I haven’t posted here for ages – a story for another time.
Today, I’m writing to share something I’m focused on right now.
This weekend I’m starting a stint as Artist in Residence at Caltech Theater. This is tremendously exciting to me – a chance to bring experiential futures, worldbuilding, and high-speed co-creation to a remarkable and storied institution. For example, one of the spaces we’ll be working in is the Feynman Room, named for the legendary bongo-playing Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate who was active in the theatre community there.
Our first event coming up is called “Immersive Futures Jam” – IFjam for short.
With a select group of participants, including undergraduates, graduates, alumni and staff from Caltech, as well as folks from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the wider community, we’ll be embarking on an ambitious co-creative process; producing immersive, you-are-there experiences of various futures, at the scale of a room, over the span of a weekend.
In a hat-tip to H.G. Wells, I call such room-scale future immersions “Time Machines”. Without quite meaning to, we essentially piloted a highly adaptable format two decades ago in Hawaii, and I’ve since modularized and sharpened it through numerous iterations – in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Singapore, and various parts of the US – with hundreds of students, colleagues, and intrepid volunteer time travellers. This is the first time I’m running it in California.
The very possibility of this edition of IFjam comes down to the vision and will-to-experiment of the unique creative force that is Brian Brophy, Caltech’s long-serving director of Theater Arts. We got to know each other over the past few years while working together on the NASA JPL show Blended Worlds; JPL’s contribution to the most recent instance of Getty Museum’s once-a-decade initiative PST.
A fuller treatment of Time Machines is in the pipeline. But for a sense of how they can look and something of the underlying process, a few starting points: A Pecha Kucha talk given years ago in Chicago. A short piece from The Futurist (the periodical of the World Future Society, as was). And another one from The Economist.
Stay tuned.
Related:
> Experiential Futures for NASA JPL (Library of Possibilities)
> A Time Traveller's Story
> Experiential Futures in The Economist (pdf version)
> Time Machines in The Futurist (pdf)
> Bringing futures to Stanford d.School
> Futures for Bristol
> Ghosts of Futures Past (Hawaii 2050)
> Time Machine / Reverse Archaeology (pdf)
> Using the Future at NASA (pdf version)
