Have we caught up with our notions of the future? This is the principle question posed at Future Observatory, the transmediale.10 conference.

Thinkers from various fields will discuss the epistemologies, limitations, ruptures and malfunctions of the future as an object of cultural projection. It brings together designers, media artists, net citizens, critical thinkers and researchers in order to create a network to focus on the future. It will be anchored by keynotes from renown writer and futurologist, Bruce Sterling; technology pioneer Conrad Wolfram (co-founder of Wolfram Alpha); and writer and critic Richard Barbrook (author of Imaginary Futures).

Future Observatory examines the ways of perception and patterns of behaviour that are inscribed into our contemporary media cultural society. What is the code that performs the operation future?

The Futurity Long Conversation, a relay of one-to-one conversations, brings 21 leading artists, designers, theorists, journalists and media interventionists together to discuss, contextualise and explore the abstract and qualitative elements defining what we conceive of the future today. In the Futurity Long Conversation the dialogue as an aesthetic, analytical and collaborative process expands into a special timezone in which the participants and the audience oscillate between the disciplines of art, science and industry.

The Futurity Long Conversation was developed in collaboration with the UK arts organisation Artangel and the Longplayer Trust, and was inspired by their work and that of The Long Now Foundation, international organisations crafting ways with which to perceive time and durational process in radically different and perhaps media technologically appropriate ways. In their approach, we are in a period which redefines the 'now' within a timespan of 10.000 years, altering our notions of future and the acceleration of progress and development.

For the duration of transmediale.10 the HKW will act as a temporary sound beacon for Longplayer, an algorithmic piece of music designed to play 1000 years without ever repeating itself composed by artist Jem Finer.