Laboratories of the Not-Yet: Being in Time within Alternative Futures

Abstract

This thesis investigates how art–technoscientific laboratories make alternative futures tangible by staging them as lived experiences of time. While much research on futuring concentrates on discursive visions or technological prototypes, I examine how such laboratories create opportunities to inhabit different temporalities in the present. I approach laboratories as temporal formations rather than solely physical sites, focusing on two Dutch hybrid institutions: V2_’s Sensing Systems and BioArt Laboratories’ Symbiotic Sessions. Using an ethnographic method grounded in embodied, in-tempo participant observation, I analyse how these laboratories curate aesthetic experiences of micro-temporal becomings. These arrangements allow participants to sense and negotiate speculative futures through affective and sensory engagement. Drawing on Deleuze’s concepts of the virtual and intensity ([1968] 1994), together with Bloch’s notion of the not-yet and concrete utopia (1986 [1954– 1959]), I develop the concept of “aesthetic-time” to describe the embodied, distributed, and more-than-human temporalities these laboratories actualize. I argue that these actualizations function as Techniques of Futuring (ToF): methods through which futures are made imaginable, experientable, and actionable. To address the political nature of such experiments, I draw on Bloch’s theory of hope, conceiving it as an anticipatory force that orients the temporal experiments of these laboratories toward the not-yet: possibilities that are both concrete in their materialization and emancipatory in their intent. The research shows that futures are not only imagined or represented but rehearsed through time as it is lived, offering new tools for understanding how cultural institutions can forms of anticipatory hope oriented towards alternative futures.