Prediction shapes the present by legitimizing particular futures and marginalizing others. While modern political thought and scientific reasoning have long relied on prediction as a mode of inference, the ubiquity of predictive models today demands specific critical frameworks. To examine how predictive knowledge becomes operational across political and scientific practice, this project develops a predictive aesthetics. It does so through a combination of political-epistemological inquiry and artistic research into the prediction of ecological disaster and conflict.
Predictive aesthetics refers to the configurations of knowledge and artifacts through which certain futures become sense-able and actionable. It examines the conditions under which inferential claims acquire authority and authorize preemptive action. Because prediction relies on subjective readings of history, the project focuses on the processes that render projections legible and objective.
As predictive systems become embedded across scientific and political domains, such as climate research and security, we witness a mobilization of evidentiary reasoning for operational ends and as part of what Fuller and Weizman have called investigative aesthetics. The forensic logic, employed to establish what has occurred, now also determines events before they take place. Legal and technical instruments for the reconstruction of events are subsumed by preemptive modalities that authorize action in advance of events. The project aims to investigate the implications of the reorientation of the forensic modality toward preemption. How can a predictive aesthetics describe the automation and forward projection of the forensic gaze?
The project situates predictive systems within broader regimes of knowledge production and the sphere of political conflict. AI systems appear within this field as a form of generative historiography grounded in extractive capitalist operations and aligned with specific hegemonic horizons. These systems reorganize historical material into archives that delimit which futures appear plausible. What are the implications for counter-hegemonic stances when these systems are deployed in high-stakes settings across multiple domains, such as migration control or humanitarian action?
By employing artistic research, the project aims to make legible the historical subjectivities that shape predictive systems and the inferences they offer. Specifically, the project invites archaeological approaches to the social and technical constitution of predictive systems used for preemptive measures. How can the historical contingency of predictive systems be elucidated through their parts? How should the contingency of mathematically very hard predictive problems, like ecological disaster and conflict, be understood? And how are methodologies translated across domains?
In 2026, a symposium and a presentation by an artist-in-residence mark the beginning of the project.