Imagination Meets Future Scenarios: The Future Custodians
Rewilding Possibilities with Multidisciplinary Futures, Artificial Intelligence, Hybrid Artforms and Speculative Design with Samar Younes and Geraldine Wharry
Image credit: Kaleidoscopic Heritage: Future Custodians’, part of the ‘Future Ancestors’ series by Samar Younes @samaritual.
Dare to ask: What if? Join a future period of humanity in 2034.
Explore the interrelationship of real and unreal in a 2-way conversation between Futurist Samar Younes and myself, where we share the process of crafting The Future Custodians and the Kalei tribe.
Set in 3034, the Kalei tribe is a pen profile, a cosmic fashion story, neither a desired nor predicted future. By combining foresight analysis, research, world-building, speculative design and art, Samar and I explored the essence of fashion beyond ownership, fostering harmony even through hardship.
Images Credit: Kaleidoscopic Heritage: Future Custodians’, part of the ‘Future Ancestors’ series by Samar Younes @samaritual. Writing: Geraldine Wharry.
Conversation
Full Audio
Transcript
(edited for brevity and clarity)
Geraldine Wharry: First, I thought we could talk about our collaborative process and how it came about.
With the Spur team, we wanted to explore AI and fashion. And I came across your work and took one of your Imaginaolgy Future Edu Lab courses. Your work is so compelling in terms of showing a different vision, utilising AI as your paintbrush, but it was much broader than that because you bring in a lot of philosophical and systemic questions around fashion.
It seemed great to collaborate and showcase how we could envision together a possible fashion future. Since publishing in the September issue, the response has been amazing on IG!
This way of working seems like an amazing avenue to inspire people to speculate more, to go beyond the limits of what we see today, and step away from the noise. Having done previous collaborations with other digital designers like Harriet Davey, Dazed and Selfridges, it was a no-brainer to see if you wanted to do this with us.
Samar Younes: When you reached out, I've always sort of been following you, obviously as a futurist. There are not a lot of futurists specifically focused on fashion and thinking of rewilding fashion, which is something that I'm really interested in, and rethinking systems that focus on circularity and repair through a philosophical lens, but with a very specific, pragmatic point of view and solution.
It seems there's so much opportunity within the fashion realm that it would be really exciting to work with somebody who has not only the philosophical perspective around fashion Futuring and an amazing perspective on how you see fashion in the future, but also somebody who you could tell is very caring and thoughtful in the way they do this, and not just sort of statement pieces or at the next trend, which a lot of futurists kind of do around the space.
So there was this echoing kind of connection, and all your work specifically around repair, circularity and rewilding kept kind of coming up that I found super inspiring. That's why I thought this would be an amazing collaboration.
Geraldine Wharry: We're both captivated by this idea of bringing the unreal into the real and opening people's eyes. We talked about this as we concluded our piece about the interrelationship between the real and the unreal, and how for us collaborating creatively, Our collaborative process embodied a seamless fusion of written and visual storytelling.
While I primarily focused on crafting the narrative and developing intricate scenarios, your AI-generated visual portraits served as a wellspring of inspiration, igniting new pathways of imagination. This dynamic interplay allowed us to build upon each other's ideas, with your visual concepts inspiring further narrative elaboration, and my research and insights informing the evolution of the imagery. The result was a rich, multidimensional tapestry that transcended the boundaries of traditional futurism, weaving together words and visuals in a uniquely symbiotic relationship.
It's not about saying ‘This is the trend’ or ‘This is the future we're predicting’. It’s an invitation to look at spirituality, community regeneration, ancient wisdom, innovation, all these things as the compass for future fashion, deeply meaningful, but also very creative.
Image Credit: Kaleidoscopic Heritage: Future Custodians’, part of the ‘Future Ancestors’ series by Samar Younes @samaritual.
Samar Younes: When we started our conversation, we found all these adjacencies, these similar interests that go back to indigeneity and the ritual of fashion beyond its value today.
How can it sort of be more than just this consumable artefact, beyond just a cultural artefact? What can we move deeper into a great opportunity to speculate and imagine: what if? I think that was really exciting.
Geraldine Wharry: Speculative design is not fantasy, and that was the point as well. This world we're portraying may seem very farfetched, but we did weave in a lot of facts.
What we're trying to say and get people to see is that to create this long-term future that we want, we have to put imagination in the driver's seat and suspend ourselves from disbelief.
