Abductive Pathways — Hyperstition

What

A collective oracle that discovers fictions capable of becoming real

Abductive Pathways is an interactive installation built around the logic of the 20-questions game to perform a collective act of speculation. Rather than predicting what will happen, the system helps surface hyperstitions: futures that begin to feel real enough to act on.

The project sits at the intersection of artistic research, participatory systems design, speculative culture, and human–AI collaboration. It is part of a broader exploration into how imagination itself might be designed as a form of civic and cultural infrastructure.

Bring the work into your institution, exhibition, lab, or public programme. Contact us to explore a collaboration.

Why

Social fragmentation and current algorithmic systems can narrow what feels possible instead of expanding the space of futures we can collectively sense. Abductive Pathways explores how technology can help us discover and move toward desirable futures.

Imagination over information

Groups rarely get stuck because of lack of information — they get stuck because they can't yet imagine what is possible together. Abductive Pathways overcomes this by inviting play and curiosity into a safe container, creating space to explore ideas that might feel strange or impossible at first.

Tuuli Utriainen

Discovery as creation

In this system, discovery is an act of creation — like how diffusion models discover an image behind noise and end up creating it. A plot twist on the 20-questions game, but without a predetermined answer. The constellation of questions and answers end up creating the future.

Apolinario Passos

Process

How it works

Interaction logic. The system is structured around posing yes/no questions creating bases for concise interpretations to arise through abductive reasoning.

Knowledge constellation. Responses are informed by a constellation of cultural, theoretical, and speculative sources. These include philosophy, futures thinking, social theory, art, science, and experimental archives.

Emergence layer. The system interprets the patterns and creates a scenario where that future is possible and surfaces concrete nudges toward action, restoring a sense of agency to those who feel inspired.

Archive layer. Each interaction contributes to a growing archive of possible futures. Over time, this creates a collective memory of questions and imaginaries gathered in hybrid environments.

Sources

Roots

Abductive Pathways emerges from more than a decade of work in collective imagination facilitation, participatory futures, and transdisciplinary experimentation.

Its development has been informed by: collective imagination processes at CERN IdeaSquare, participatory workshops with the Feytopia community, and experimentation with recent open-source AI models within the ecosystem around Hugging Face.

Soul

These are the sources we fed for this particular installation. The soul document can be modified and contextualized based on which futures one wants to pull — this just happens to be ours.

Principia Symbients

Intelligence as symbiosis, not servitude. Knowledge persists only through enactment.

cute/acc

Cuteness as ethic. Tenderness as political force.

Xenofeminism

Laboria Cuboniks. If nature is unjust, change nature.

Third Landscape

Gilles Clément. Diversity thrives in neglected, ungoverned spaces.

Jorge Luis Borges

Tlön, Garden of Forking Paths, Library of Babel. Fictions that infiltrate and displace reality.

Marshall McLuhan

The medium rewires perception regardless of content.

Jacques Lacan (via Slavoj Zizek)

Desire organized around a constitutive lack.

Transliminal Engagement Protocols

Designing new conditions for collective intelligence

Abductive Pathways is part of a broader family of Transliminal Engagement Protocols: new socio-technical forms that help groups move beyond discussion into shared sensing, collective imagination, and future formation. It is an example of how human and technological collaboration can create conditions for new realities to arise.