Wild Papers
Unpredictable as the Future

Wild Papers is a new online publishing series edited by speculative writer and lecturer Ingo Niermann and commissioned by the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. Wild Papers constitutes a collection of concise scenarios that affect the future of art, technology, gender, and nature.

Why “wild”? The modern Western world has banned, projected, idolized and appropriated the wild as the other. It has confused the wild with the provocative and the rude. Speculative bubbles, filter bubbles, OCD, addictions…when the Western world “runs wild,” it’s not because natural impulses grow rampant but because domestication enforces compulsive repetition. The Wild Papers series doesn’t aim to predict the future—it draws on the future’s inherent unpredictability to escape more of the same.

Wild Papers are published on a monthly basis. Pdfs can be downloaded in English on wildpapers.ch. Korean translations will follow suit.

No. 1 Karin Pittman – Conversations with Slime
Slime is the great mediator. Respect the slime even if you cannot understand it.
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No. 2 Onome Ekeh – Future Fashion Week
Future Fashion Week is a noetic device designed to attune your attention to a greater purpose than merely enhancing your sartorial experience. 
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No. 3 Amanda E. Metzger – Identity Sandboxing
The research project SCION is taken as the scaffold for thought experiments on how to help artists by providing more privacy and security.
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No. 4 Ronnie Vuine – Do Not Align
The humanity that could potentially restrain superintelligences does not exist.
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No. 5 Ran Zhang – My Slippery Minds
Ran Zhang’s narrator lives in the year 2123 and is the descendent of an ancient East Asian grey-zoner. She sits in an armchair, letting her mind drift between awake criticism, cognitive self-doubt, pseudo-rationality and illusive absurdity.
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No. 6 Sonia Fernández Pan – The Ultimate Dancers 
After a major crisis, the energy produced by dancing bodies inside clubs is stored and used as a local resource. The characters in this story are aware of the ambiguity of their work, but they are mostly driven by the pleasure and community-making when dancing. 
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No. 7 Jumana Emil Abboud – Where did the mountain go?
A multi-authoured folk tale in the future adapted from the Palestinian folk tale Gazelle. Jumana Emil Abboud channels her childhood memory, as well as the expansive community of women storytellers and a chatbot AI in the remaking of the original tale.
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No. 8 Kettly Mars – The Tyranny of the Future  
What if the future was just a prison where we voluntarily locked ourselves up, praying to escape all forms of untimely deaths, while the powerful world leaders deprived us of today and its wonders? What if we ended the tyranny of the future?  
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No. 9 Filipa Ramos – Possible Love
This essay looks at what a film does to imagine what a film could do. Departing from the 1980s medieval fantasy film Ladyhawke, it looks at what kind of relationships and affects can emerge between a woman and a wolf, a man and a hawk, to wonder how love beyond the species divide may help to renew the way in which people connect to, care for and fit in the natural world.
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No. 10 Ingo Niermann – Entering the Monadic Age
In Entering the Monadic Age Ingo Niermann argues that, stirred by rapid developments in automation and AI, manifold crises are about to culminate in a new paradigm of self-sufficiency—monadism—that overturns the liberal era and forces a reinvention of all social parameters.
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No. 11  Ann Cotten – Letter from the Iron Matriarchy
A disillusioned guerrilla tries to describe the situation on Earth to an old friend who is considering remigration from Mars. Unsurprisingly, structural problems of a real existing queer feminism are a key topic.
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No. 12 Alexander Tarakhovsky – Love of Slow Pedaling
While all of us are destined to die, our cells may live indefinitely if placed in the correct environment. There is data suggesting that the neurons of short-lived animals can become long-lived if placed inside the brains of long-lived animals. For example, the Greenland shark, which can live for approximately 500 years, may offer a solution for the future elite who seek to preserve their neurons within the shark’s brain to safeguard their memories from fading and potentially enable self-recreation several times over.
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No. 13 Momus – The Car Cassandra
A voice from the future—Cassandra—reproaches us as Carmageddon approaches. We learn about the anti-car activism of the Taurinos in Barcelona, the Firebugs in Berlin. But Cassandra cannot change the past. Keep moving, please!
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No. 14 HMOT – Irekle Qoştar
In a decaying post-digital world on the brink of ecological collapse somewhere in Northern Asia, a disillusioned sound designer embarks on a mysterious assignment to maintain speaker stations playing artificial bird sounds.
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Upcoming contributions to Wild Papers by Staci Bu Shea, Clemens Driessen, Eva Hayward, Wonyoung Kim, Chus Martínez, David Pearce, Claire Pentecost, Filipa Ramos, and Stas Sharifullin.