FUTURE PERFECT ADVICE BUREAU
subject-specific individual predictions in 15-minute one-on-one sessions

We offer our clients a prediction in the future perfect tense: We view your present as material with a meaning that is inaccessible because only located in the future. You will meet fortune-telling experts who will remember your present from a position in the future, offering advice on important questions and aspects of your current life situation that have yet to be produced by your future. The meeting between expert and client will take place on a film set of a detective bureau, monitored by cameras. On this set, however, instead of looking for clues to crimes that have been committed or for proofs of innocence, symptoms of the present will be diagnosed by predictive treatment as traces of a future truth. These prognosis sessions will be recorded and shown at several viewing points.

Sherlock Holmes consulting a fortune-teller

1. How I will have loved
Judith Hopf, artist, filmmaker
Head Of Department for Pictorial Studies, Fynske Art Academy,
Odense, DK
latest exhibition and publication: Concepts of Love, Kölnischer Kunstverein 2008 (in cooperation with Anja Natahn-Dorn and Kathrin Jentjens)

Judith Hopf

As is well known, the experience of "falling in love" cannot be fabricated. But, as Klaus Theweleit puts it, there are "techniques" and models with regard to the "choice of object" by which love can be sparked off, and by which it is then inserted into the social consensus and the corresponding power relations. Forms of sexual desire can be forbidden and persecuted, but above all they are ceaselessly turned into capital-pushed, organized and sold off via a multiplicity of media. What constitutes the sphere of love that docks onto desire? And does it, too, primarily serve the preservation of established power relations? How will you have loved?

2. What I will not have done
Nicolas Siepen, artist, filmmaker, writer, co-founder of the b_books project.
Writes for Springerin, Texte zur Kunst, Frakcija, Phase Zwei, FAZ (Berliner Seiten), Starship and Artfan; co-editor of the magazines A.N.Y.P. and ASSEMBLY INTERNATIONAL.

Nicolas Siepen

It will have been very pleasant to have done nothing, but also worrying. There is no solution other than this misleading movement: not having an opinion, not having any idea about this or that, not suffering from a lack of communication. Because the nice thing about life - one might say - is the holes and the gaps, as well as the attendant fits of catalepsy and somnambulism that contain them.

3. What kind of agent I will have been (bibliomancy with Bruno Latour)
Karin Harrasser, philologist and cultural studies scholar
Director of the Science Communications Research society in Vienna; research work at Vienna University and the Humboldt University in Berlin on the history of prosthetics.

Karin Harrasser

An agent is someone/something who/which makes a difference, who/which leaves a trace, without whom/which the world would be a different place. Consequently - after Bruno Latour - politics means being attentive towards emerging agents, mobilizing them and systematically integrating them into processes of negotiation. Because agents have causes, and causes have agents. As a result, Indian cows can become agents, as can religious warriors or mirror neurons, radiation from mobile phones or UN Secretaries General, cloned sheep, djinns - or you.

4. Where I will have travelled
Hasso Spode, historian, sociologist
Editor of Voyage: Yearbook on Research into Travel and Tourism; latest publication: The Future as a Resource: The Seven Fields of Decision-Making for Reform in Germany (2008); director of the Historical Archive on Tourism (HAT) at Berlin's Free University.

Hasso Spode

There are still many places around the globe where the world is different, which is great, especially for tourists, since they can actually see this with their own eyes. Logically enough, this sadly means that the world has become awfully small thanks to Thomas Cook and GPS. Ergo: the best journeys are those that take place inside one's head. Life as a whole is a journey. Ergo: the destination is predetermined - non-existence. But the intervening time needs to be used somehow. Here you will find out how you will have done this.

5. What kind of expert I will have been
Helgard Haug, director
Has been working since 2000 under the label Rimini Protokoll in the fields of theatre, radio plays and films, always in the grey area between reality and fiction.

Helgard Haug

Each Rimini Protokoll production is preceded by in-depth research and castings. At such a meeting, neither party (guest or host) knows in advance whether or not they will decide in favour of each other for the project in question, nor where this cooperation would lead. At the Future Perfect Advice Bureau, a shortcut will be taken: At the first meeting, not only the person's own role is already established, but also the company, the play, the stage, the audience reaction, the performance dates, the production's tour schedule, the reviews, and the point in time when the whole thing will be over.

6. How I will have moved
Gabriele Brandstetter, theatre studies specialist, focus on dance
Founder of the Centre for Movement Studies at the Free University, Berlin; research project on "Movement and Being Moved"; recent publications on "dance as anthropology" and on the movement of swarms.

Gabriele Brandstetter

The goal of a movement can usually be predicted; and we also often think we know the reason for a movement. But quite often, we arrive, in the process of a gesture, in the course of a movement, as someone else - we are transformed. How can such deviations from the path of a movement be squared with its prediction? What encounters, disruptions and promises does this involve? And could it be that this is where we should look for the reason for the inner movement you will have felt? Which movements will you have dreamed?

Advice Bureau