Insights · July 8th, 2025
As I was editing my book ‘Facing Our Futures: How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth’ I had to cut a whole part where I talked about artist Tom Sachs. So much is sacrificed in the editing process – even whole chapters were cut. RIP.
So, I wanted to revisit my thoughts on sympathetic magic, Tom Sachs and his process of exploration and creativity here by sharing a couple of videos and the discarded writing I did.
How to succeed as artist in spite of your own creativity
A Brief History of the Mars Yard
Sympathetic Magic and Influence (from the cutting room floor of Facing Our Futures)
My parents weren’t particularly interested in visual art. Sure, they would take me to galleries in London when I was young but it was more about seeing the ‘national treasures’ than a voyage of discovery. In the 1980s I started diving into the world of art more and a number of friends had parents that were from a more informed art and design background. I had felt that my inability to draw or sculpt clay preclude me from that world but I started to realise that appreciation of art was important. In fact, in that time of personal rebellion I was drawn towards different subcultures – punk, skateboarding, graffiti, hip hop – that insisted I pay attention to alternative forms of art.
In 1987, I watched a documentary by Dick Fontaine called ‘Bombin’’ that dived into the nascent British graffiti and Hip Hop scene. In this was a young man called Brim Fuentes – an graffiti artist from the South Bronx, New York City and founding member of graffiti crew TATS CRU. Fuentes began ‘bombing’ – throwing up graffiti illegally – on walls and New York City Subway trains starting in the late 1970s and through to the mid-1980s. He was driven to be an artist.
In Bombin’ we follow Fuentes as he journeyed from the South Bronx to the UK where he was welcomed and appeared on TV, radio and in newspapers like The Daily Telegraph where he discussed graffiti culture from the perspective of someone living with and creating the art on the street. As media interest increased Fuentes was invited to lecture at Oxford University and was asked personally to create the backdrops in the film Death Wish 3 by British filmmaker Michael Winner.
More importantly. The documentary shone a light on two British artists that would go on the be very influential – Robert Del Naja aka 3D and Clifford Price aka Goldie. Del Naja who would go on to form Massive Attack (an evolution of the Bristol Wild Bunch crew) and Price would travel to New York City with Fuentes and become ‘Goldie’ – a person that shaped the British Jungle / Drum n’ Bass scene with nights at the Blue Note in Hoxton Square in London and his ‘Timeless’ album.
The output and contribution of Fuentes, Del Naja and Goldie was part of a cultural movement seen across the world and has reshaped how we consider art, music, life and the streets.
He became what he was meant to be and willed his art and a culture into reality. In all intents and purposes he created our futures and I thank him for it. As I travel the cities are alive with art because of these art movements. Something I appreciate every day that I am home in Toronto. More importantly, people like these three and many in these new cultures encouraged me to take part and get over the fact that I was not artistic and that I could become artistic and creative.
What they practiced, as did many like them – and likely unbeknownst to them all – was ‘sympathetic magic’.
sym·pa·thet·ic mag·ic
/ˌsimpəˈTHedik ˈmajik/
noun
primitive or magical ritual using objects or actions resembling or symbolically associated with the event or person over which influence is sought.
Of course this goes beyond street art and music into so many parts of life. Manifesting our (or your) futures can seem hokey, and imposter syndrome can seem very real for people trying to ascend beyond the situations they find themselves in. However, with these daily actions and chances, stepping up to do new things and being brave in the face of everyone sayong “you can’t do that/” really can lead to something very special.
I wanted to highlight sympathetic magic as I feel it’s an important part of experiential futures, it’s deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions, and it shapes our cultures more readily than any technological gizmo, app or software platform ever could.
Today, there are some incredible people undertaking this work and much of it lives in the art world. A world I think is inhabited by foresight folks more than anything else.
One artist I refer to often is Tom Sachs, a contemporary American artist – and self-proclaimed “21st century American sculptor” – who lives and works in New York City. Sachs creates functional art and refers to his process as a form of Sympathetic Magic, and he explains what that means to him in this SOMA Magazine interview:
…when someone like an Aborigine person in New Guinea will make a model of a refrigerator because they saw that missionaries had refrigerators and food was always coming out of them. They made these models of refrigerators, and they would pray to them and hope that food would come out. And they’d even make runways with the hope that airplanes would land on them and docks with the hope that ships would come visit them. In fact anthropologists did come to look at these makeshift docks, and runways, and fridges. So the Aboriginal people, in a way, created their own destiny using art.
He’s explored many things – a homemade Polaroid camera that he built from a Canon 20d digital, an HP inkjet printer, and an 18 volt Makita cordless drill battery actually takes pictures’. The blue cardboard Tiffany and Co. Glock 19 actually fires rounds, and his ‘waffle bike’ really makes waffles.
It’s his more recent art explorations that have really blown me away in their scale and intent. In ‘Space Program 2.0: MARS’, Sachs and his team built an entire replicant space program from the ground up guided by the philosophy of ‘bricolage’: creating and constructing from available yet limited resources. Paper, cardboard, plywood (a favorite of Sachs and his team), discarded TVs, and other resources were used. At the centre is a lander. A full-scale lander made of found materials.
In the program they sent two female astronauts to Mars in search of the answer to humankind’s ultimate question… are we alone?
The mission followed the protocols and (accelerated) timelines of a real mission. Sach’s crew acted out all of the roles, even excavating the floors of the galleries where the installation was placed. I love the scale and ambition.
What I love about his work is it’s links to futures that are accessible by all, something he shared in an interview with Sotherbys:
I think when the space program started to become more privatized like it is now. All these guys like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen and Richard Branson have their own space programs. I thought, if they can do it, so can I. Not all of them will succeed, but they’re all learning things. Private space programs have the same problems that NASA has. We have to think about physics, funding and safety of astronauts. These problems are opportunities to address everything from engineering to taxes to the laws of physics. I thought I would throw my hat in the ring and see what I could do. I’ve been pretty happy with the results. In 2007 we went to the Moon, and we went to Mars in 2012. Just this past year we went to the icy moon of Jupiter known as Europa.
Now, this is still pretty extravagant and you can trace sympathetic magic back to ritual, building shrines, making offerings and creating voodoo dolls, and symbological jewelry that remind you of your family or key religious paths you’ve chosen in life. It’s simple and powerful.
Something that more elaborate experiential futures can be.
About Nikolas Badminton
Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 300 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.
He helps shape the visions that shape impactful organizations, trillion-dollar companies, progressive governments, and 800+ billion dollar investment funds.
Nikolas Badminton’s book Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth has been selected for 2023 J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List, and featured as the ‘Next Gen Pick’ to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.
Nikolas is currently writing his next book that provides guidance on applying hope theory with futures exploration
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