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.”

(Update August 31, 02026: A follow-up post with a first look at the event from Caltech’s own news office.)

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

What if we could sing better futures to life?

Notes from our collaboration with Brian Eno on using music to grow public imagination.

This post is about a new initiative in progress – something I’ve really enjoyed working on, and have great hopes for as it unfolds.

Sing Wild Seeds is a project about having musicians and audiences pre-enact preferred futures together.

Conceptually, it springs from a question along these lines: how might music-making be combined with experiential futures towards developing our collective ability to imagine and shape desired change?

Institutionally, it’s a collaboration between the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and Earth/Percent, both independent UK-based social change organisations, dedicated respectively to accelerating the “transition to a more equitable and just future”, and “unleash[ing] the power of music in service of the planet”.

Also centrally involved is Earth/Percent founder Brian Eno, a celebrated musician, producer, and expert collaborator in multiple artforms, whose extensive experience facilitating individual and group creativity has helped form the foundation for this effort.

To say a bit more about the idea behind the experiment – or series of experiments, really, as I’ll explain – the focus is on harnessing the promise and pleasures of worldbuilding on one hand, and musical co-creation on the other, to help people not just think or imagine but play and perform their way into future possibilities. 

If this strikes you as different from the commonplace framing of futures in support of “strategy” or “decision-making”, you’re right. In a sense, this is upstream of those, aiming at some of the background or cultural context within which conscious decision-making occurs. And in a different sense, it’s downstream, in the detail of lived experience, a part of what I call the futures of everyday life.

This goes to a motivation that’s long been key to our practices of and arguments for experiential futures, towards developing a distributed cultural capacity, social foresight.

As I wrote in The Economist many years ago:

Driven by the irrepressible human urge to bring our inner worlds to life, the culture of public imagination is set to make a leap: in coming years we can expect to see more and more companies, governments, advocacy organisations and communities creating and sharing experiential futures. The sooner we learn to use and democratise collective imagination to dramatise our alternatives, the more powerful will be our capacity to shape change towards just and worthwhile ends.

Sing Wild Seeds could be seen at once as a datapoint exemplifying this forecast coming to pass, and as a conscious contribution to taking it further.

It’s a matter of what my collaborator Cassie Robinson of JRF, who initiated the project, has inspiringly framed as imagination infrastructures, a kind of “soil work”, gardening towards conditions favourable for certain kinds of things to grow. (I also find the cognate idea of acculturation a helpful rendering of this approach, and an important complement to organisational reflexes towards institutionalisation.)

We’ve worked together on several occasions over some years, but Cassie and I began talking about this particular project late in 02023, on the back of a series of conversations about social foresight and collective imagination.

We launched Sing Wild Seeds in March this year, with a hybrid online / in-person event in two parts: I gave an introductory presentation on foresight and experiential futures practices for a cohort of interested musicians, assembled from Brian’s network, then he and I had a conversation to begin exploring a bit more of what the possibilities might look like within our chosen design space.

Cultivating public imagination through music is an appealing creative prospect, and also a good practical challenge.

Our approach has been not simply to have musicians integrate richer or more deliberate futures imagining into their existing creative practices – because while helping professional music folks make “songs from the future” is super interesting, Sing Wild Seeds has a more ambitious and fundamentally more participatory notion at its heart.

The idea is to expose musicians to futures ideas and methods, and then to support them in devising site- and event-specific experiments where they in turn will engage live audiences in real time, co-creating and performing songs from the futures that they’d like to see (and hear) come to pass.

This comes with an inbuilt complexity; synthetic and nested.

Nested because the project has entailed devising and running a participatory process to help prepare the musicians in turn to devise and run their own participatory processes, particular to them, with later audiences elsewhere.

Synthetic because it has meant figuring out a way to mesh the musical gifts and creative preferences of a cast of songwriters / performers with two other sets of practices that in most cases are unfamiliar; one to do with the granular imagination and articulation of preferred futures, and the other to do with facilitation and process design.

Tackling this combination was an exciting prospect, and maybe just a little daunting, since not only were the particulars of the musicians’ own sensibilities and orientations impossible to plan for in advance – the ways artists write songs varies enormously – but the ultimate design parameters, practical elements of context in which they would eventually run something themselves (location, duration, format, audience size, cultural composition, etc), would not be found out until later either.

