The current outlook into the future seems to be largely informed by resignation and anxiety. The understandable scepticism which utopian visions of the future are met with today and the crisis ridden present give rise to nostalgic resorts to seemingly reliable ideas. The book The Present of the Future investigates our present relation to the future and asks which means and strategies artists and scholars pursue today, to gain a new scope of action for shaping alternative futures. How do they create potentials for change and for the imagination of possible futures beyond modernistic idealisms and romanticist projections into remote times? The Present of the Future is the result of the third annual theme of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.