Participatory Futuring: Critical Utopian and Dystopian Thinking in Billennium by Uninvited Guests and Duncan Speakman

This article discusses the Augmented Reality (AR) performance Billennium (2018–22), a guided tour of dystopian and utopian futures for a place. In this work by Uninvited Guests and Duncan Speakman, performers tell site-specific science fiction stories while AR animations of future scenarios appear around the audience and they hear spatialized soundscapes of times to come. The tour concludes with an opportunity to design tomorrow’s city together and participants see the speculative architecture they imagine collectively, drawn in real-time and superimposed onto the buildings of today.

I argue that it is in the gap between the reality of the neighbourhood now, ‘as is’, and the ‘as if’ of the alternate AR futures that critical comparison can take place. Darko Suvin (‘On the poetics of the science fiction genre’, College English, 34(3): 372–82,1972) describes the ‘cognitive estrangement’ of science fiction, which can defamiliarize our observed environment in ways that function dialectically. Billennium decentres the present place and, in between actuality and the AR/science-fictions, participants measure life ‘as it is’ in their place against how it could be. I suggest such performance methods aid critical reflection on the present and on the impact decisions we take today have on future probabilities.

Through this case study, in the context of crises of democracy, the social imaginary and the imagination, I explore whether site-specific science-fiction storytelling, participatory futuring and AR can scaffold and inspire ‘collective social imagination’ (Keri Facer, The University and the Social Imagination, Centre for Global Higher Education Working Paper No. 82, University of Oxford, 2022). The article proposes that place-based, speculative performance builds people’s capacity to conceive of and co-design more critically constructive imaginary futures, and thus enables communities to practice democratic decision-making differently.