October 18–19, 2025
Bergen 5015
Norway
Saturday October 18 is the opening day of the 7th Futurological Congress: “The Future of the Contact Zone”, which takes place in Tårnsalen at KODE with talks, performances, and screenings to explore the ‘contact zone’ as a space of convergence.
The Futurological Congress is a hybrid artistic, intellectual, and speculative gathering—part exhibition, part symposium, part performative scenography. The Bergen chapter focuses on the ‘contact zone’: charged spaces where species, systems, and sensibilities converge. Today, these zones extend far beyond physical terrains into algorithmic ecologies, multispecies entanglements, and the blurred boundaries between human and machine.
Through talks, performances, film screenings, and visual interventions, the congress stages discourse as a shared, sensorial, and speculative act. The invited contributors include artists, researchers, and thinkers who engage with themes of autoethnography, code-switching, vernacular expression, mimicry, and the politics of intelligibility. Together, they ask: What does it mean to think, create, and interpret when these actions emerge from more-than-human intelligences?
Within our contemporary political landscape, where reactionary impulses guard against ambiguity, the challenge of complexity becomes philosophical as well as ethical. As cognitive and creative agency are attributed to AI technologies, they do more than extend human capabilities. They confront the deep assumptions of anthropocentrism itself. What does it mean to think, to create, to interpret, to react—when those actions emerge from a source that is not “us”?
Perhaps it is here, in the speculative corridors of machine learning, primate art, and posthuman cognition, that we begin to reimagine the social contract. To look past our own shoulder is to acknowledge the unfinishedness of human knowledge and to engage with the emergent, the alien, and the more-than-human as legitimate co-authors of reality. It is an invitation not toward mastery, but toward entangled futures—radically open, profoundly uncertain, and rich with unfamiliar logics.
Conceived as a two-day program, the Bergen edition unfolds in Tårnsalen at KODE—a venue whose architectural specificity and atmosphere become part of the scenography itself.
The 7th Futurological Congress features: Julieta Aranda, Mari Bastashevski, Pierre Brassau (Peter the chimpanzee), Creativity Machine, Sougwen Chung, Katya Garcia-Anton, Pierre Huyghe, Ed Keller, Adam Kleinman, Larissa Mendoza Straffon, Patricia Reed, David Rych, Hito Steyerl, Martinus Suijkerbuijk, Amir Yatziv, and documentation of Arnuf Rainer in collaboration with a Chimpanzee
The Futurological Congress was developed in 2016 by Julieta Aranda and Mareike Dittmer. The presentation in the framework of the Bergen Assembly has been co-organized with David Rych, and it is conceived as a hybrid artistic, intellectual, and speculative arrangement—a convergence of exhibition, symposium, and performative scenography. Drawing inspiration from Stanisław Lem’s iconic title, the congress unfolds as a multi-layered platform where critical inquiry meets imaginative projection.
“All animals are beasts of burden, because they are made to carry the weight of our thoughts.”
Saturday October 18, 2025, 1–7pm
Day one: Talks, performances, and screenings
Sunday October 19, 2025, 12–7pm
Day two: Film screenings and a closing conversation
Book your tickets here.
