In the Making #12: Prediction, Simulation, and the Incalculable Model

May 22nd – ITM #12: Prediction, Simulation, and the Incalculable Model

Femke Herregraven with guests Marleen Stikker and Francesco Ragazzi

Through a series of recent works, Femke Herregraven’s talk explores the modelling and financialization of the future. It reflects on how, rather than rejecting technology, technological tools can be repurposed to experiment with image making when perception collapses, to escape the categorisation of the model, and how to speak when language no longer suffices. How can the entanglement of language, code, matter, and predictive structures become a new protocol for image and art making? Underpinning this talk is the question of artistic research method and what a method means within a state of vertigo and disorientation.

After the presentation, Femke Herregraven will be joined by Dr. Marleen Stikker, founder and executive director of Waag Futurelab and Dr. Francesco Ragazzi, associate professor in International Relations at Leiden University and co-director of ReCNTR.

Femke Herregraven’s work explores the effects of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, historiography, and daily life. Her research into the interaction between financial markets, risks, and the physical world forms the foundation for her iterative sculptures, drawings, films, and hybrid installations. Over the past decade, she has focused on financial, geological, and climatological self-organizing systems that both shape and disrupt daily life. A recurring theme in her work is the financialization of the future as crisis, which she examines through catastrophe bonds as a set of potential distributions of risk and catastrophe. Her work employs textual, computational, and gestural languages to reflect on how these contemporary future models shape the experience of reality and the very ground on which it stands. Herregraven is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2017-2018), and obtained the Creator Doctus title at the Sandberg Institute in 2024. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Prix de Rome, awarded the Evens Arts Prize 2023 and the Theodora Niemeijer Prize in 2025.

Dr. Marleen Stikker is founder and executive director of Waag Futurelab in Amsterdam. Waag Futurelab reinforces critical reflection on technology, develops technological and social design skills, and encourages social innovation. Marleen leads the trans-disciplinary team of designers, artists and scientists, utilising Public Research and Key Enabling Methodologies to empower people to participate in the collective design of open, fair and inclusive futures. Marleen founded 'De Digitale Stad' (The Digital City) in 1993, the first virtual community introducing free public access to the Internet in Amsterdam. In 2021 she was appointed professor of practice by HvA, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

Dr. Francesco Ragazzi is associate professor in International Relations at Leiden University (Netherlands) and co-director of ReCNTR, Leiden University’s Center on Multimodal and Audiovisual Methods. Francesco has directed and produced several documentary films. In his current collective research project SECURITY VISION (Security Vision | Home) Francesco explores, through quantitative, qualitative, film and coding methods, the security uses of computer vision in areas such as biometric surveillance, social media content moderation and border control.