Last month, then, while I was in the UK, we held two in-person workshops at Brian’s studio in London, to try out some ways of helping folks navigate and identify the most promising sectors, for each of them, within the vast design space of potential project-experiments.

The wonderful designer Sarah Drummond was enlisted to co-facilitate, and to support the musicians going forward as they craft their experiments to carry out with festivals and other partners over the next few months. (Sarah is an exceptionally intuitive and adept facilitator; we’ve known each other for well over a decade but hadn’t a chance to work together directly before – and what a pleasure!)

I’d suggested that we offer this face-to-face project development workshop not once, but twice, on different dates, in order to reach a wider pool of potential collaborators, and also to enable a bit of reflection and iteration between runs. This structure worked well, allowing Sarah and me the chance to simplify and better integrate our process for take two.

It’s too early to start talking outcomes, but I doubt if it’s ever too early to start trying to learn from an ongoing process, so I’ll just remark briefly on a few aspects of the foresight part of the project.

I chose two contrasting points of departure for engaging our musician friends in futures imagination and songwriting ideation. One was quick, and deliberately time-pressured; a combinatorial prompting activity using The Thing From The Future card game (second edition). The other was more leisurely, taking the form of a guided meditation or daydreaming exercise; the sort of approach that my colleague Oliver Markley calls mental time travel.

The pair of contrasting tempos aimed to elicit different kinds of creative response: imagining fast and slow, you might say.

From the outset, in relation to the mental time travel exercise, I was specifically interested in going beyond guided visioning. The sense of sight often implicitly overrides all others when it comes to imagining alternative and preferred futures, so we invited guided listening, too – having folks attend especially to their auditory experience, along with other senses, during their inner journeys.

We used a time horizon of 30 years (02054) the first time, and 50 years (02074) the second. Although we were able to give the activity a bit more breathing room in workshop two, on both occasions, from the reams of notes that people took upon returning to the here-and-now and opening their eyes, and the animated conversations that followed, there was clearly much more to explore.

In relation to the card game, both meetings were highly generative, but the second provided an opportunity to fine-tune the prompting a bit.

With participants clustered in small groups of 2–3, one member was asked to select a card on behalf of their group, to indicate the type of preferred future or world that they would be creating a song from (e.g., a “fair” future, a “decolonised” future, and so on). The theme or aspect of that world which each person would focus on for their song was individually drawn from the deck at random (e.g. farming, the ocean, love, cities). And finally, I assigned to the musicians not just the generic output “song” as the future thing for them to create, but instead gave each one a particular kind of song to make from within their chosen future (e.g. anthem, show tune, folk song, etc).

(The Thing From The Future has been compared to, and at its inception over a decade ago was directly influenced by, Brian Eno’s own classic creativity-enabling card deck, Oblique Strategies, so there was a highly satisfying coming-full-circle quality in getting to deploy it with musicians in his studio!)

In addition, following one of Brian’s specific creative mandates that arose in workshop one, we ventured to insist on strict parameters: people had to finish a song corresponding to their personalised prompt within five minutes, then actually sing it.

While obviously the product of a highly compressed creative process, the resulting first-draft compositions from both gatherings truly exceeded expectations. They included a chanted exchange between different species seeking to peacefully inhabit the same planet, a future ballad about farming, a children’s song celebrating science, and a call-and-response performance recounting how humanity saved the oceans.

Modest as these beginnings are, there’s something potentially significant here as a kind of prefigurative politics (see TFOEL p. 220) in the use of music, not just as a social medium – which thankfully has been part of human society since time immemorial, and which has nothing necessarily to do with futures content per se – but on top of that, as a way into shared imagining of new possibilities.

We can make out a kind of double prefiguration: the desirable-in-itself investment in solidarity or community-making by creating and performing in a group, coupled with the roleplay-like composition and singing of lyrics deliberately formulated to bespeak, concretise, and summon the futures we hope to bring into being.

Politics is perhaps too small a word. If this doesn’t sound like a recipe for magic, I don't know what is.

The very first public deployment for Sing Wild Seeds has just taken place – at Britain’s legendary Glastonbury Festival, in an experiment led by the marvellous Genevieve Dawson (pictured at the top).

Many thanks are due to Cassie Robinson, Sepi Noohi and Magda Maculewicz from JRF, to Cathy Runciman and Becky Young from Earth/Percent, to my star of a process design and facilitation partner Sarah Drummond, to Brian Eno for generously hosting these gatherings, and to all our musical participants to date.