Separate ourselves from the marketplace and what we see is only possible today. The future is a very altered place, and we don't know what kind of tipping points could happen. So, our visual and written pen portrait is a prototype. It was created to engage and provoke. But it is also saying: this may not be this far-fetched. That brings us nicely to the idea that the future is here.
We could talk about the culture of this new society and tribe that we pen-profiled called the Kalei. I should specify that in this pen profile, the day is August 5, 2034, and the day the scene is taking place marks the four-year anniversary of when the Kalei embarked on a new life with millions of others.
So maybe we could talk about this tribe that we tried to create, about the why and all the references and why this tribe has nomadic aspects, lives in a circular way, and cohabitates with machines. Let’s talk about this future.
Samar Younes: I do think we already have our micro tribe that exists, in a multiverse kind of way, online and in real life. And we're all seeking a tribe that resembles us. But think of being able to now add into the tribe other species, thinking beyond the binary specification of ‘who is a tribe’, and who are the folks within it.
The world that we're trying to envision is a non-binary kind of perspective on this idea of tribe more around a multi-species type of intelligence of different folks, which are made of humans and machines with ancestral knowledge systems, which is their intelligence that they're bringing towards the future.
And I think since a lot of us folks nowadays, and even in recent years, have been pulled towards understanding more about ourselves, through our ancestors, and understanding more the relationships we have to one another, and how can we create a better future?
One of the biggest opportunities that emerges is, how can we be better for our planet, with knowing how much impact fashion has on the planet. And how we manifest towards each other within our tribe, and how we want to express ourselves in such a multitude of ways, in a kaleidoscopic type of way.
I think that's how a lot of how this tribe emerged by allowing us this nonbinary expression of like, okay, you are X, Y and Z, you are just a multitude. And how can you have within that multitude of self, other self, and even other machine self that you can identify with and build this new kind of community? That is done through a much more thoughtful, decolonized kind of mindset.
Geraldine Wharry: The name of the tribe, the Kalei, was coined after the term kaleidoscope. It's about people being more accepting of what being human is, even if you're not physically human, and it’s about recapturing the richness of no longer being trapped in The Waste Age and what coming out of those bounds leads to.
There's been an event in the story. There's been a crisis. People have had to move to a part of the world where they're no longer the dominant force. So that's where the decolonization storytelling also happened.
They're no longer sedentary either, they're embracing a new way of life. In our piece, we reference the Tuareg, but we also reference Planet City by Liam Young.
This is about: how do we live in a world where we stop extracting so much from our planet?
That would require us to completely reimagine things.
As you said, a lot of people are interested in going back to certain types of ancestral or primordial connections, because naturally, they feel trapped.
I was at this talk where Brian Eno was speaking and he was saying “We are in the winter metaphorically and literally. In the winter, the roots thicken in and occasionally you see a leaf popping up. There's something going on that is phenomenal.”
And then he described how “revolutions happen in two phases, realising something has gone wrong”, which I think is what we're kind of going through. And then everyone realised that the other person had realised too. So, it's like someone needs to say “This is what I'm thinking or feeling” so that then everyone else starts saying “but that's what I'm thinking and feeling too!”.
The Kalei tribe serves as our speculative lens, offering a vivid glimpse into an alternative future. Rather than a prediction or a prescription, it's an invitation to explore the realm of possibility. Through the Kalei, we're not just saying 'this is how things could be,' but rather, 'imagine if we dared to reshape our world this way.'
It's a catalyst for critical thinking, encouraging viewers to question current paradigms and envision radically different ways of existing. The Kalei embody a fusion of ancestral wisdom and futuristic innovation, challenging us to reconsider our relationships with technology, nature, and each other. By presenting this provocative vision, we aim to spark dialogue about the trajectories we might choose and the futures we might create.
Image Credit: Kaleidoscopic Heritage: Future Custodians’, part of the ‘Future Ancestors’ series by Samar Younes @samaritual.
Samar Younes: Exactly. These are at the beginning. I think it will be interesting to start looking at the idea of being beyond just human beings. What are the different beings that we will have in this type of future?
This event that happened, that forced us to reinvent our ways of living, reminds me of that concept when for instance, in Cuba, because it was under an embargo, people reinvented based on what's available. I’m referring to the book “Objets Detournées” (2008) by Ernesto Oroza and Penelope De Bozzi. It chronicled tales of resilience through the lens of collection, repair, and recovery in Cuba.
The intriguing insight here is, as Ernesto Oroza Suarez, a Havana-born designer, states: 'In Cuba, we don’t ‘speak’ about recycling. This topic has just begun to surface in environmental TV programs. Yet, we've been practising 'domestic recycling' for years, greatly benefiting the environment.’ Here’s a link with more information: Objets Reinventés - Ernesto Oroza . What is the saying? That necessity is the mother of invention.
