BEYOND BARCODE

Beyond Barcode (BARCODE) is an exhibition project organized by CoFUTURES research team and hosted by the Intercultural Museum in Oslo. The primary objective of this project is the exhibition BEYOND to showcase results and innovation of the ERC-funded CoFUTURES: Pathways to Possible Presents and associated research projects. BEYOND consists of a set of transmedial prototyped futures co-created with artists, writers, designers, games developers, and changemakers. The secondary objective is to develop an activity programme during the exhibition. The project considers relevance along three different axes: (a) Expanding CoFutures Literacy, (b) Pluralizing Futures and Futures Knowledges, and, (c) Global-Local Challenges and Norwegian Futures. BEYOND will draw upon research findings and innovation of the CoFUTURES research team and collaborators who come from Europe, the US, Africa, and Asia. BEYOND will combine findings from research on how local inhabitants of Oslo anticipate and imagine the future and juxtapose it with global imaginaries of authors and artists affiliated with CoFUTURES. The ERC funded CoFUTURES project strives for a threefold impact: (1) expose audiences to the impact of futures thinking, (2) teach futures literacy and CoFutures literacy methods, and, (3) promote and raise awareness of diverse future thought on individual lives and how that shapes communities from the regional, national and the planetary scale.

The FORSTERK Grant was used to develop the exhibition "Beyond Barcode: Experiments in Radical Futures," currently exhibited at the Oslo Museum: Interkulturelt Museum (Tøyenbekken 5, Oslo). We conducted numerous workshops with the Oslo community to develop the 7 visual scenarios in the exhibition, the soundtrack (8th scenario) and the gamification (9th scenario). The financing was used primarily to develop the scenarios and to pay the workshop participants, artists, and costs for the exhibition materials. The exhibition was successfully executed and opened with the first scenarios on March 30, 2023, additional scenarios are added periodically, and additional closing events (workshops and lectures) were conducted in May and July. The exhibition website (https://conference.cofutures.org) showcases all the different scenarios developed in the exhibition, and provides additional details about the entire exhibition project and its methodology. The exhibition has been made part of the Oslo Jubileum celebrations, so it will be open at the museum until December 2024. The exhibition was also featured in the podcast "Spreng Grensene!" organized by Norges museumsforbund. An additional policy oriented impact article was presented by curators Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Bergsveinn Thorsson in Forskningspolitikk (1/2024). Both are available open access.

CoFutures takes as its main methodological inspiration futures literacy. Futures literacy is recognized by the UN as a key skill of our time, relevant for all aspects of our life. It involves training people in their ability to be aware of, recognize, and deal with problems in long, medium, and short term futures. There is a critical gap in how short term thinking (politics) and long term strategic thinking (scenario and policy) can be brought together in the public space of engagement in order to develop sustainable futures. CoFutures addresses this gap by developing and creating methodologies that hybridize and advance knowledge from science and technology studies and policy, futures studies, and speculative future fiction. We call this cofutures literacy. The exhibition project BEYOND BARCODE (BEYOND) will promote cofutures literacy for different stakeholders: academia, general public, as well as policy makers and public and private organizations. BEYOND and its content, as well as the different public events, will radically expand the impact of the project in Norway, and also help export our research to international communities. We will prototype different alternative futures, in association with different communities in Oslo, artists, fiction writers, designers, games developers, and changemakers. These prototypes will serve as the core component of the exhibition. We will also have associated events including workshops, lectures, and a Live Action Role Playing Game (LARP). BEYOND serves the ERC project's goal of exploring alternative visions of innovation, non-traditional visions of futures, and questions the dominance of specific future visions by presenting alternatives on an equal playing field. BEYOND will display prototype futures under the themes: Diversity and Demographic Change, Culture and Social Life, Infrastructure and Governance, Climate and the Environment.