Although the construction of footholds for orientation may sound like a bland, dispassionate task it is wholly dependent on imagination. As the primary faculty through which we can exceed ‘what is’ directly before us, imagination marks a moment of fertile alienation – the willful construction of alienation that separates us from what is, towards the foreignness of what could be. In the face of daunting complexity, the future is tasked with the development of descriptions of and for constructive alienation; that can separate us from the situation of what is, orienting us towards a foreign place of actualization. If the future can only be constituted by a synthetic interplay between ideas and reality, the local and the global, the one and the many, it’s our pressing labour to exit critical stagnation (generative only of a tragic, ‘present’ future), and work stereoscopically to articulate and construct our desired estrangement as an actual world.