Geraldine Wharry: Yes, we talked about frugal innovation.
Samar Younes: And playfulness too, like the idea that we have become this very passive consumer of what's available, just to sort of fit in this kind of tribe.
Reinvent where you are not trying to sort of fit in through buying a similar kind of trend and a similar kind of brand or outfit like somebody else.
You're more creating your own identity based on all the pieces that make you who you are.
We're going toward where we are incorporating a different way to interpret fashion and your persona. How can you be uniquely you, knowing that personalization is already a thing? And how can you even push it further through how you express yourself within this tribe?
Because that's what it's ultimately about. Being playful and thoughtful about your self-expression.
Geraldine Wharry: We talked about who is a citizen in this new society. What does that look like?
In terms of those personalised signifiers in our story, they happen through certain new technologies, whether it's biotechnology or AI or certain types of wearables, but they also happen with craft and repair.
And because this is also a society where they're not changing outfits all the time, those few outfits they're wearing have everything. They mean so much, and they require more signifiers. It's not like in today's world where it doesn't matter if I personalise this because I'm throwing it in a month or I might just wear it a few times anyway.
One of the things I also felt was so meaningful in the story that sort of happened organically as we were creating it is the new notion of family in this story. I found that quite emotive, how as the story was unfolding and being created, we felt a connection between the protagonists and it reminded me also, of older family portraits, where people pose. You could just sense this nucleus that was in transition, but also incredibly united, and had these common signifiers.
When we unpacked the technologies used, they were both ancient and very novel, and there was an intersectionality. We wanted to portray that in the piece you could combine a way of reviving ancient nomadic cultures with these different technologies. It was a way of carrying the memories and the stories of this new way of living.
Image Credit: Kaleidoscopic Heritage: Future Custodians’, part of the ‘Future Ancestors’ series by Samar Younes @samaritual.
Samar Younes: In the past, hair, heirlooms, objects and pieces were passed down from generation to generation. You would inherit a lot of things from your mother or grandmother or such things were passed along until we kind of got into this era where we can't really pass anything down anymore, because most of the stuff hasn't been sort of cared for or personalised enough to want to keep on to it. Or it has disintegrated because of the quality of it.
So, there is something, when you talk about this family nucleus, that thinks about using technology and this knowledge system, this intelligence system to help the Kalei tribe, not only create and coexist in an interesting way, but create a new heirloom that they are wearing, that they can pass.
This new kind of system utilises a very similar slow kind of way of building these heirlooms, personalising them, bringing about thoughtfulness. And the pieces are put together from their collective travel, or bits and pieces from their memory and things that make it so uniquely theirs.
Geraldine Wharry: This makes me think of how you had named the visual artefact part of the piece ‘The Future Custodians. Then I took that word, this speaks also to how we ‘Ping ponged’. I took that word around the future custodian, and one of the protagonists, Havey 3.0 which is an Android, his role is to be the scribe of our tribe. He's the small robot to the left and programmed to care, educate, and preserve our legacy for generations to come.
And it's that sense of future heritage. And so, he as this future archive, that will be alive centuries from now and will continue to share the story of the Kalei tribe, and safeguarding the stories, this idea of a family is really important.
I mean, in consumer and behaviour trends at the moment, people are talking about Chrono-normativity, or intergenerational living and all of these things. But we forget to link to the story of fashion. Where does fashion play a role? It’s so important in terms of legacy and heritage. We even saw it at the Olympics this year. Everyone was gathering and had their outfits and their different tribes. Fashion is everything.
Samar Younes: The Kalei tribe totally reminded me of some of the Olympics outfits. It was insane. Some people were sending them to me saying they looked like I drew them.
Geraldine Wharry: Maybe you should work for the next Olympics! But seriously, it was so moving. And I think we lose a little bit of that in today's fashion story.
I hope that this story will help people reconnect with just how rich it is to have clothing that you pass on, clothing that lasts, clothing that you repair, and the whole circularity of it.
And if we can embed things like for example in the piece, we talked about our clothes becoming wearable habitats. And we talked about neuro aesthetics and certain wearable aspects. When you can introduce certain technologies, the sky's the limit.
Image Credit: Kaleidoscopic Heritage: Future Custodians’, part of the ‘Future Ancestors’ series by Samar Younes @samaritual.
