The Art and Artifice of Prediction: Recent Episodes
The Art and Artifice of Prediction
In this episode of The Art and Artifice of Prediction, we turn to art and visual culture. Maria Christou (University of Manchester) talks to Theo Reeves-Evison (Birmingham City University), who examines the ways in which infrastructures of prediction' are responded to in visual culture - or even initiated by it.
Assoc. Prof. Ruth Morgan asked Professor Matthias Heymann (Aarhus University) about the rise of climate modelling and the quantification of climate futures. How did these techniques affect the ways we understand the climate and the effects of climate change?
During the Cold War, social scientists contributed to the ‘military-intellectual complex’ of American foreign policy. Lise Butler spoke to the historian Daniel Bessner about the close relationship between social science and the American defence establishment in the mid-twentieth century, and the use of predictive methods, like the American RAND corporation’s Delphi system, in Cold War era foreign policy.
Cybernetics has long been associated with predicting the future. Dan McAteer asked Dr Andrew Sanchez from the University of Oxford about the now forgotten cybernation theorists of the 1960s, whose predictions of an automated future thrust them into the limelight of social debate. What kind of society did cybernation envision? And how can past debates about automation inform the contemporary debate?
Science fiction, and speculative fiction more broadly, are generally considered to be the genres of prediction. What is beginning to be known as 'Anthropocene Fiction' is also seemingly future-oriented. In this episode, Maria Christou (University of Manchester) talks to Patrick Whitmarsh (Harvard University), who explains why this is not necessarily true.
Seeking to contextualise the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report (1972), Assoc. Prof. Ruth Morgan asked Dr Sarah Dry from the University of Cambridge about the rise and fall of world systems modelling in the 1960s and 1970s. Why did researchers attempt to predict the future in this way, and what lessons can we learn about the possibilities and pitfalls of prediction from their efforts?
In the first episode of the series, Lise Butler spoke to the historian Jenny Andersson about the rise of future studies and futurology during the Cold War. Why did so many intellectuals and policy makers become interested in predicting and planning the future in the mid-twentieth century, and what is the legacy of future studies and futurology today?