and theories of the future. With the ubiquity of digital systems, communications mobility and social media firmly entrenched as an intrinsic part of our cultural code, we saw that what we used to think of as the future had caught up to us... and was experiencing an identity crisis.

transmediale.10’s program included among other events the conference Future Observatory, which examined the limits, gaps and dysfunctions of the future as cultural object of projection and seeked to delineate possibilities and strategies to analyze our present (and its media,) and a film & video program which looked at FUTURITY NOW! in terms of failed utopias and illuminated various sub-topics. The exhibition Future Obscura explored how the machines and materials of moving-image making capture, retain and reproduce our reality and so alter our sense of temporality.