Samar Younes: Fashion always expands into your home. It's very interconnected into your habitat in many different ways. Because a lot of the pieces intercross, I always look at them through this two-way symbiosis. You can have a scarf that you hang on your wall, but you can also put it on you, and that goes back and forth.
But beyond that, oftentimes luxury has become nowadays more of a status symbol and a label. But ultimately, luxury used to be all that.
What you just mentioned, which were this intergenerational past kind of heirloom, they're really well done with all the saving and all the care, and even if you had a lot of money and you bought an heirloom that was expensive, it was so well saved with this packaging and all the details of it and the initial and passed down.
So, it's just basically reimagining and rethinking luxury to be more in line with sustainability and the idea of this personalised, much more resilient and regenerative artefact that we will carry. Embodying their aesthetic value is making us feel good through neuro aesthetics. And their emotive value is making us feel good because the strengths come from their ancestral connection.
These artefacts possess a transformative power that goes beyond mere aesthetics. They interact with our biochemistry, altering our very essence and amplifying our capabilities. By wearing or surrounding ourselves with these pieces, we become empowered in ways that transcend traditional notions of adornment. The integration of AI systems into these artefacts adds an extra dimension - a sentient companion that evolves with us.
This symbiosis between humans, artefact, and AI creates a new type of being, one that seamlessly blends our ancestral wisdom with cutting-edge technology. It's as if we've gained an extension of ourselves, a living library of knowledge and creativity that we can constantly draw upon, innovate with, and use as a springboard for further exploration and growth.
The era of AI systems that is being programmed and the more responsible way to be sort of this amazing library and source of information, this thread that you can pull from and connect with and build upon and innovate from and play with.
Geraldine Wharry: AI is based on language. In the piece, we talked about language, for example, the stripes in the quilt, or some of the motifs. Every ancient culture had symbols and those had meanings, sometimes they were hidden spiritual meanings, whether they were more obviously illustrative, whether, for example, it looked like an animal, or sometimes it was much more abstract, but it meant something, for example not trapping a spirit in the Hopi and Navajo cultures.
When we look at modern culture, basically every logo is just a tribal signifier and tribal language. The piece was also trying to say, let's go back to those codes and create new ones, our own codes. We can be creative again with the language.
I know that's an adjacent connection with AI, and there's a lot of debate with AI for example that so much of it is going to start being fed with synthetic data. But you could look at it in a different way, where we play a role in the new languages that we hand over to these large language models and become more creative with what we can teach them.
Samar Younes: The information we provide, and the ability to improvise again because there is something about that with AI that we kind of count on it as a system to be perfect and so put together to give us everything, forgetting that ultimately, AI is collective intelligence.
Basically, a system of collective intelligence that's at our disposal, and it is going to make mistakes, and it's going to be imperfect.
Ultimately, our role is to be able to work with it in a way that allows us to circulate knowledge but kind of like a kid, being able to play along and make mistakes. It's okay to make mistakes because it's similar to a hand process.
And I think I see a lot in your work when we talk about rewilding, which to me, is the anti-perfection, there's something about the industrial era that created this very perfect model of exactness, In this new era, we're witnessing a paradigm shift that transcends the industrial age's obsession with perfection and mass replication. The advent of AI represents a fascinating paradox - a technology more advanced than industrialization, yet inherently embracing imperfection. This mirrors the organic, nuanced quality of artisanal craftsmanship, where each piece carries the unique imprint of its creator.
AI's capacity for generating novel outputs, akin to a child's imaginative musings, introduces an element of unpredictability and creativity that defies the rigid exactness of industrial production. This 'rewilding' of technology allows for a more fluid, adaptive approach to creation and problem-solving. Just as a skilled artisan might improvise to finish a stitch when faced with an unexpected challenge, AI systems can generate innovative solutions that deviate from predetermined patterns.
This fusion of advanced computation with organic ingenuity redefines our understanding of care, luxury, and value. It shifts us away from the sterile perfection of mass production towards a more nuanced appreciation of uniqueness and adaptability. In essence, we're cultivating a form of 'digital craftsmanship' that honours both technological advancement and the beautiful imperfections inherent in human creativity.
It's that sort of organic ingenuity that happens with humans that's very similar to an AI being. Why call it a being? Because I see it very much as a being, because it's this kind of awkward being that is programmed by people through this collective intelligence with all these sorts of limits, like, kind of judgement on it, which, you know, fair enough because it can go haywire and very bad quickly.