No doubt there will be more to say as these wild seeds take root.

Related:
> Experiential Futures: A Brief Outline
> Introduction to Experiential Futures in The Economist
> Dreaming Together (from the book Made Up: Design’s Fictions)
> What Is the Value of Futures and Foresight? (a Q&A with the RSA)
> Imagining Transitions (interview by Rob Hopkins)
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> Inside a bold new experiment in public imagination (on UNTITLED Festival)
> Participatory Futures for Democracy (see “acculturation”)
> Gaming Futures Literacy (PDF – from the book Transforming the Future)
> The Thing From The Future (see also Situation Lab website)
> Anything but Text (post anticipating XF from 02006)
> Historical pre-enactment

Note 1: All photos by the author. Note 2: A bookmark: to write up an assignment I once set for my (non-musician) graduate students at KAIST – creating and performing songs from various futures for Korea.

(Update 08aug2024: This post was also published on Medium.) 

Participation design

I was revisiting earlier today a podcast conversation between two people I much admire –– an episode of Team Human recorded by writer and host Douglas Rushkoff with security and privacy architecture consultant Eleanor Saitta.

Rushkoff's first book Cyberia (01994), for me as a teenager in Australia, was a gateway to a whole lot of things I'd never heard of before. I've followed his work for about 25 years, and we've met a few times over the past decade. Saitta, whom I first met when we spoke on a conference panel in Singapore together in 02013, blew my mind over breakfast, in I think our first face to face conversation, by putting me on to Nordic Larp, a big topic to dig into more at some stage. She coedited the excellent Knutpunkt book The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (02014), a great entry point if that topic piques your interest.

So there's this exchange towards the end of their discussion that has come to mind more than once since I first heard it.

*** 

Douglas Rushkoff: [You have written about] our determination to maintain this illusion of individuality and selfhood in the face of an increasingly networked reality. In one of your essays, There is no Future, which is a way of saying that the future distracts us from the present that we're in, you say:

Our production of narratives runs very deep. We create the "self" as a distinct entity, different and separate from the world, and create a narrative about how that self has interacted with the world through its history. This, even, is where the problems start. We try to live in that narrative, instead of in the real world. The self we create doesn't really exist, and the narrative we create is more fiction than real.

Eleanor Saitta: And I should caveat that by saying: Creating and living in fiction can be an incredibly powerful tool for political change –– as long as you know what you're actually doing. As long as you you remember that you're doing this thing.

This is something that I've argued at a completely practical level. It's really interesting to look at the toolkits that people use to design, for instance, social networks. “Experience design” –– the experience that they're talking about there is the individual experience, and that is the thing that is designed.

DR: Right, UX/UI [user experience and user interface design] is the individual user. It's not community experience, collective experience.

ES: There is no practice of, the phrase that my friend Andie Nordgren uses is 'participation design'. And this is looking at a participation frame that says, yes, we have a set of personas, and they have their individual interests, but the participation actually happens between personas, and between different parts of the community, and that's the thing that we actually really care about designing.

It's useful to consider individual experiences, and certainly every system has interactions that are individualistic, but a lot of what is interesting [lies in between these].

If you've got the in-house wiki for some organisation, there's the person who always starts pages, there's the person who cleans up pages, there's the person who is really unlikely to start a page, but will absolutely go through and flesh out all the details and find the citations. And those are participatory roles that are happening between people, and you want to encourage and shape those interactions. And trolling and griefing and all of these things; these are also participatory roles that we want to discourage.

But there isn't a design discipline that focuses on those things, those interactions, those participations, as the first-class structures.

***

(Starts ~54 mins in.)

I've transcribed this to share here because it's interesting in its own right, and partly also as a bookmark: the fact it has come to mind multiple times seems to be tugging at some threads that are important and that I hope to tease out properly in another post. 

For now I'll just say that this idea of 'participation design' rhymes with approaches we've been working with around 'structures of participation' (Natalie Jeremijenko), 'designing for emergence', and 'situation design' (including, over the past five years, and thanks to Ella, live action roleplaying games).

Engendering circumstances in which we can usefully speculate and improvise, it turns out, is all about this design terrain made up of the spaces between people.

Related:
> Dreaming Together (pdf)

> The Experiential Turn (pdf)

> Build Your Own Time Machine

> A Question of Scale
> An Experiential Futures Interview