Over the past 15 years various different notions of the "documentary" have gained great influence in the contemporary art world. A desire for a new realism has come along with dramatic shifts, such as globalisation, the raise of digital technologies and networked communications.

Across all disciplines, artists and curators responded to a radically new understanding of the world by rediscovering, reinterpreting and revaluating the relationship between an increasingly immaterial world of things and their perception by a likewise precarious self of the artist.

From visual arts to theater, from photography to architecture "documentary" is understood as a turn towards a more or less fragile understanding of reality through a practical critique of concept of the "document".

While the original purpose of the document was to produce evidence and therefore stabilize a self, today it has become subject to all sorts of manipulations that either deconstruct or reinforce its potential to generate a truth that has always already passed.

Rather than dismissing the new relevance of the documentary as playful analogies for its own sake or tautological proof of what is anyway obvious, its real potential lies in a sort of alternative fiction that is no longer opposed to the present reality but based on a different reading of the past.

The research project "From evidence to providence: future practices of the documentary" investigates new forms of image production that allow us to re-imagine the future and see it in a different way.

It starts with a critical analysis of the role of the image as a document in surveillance technologies, speculative practices, and automatic vision that all may be characterised as preemptive attempts to gain an advantage by impeding a future event before it is realised.

This is compared to anticipatory strategies which prefigure future events, in order to offer alternative images that are not present yet but could potentially happen: either because of a re-reading of the past (re-enactments, mockumentaries, fakes, archive art) or a refusal of the disciplinary force of "real-time" (improvisation, aleatoric techniques, anti- or conceptual photography, ephemeral arts).

The goal of the project is to push forward a discussion about the ethics and aesthetics of the documentary today that may have fundamental consequences for the role of art and the artist in society: art as anticipating a future by reading reality against the grain.