I went off on a tangent a bit, but I think there is something really empathetic. Why it's part of the tribe and why this robot becomes part of the tribe is because it doesn't embody this kind of binary perfection of a robot.
It's not your typical robot where it's just like, move left, move right, do this exact same thing.
It does have some qualities of what humans are and other species because of the imperfection and we want AI to be kind of like a bit wild. I think that wilderness is kind of important.
Geraldine Wharry: AI came into the picture because that's one of your tool brushes in your visual, but we didn't use AI to tell the story. I want to specify that because people might think that we actually used AI also for ideas for the actual story, but we didn't. We could have, and maybe that's the next stage. Maybe we should explore that, and that could have been another layer of iteration.
Iteration is such a fun part of working with AI, and it's part of every creative process. And people manifest iterations in many different ways. Artists have so many different ways of working. Ultimately with AI ethics, that's a whole other conversation, of course, but touching upon it a bit, because I feel that our shared motivation and passion has been to just work with AI to inspire people, and that is ultimately what is powerful.
Samar Younes: Right, it's like being able to draw with a system that allows you to explore this speculative idea of what how this fashion narrative could come about if we were within the context of this Kalei tribe, but also thinking through the perspective of a rewilded future, a decolonized future, a future in which you are trying to think of fashion beyond the status quo and think of a regenerative model that could provide better solutions and better perspectives on how we think about fashion too, is most important.
Image Credit: Kaleidoscopic Heritage: Future Custodians’, part of the ‘Future Ancestors’ series by Samar Younes @samaritual.
Geraldine Wharry: In the story, there's an event that leads to a huge change, and people have to adapt to it. And we touch on that, on the fact that it's a transition, it's not easy, to go back to your point about rewilding.
Rewilding is not this beautiful, romantic thing all the time. As far as nature preservation, it can be pretty tough. When nature is seeking to readjust itself, it needs to cull. In certain regions, there's been culling of certain species, and that's been quite hard for humans to witness when you give back control to nature, nature can be tough. That’s the thing, we're trying to say things might be very different, and it might require us to go through a certain difficult and radical change, but we might come out of it that much richer. How can we imagine these possible avenues? Even if not a final destination, but just to open our minds up. I guess the piece to me is an invitation for people to imagine and become visionaries themselves.
Samar Younes: I think that that's a great way to end it, because it sort of is about people reimagining what if? What is the future of fashion within the context of our future existence? And how can we sort talk about rewilding.
We envision a future that transcends today's media-driven consumerism, embracing radical self-expression and creative autonomy. In this world, AI becomes a tool for unleashing creativity, not dictating trends. Imagine crafting deeply personal artefacts that blend ancestral techniques with cutting-edge technology – like 'printing with mud' to create a unique bracelet.
This approach redefines our relationship with objects. The items we create and surround ourselves with become extensions of our identity and stories. They contribute to our well-being and that of the planet, holding as much significance as the food we consume.
By reimagining our creative processes and connection to objects, we foster a more sustainable, personalised existence that honours individual expression while deepening our bond with community and planet
Geraldine Wharry: Fashion takes on a whole new pivotal role, but a new role. And we have all the technologies, we have all the facts, we have all the data. Maybe what we're lacking is imagination.
And so, this is really about tapping into our imaginations and thinking very boldly about possible futures. Because, in fact, throughout our piece, we cite a lot of examples of projects and innovations that are already existing, already happening.
Samar Younes: We're not reinventing the wheel. We're just rethinking how that wheel could be redeployed or that goal re-imagined.
Geraldine Wharry: So, Samar, where can we find you at the moment?
Samar: Here are the three realms of SAMARITUAL:
Creator Realm: Collaborate on Visionary Art & Cultural Artefacts. This involves commissioning artistic work at the intersection of art, technology, artisanal, and transcultural intelligence.
Catalyst Realm: Engage in Brand & World-Building Consultation. This is about shaping multi-dimensional universes through futurist-driven strategy.
Cultivator Realm: Join IMAGINAOLGY Future Edu Lab sessions. These sessions cultivate radical imagination, technical savoir-faire, hybrid creativity and future strategic skills in the age of AI. Upcoming classes are the ongoing foundational course about “The Art of Collaborating with AI” on Nov 8 for this year and a brand new super excited new type of course about “Hybrid Universe Building: Crafting AI-Ready Brand Archives” on December 1. All info related to upcoming events and courses can be accessed via IMAGINAOLGY's Luma calendar also folks can join the Imaginaolgy broadcast channel on Instagram for special announcements, tips, and insights about hybrid future creativity in the age of AI.
