We recently ran an experiment inviting time travellers to California Institute of Technology.
In the lead up, I shared a bit of the backstory here. But some may be curious about what happened at the event itself.
Caltech’s news office has just published its own account, which opens with an evocative snapshot:
...a crowd of about 150 people gathered in and around a colonial-style house on campus. In one corner, visitors sat captivated by an attendee who claimed to have arrived from a future where whales have gone extinct. The group huddled together around her hand-drawn book of animals that no longer graced the world. Another, who said she had come from a future in which reliance on fossil fuels had been eliminated, told a guest whose clean-energy start-up had just folded that the future still needed their work.
Inside the house, a quantum physicist fielded questions about time travel, and on the front lawn, a new guest arrived in a modified DeLorean before stepping out to ask the crowd, “What year is it?”
This was the scene at Caltech’s Time Travel Gathering, hosted by TACIT [Theater Arts] and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech (IQIM). ...
“My work is about making possible futures vivid enough that they can change what we do now, and often that means immersing people into simulations of alternative scenarios,” explains Stuart Candy, a futurist who served as artist-in-residence this year at TACIT, and who originated and led the design of the event. “Something I’ve never had the chance to do until now is invite people from various possible futures to join us in the present.”
It was a privilege to get to carry out this unusual investigation, pulling together improv artists, quantum physicists, a hypnotist, and a DeLorean all under one banner (in this case literally – “Welcome Time Travellers” – the British spelling a little hat-tip to Stephen Hawking’s 02009 precedent at Cambridge University).
And it was a joy to play together with turning the customary approach to experiential futures on its head.
There’s plenty to share about the project, its design, outcomes, and many remarkable contributors, in due course. This is just a first look for now, with much appreciation to my Caltech colleagues and collaborators.
The full article is at the Caltech website.
Thanks to reporter Whitney Clavin for the piece, as well as to my co-conspirators Kari Coleman, Spiros Michalakis, and Brian Brophy for their valuable input on the story.
Stay tuned for more!
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