LISTENING to the FUTURE is an ongoing collection of art projects and experiments, some solitary and some collaborative, based on a simple process for generating ideas about the futures we want.
Join me.
Listening to the Future began as a participatory art project inside of Occupy Wall Street encampments. Since then, I have brought the simple prompts into classrooms and onto sidewalks, in activist meetings and business gatherings, museums and galleries and printshops, and my own studio. The prompts have driven performances, mapmaking projects, and installations. Throughout all of these experiments, participants have shared their ideas, one by one, on index cards, which are all archived in an old-school library card catalog, in over 60 categories (and growing).
The Future of Listening to the Future is, like all futures, unwritten! I would like the Archive of ideas to inspire other teachers, students, artists, activists, entrepreneurs and other culture makers to envision and design and create their own visionary futures - and present.
This is a map made of ideas taken from the section of the archive entitled “water.” Each written idea here is from a different person.
The 60 categories in the Archive span practical and logistical things, like transportation, waste and various infrastructures, to more complex, messy and sometimes philosophical or poetic things such as borders, connection, love, sex, gender, time, feelings, and dreams.
Left: Listen to the Future in 10 minutes kit with instructions and index cards for the archive, and a silkscreened cover in an edition of 200.