Nostalgic for the future

We’re throwing a time travel party at Caltech tomorrow night.

Here’s the slightly crazy story of how that came to be.

Back in October, at the very start of the academic year, I ran a weekend-long event at the university, leading a group of students, faculty, JPL folks, and community members in co-creating experiential scenarios; immersive futures set 30 years from now, to bring to life possibilities that they (the participants) would like to see come to fruition in reality.

The Immersive Futures Jam – IFjam for short – was great fun, and there seemed to be a number of ways it might be built upon later in the year, as my artist residency at Caltech Theater (TACIT) unfolded. It remained to be seen what, specifically, those next steps ought to be.

The very next weekend I was at a friend’s 50th birthday party in Pennsylvania, in a dark-sky area of the state (he’s into astronomy) a couple of hours’ drive from Pittsburgh. And after a weekend spent with a group of us looking at stars and chatting, he and I were driving back towards the city and listening to (birthday man’s choice) what else but the most recent podcast episode from astrophysicist and science communicator par excellence Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Towards the end of the episode, Tyson, answering a listener’s question, said something like, “Stephen Hawking or his people hosted a party at Caltech, and the announcement was made to all time travelers, come back in time and meet us here, and we will greet you. Nobody showed up.”

I could hardly believe my ears. I’d never listened to this podcast before; what a mad coincidence to stumble across this arcane yet eerily relevant bit of Caltech lore at that moment. And how strange that it had never come up during our forays with time machines at the university.

When I tried to look up the details of the story, I realized why. Tyson had misremembered and transposed to sunny California either or both of two events – a time travelers’ convention held at MIT in 02005, and a demonstration by Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University a few years later (an ingenious bit of scientific performance art from the late Professor Hawking which regularly, and deservingly, goes viral again).

I figured, well, evidently Caltech hasn’t done something like this... but it should. And both those earlier events, although intended to attract actual time travelers, had apparently come up empty, in terms of actual visitors from other times. So I thought, one way or another, that we might be able to go one better.

Having pitched the idea to TACIT director Brian Brophy, who was wonderfully game, I then enlisted as a co-conspirator and co-producer the LA-based improv theatre luminary Kari Coleman, who had taken part in IFjam and whose deep experience in character creation and improvisational work seemed a perfect complement to my own work in translating worlds/scenarios into 1:1 scale situations.

But at this point we were still thinking on quite a modest scale.

Then a few weeks back, the event began to take on a momentum and life of its own. A mutual friend at NASA introduced me to physicist Spiros Michalakis from Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. Among other things, Spiros is known for advising Hollywood productions with quantum and time-travel storylines like the Marvel movies Ant Man, Doctor Strange, and Avengers: Endgame.

Spiros took on the event as an opportunity to explore and promote public engagement with non-linear and quantum perspectives on time. These, it turns out, are highly intriguing and generative, but not terribly well represented in collective imagination.

So now the Caltech Time Travel Gathering is happening – has already happened? – tomorrow evening, Friday May 29th. Our little experiment has been coalescing and scaling at speed over the past few weeks.

I won’t go into all the elements that are coming together, as we can talk about that later, but I will say it’s getting a bit exciting.

A piece about the project appeared today in IFLScience. I particularly love Spiros’s answer to the journalist here:

Experiential futurist Stuart Candy, actor Kari Coleman, and physicist Spiros Michalakis have approached it in a new way, thanks to insights into quantum mechanics that weren’t available two decades ago.

When I questioned them about how they plan to succeed where MIT and Hawking failed, it was clear we were going to have a great time: the answers are in a superposition of being both very silly and very serious. Which is an ethos we are 100 percent on board with!

“The weather is just better over here,” Michalakis told IFLScience. “Plus, if a time machine is ever invented, it will be at Caltech.”

That IFLScience piece includes a bit more than I have space to share here about what we’re doing, and how, and why. (In a future post I would also like to say more about the many indispensable, wondrous people who have contributed to making this thing possible – and maybe also a word about what this thing will have turned out to be).

But I should add, that article follows on the heels a highly remarkable report that appeared in the most recent edition of Caltech's campus newspaper, The California Tech – apparently from the year 02046?? – written by its editor Damian Wilson, another of last October's IFjam participants. See below.

Strange, indeed.

Now, whether the more cosmic, time- and mind-bending ambitions of the event tomorrow eventuate or not remains to be seen – for me on this timeline at least.

Here’s what we know: since yesterday, the event has been sold out. Unfortunately tickets are essential for entry and the venue can’t accommodate walk-ups (but if any last minute public spots open up, they will be found here).

And as this academic year and my artist residency at the university come to a close, the attentions, energies and imaginations of scientists and artists from across campus at Caltech and from across Los Angeles have begun to be activated, and to converge on tomorrow evening.

I would like to think of these as marking, in themselves. a kind of success that in the end might matter even more.

As Spiros says, “We want to build bridges of trust between creative minds across the sciences and the arts so that, if we ever do build a time machine to the past, we won’t need to activate it. Let’s be nostalgic for the future, instead.”

Related:
> Building Time Machines at California Institute of Technology
> Songs from visionary futures – with Brian Eno
> Library of Possibilities – for NASA JPL
> Journalism from the future
> A Time Traveller’s Story – video
> What happens when 200 architects visit the year 02099?
> Growing imagination and worldbuilding capabilities at the BBC
> Lost futures – featuring “aiglatson”
> Imagining alternative pathways for Bristol
> Bringing futures to Stanford d.School