A Grimoire is a book of magic spells and recipes.
The spells you find in this Grimoire take the form of practical tools, techniques, games and structures. They can be used and put to the test in real life, by anyone or any group interested in experimenting with time travel in collective processes. The goal of this Grimoire is for it to be used. We tried our best to make the tutorials as accessible and user-friendly as possible, keeping in mind our missionary vocation to spread the practice and virtues of time travel and world-building in all layers of society.
We listed some practical tips to get you going in How to consult the Grimoire.
Futurology, Futures Studies or Strategic Foresight is a craft somewhere in between art and science that tries to imagine or predict how current trends can develop into possible futures. As this craft is often practised in the hidden back-rooms of corporate or political offices, we wanted to democratise the tools it uses, and turn them into an instrument of mutant cooperation and time travelling within the reach of all. We mixed it with the best of collective intelligence, poetic writing, somatic practices and a sprinkle of occult sciences. We hacked, remixed and prototyped new methods of open-source futurology. We invented games, exercises and tools that can be used to imagine and design possible futures collectively, to develop and elaborate these futures, and to explore them. We are convinced that these worlds and futures have something to teach us, and can influence our behaviour and lifestyles today. In practising this type of open-source futurology, an immersive art-form appears, somewhere at the border of group performance and experimental consultancy. We hope you enjoy.
Futurology of cooperation
The tools and inventions that are archived here were discovered and developed during the research project Futurology of Cooperation. They were collected and put down by the multitude of voices in our research team. We embraced this multitude, rather than attempting to bring it into uniformity. As we interweaved our words along the way, sometimes we couldn't even trace ourselves who wrote what. Nevertheless we attempted to credit the authors, and we also tried to explain where these activities came from and who passed them on to us in what context. These mentions provide clues as to how this tasty knowledge was circulated. They can also be seen as 'dedications' that will allow the diligent scholars among you to deepen their own research. The voices that haunt this publication: Anna Czapski, Diederik Peeters, Hans Bryssinck, Adva Zakai, Heike Langsdorf, Sarah Magnan, Pierre Huyghebaert, Mathilde Maillard, Rasa Alksnyte, Anna Rispoli, Marine Thévenet.
You can read more about the research project here and here. And if you want to know more about the art of futuring, Maja Kuzmanovic wrote a splendid introduction that you can read here.
This Grimoire is a living archive of existing tools and new inventions. Nourished by our own tests and experiences we keep on shifting, adapting and adding entries. A first proto-version of this website was launched on April 1st 2022, a second one somewhere in December 2022, and we will continue moulding, reshaping and transforming until the end of times. Apart from this website we also published a pocket-sized workbook of this Grimoire. At the moment we are still investigating how to distribute the book, so should you be in desperate need of a copy, please send us an email: grimoire@futurology.be.
Nederfrançlish
You will find a mix of English, French and Dutch here. We did our best to make as many entries as possible available in all of these three languages. However, since simplicity isn't among our core-values, we didn't necessarily translate everything from one language into another. Sometimes we opted to write an entirely different version. Therefore, should you feel adventurous enough to compare different versions of the same entry, you might discover that the English version of a certain recipe is only half the length of the Dutch one, and the French one something completely different altogether. Much in the same way, you will discover some entries that only exist in one or two of the three languages. In short: if you really want to know everything there is to know, it is advisable to examine all three siblings (translators like deepL can help if you don't master all three languages).
Attention! We didn't run everything through a spell-checker ebfore publicotian. Rather than attempting to arrive at a final stop in order to reread everything like true professionals, we opted to embrace the living character of this beast. So beware, you will undoubtedly find an outlandish amount of grammatical and spelling-mistakes. We can only hope your mood will be a forgiving one.
Besides, our journey back to 2022 comes to an abrupt end, and behind our backs the door to the future is closing. We preferred to throw down here what we could and as we could, rather than take too many mysteries and secrets with us back to the future.
Copyleft-right
Everything you find here is published under the CC BY-SA licence (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). It is available for anyone to use, to change and to adapt according to specific needs and situations. Please feel free to mix and remix all you want. For public events it's always nice to mention narrative credits, as we tried to do too. You are also warmly invited to share your adaptations or your experience by sending us an email: grimoire@futurology.be.
The CC BY-SA is the only of the six Creative Commons licence to be considered as copyleft. This licence is also fully compatible with the Licence Art Libre (see https://artlibre.org) that provides a text with a more interesting tone. At the same time, we are curious about the speculative licence CC4r licence (see https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html) that asks more powerful and future questions.
Libre tools
This website and printed publication was designed by Sarah Magnan and Pierre Huyghebaert from OSP (Open Source Publishing) using Ethertoff. Ethertoff is a simple collaborative web platform, much resembling a wiki but featuring realtime editing thanks to Etherpad. Its output is constructed with equal love for web and print thanks to paged.js.