The Futuring Lab seeks to question, discover, and remake chrono-logical representations of time. In response to pervading anxieties about the near future–  concerns about climate destabilization, rising social inequity, racism, political division, and ecological collapse, among other things– this timely exhibition employs the practice of futuring to generate new building blocks for imagining futures that are not only possible and probable but also preferable. Futuring is a pluralistic practice; there is not one future, but many; it is interdisciplinary, democratic, and inclusive of many voices. Futuring is not an escape from the present, rather it is an awareness of our becoming at this moment, which can help increase our insight and response-ability to the long and thick now.  

For this exhibition, the Design Building Gallery will feature a large interactive wall installation where visitors can post personal and political events, historic and speculative, known and unknown. This interactive Khronika pushes against the sequential and linear flow of past-present-future to envision a nonlinear entanglement of human and more-than-human events spanning the current millennium and beyond. In this effort to un-map the dominant capitalist and colonial narratives of time, the Khronika makes visible a cascade of mattering whereby the past is yet-to-come and futures re-member the forgotten. The practice of futuring extends beyond end-of-world narratives and asks us to consider both old and new economies, ecologies, and cultures of collective emancipation. 

3:30 The Renaissance of the Earth with Suzette Martin’s “Tipping Points”

4:00 Carbon Cycle 101 with Rob DeConto and Julie Brigham-Grette 

4:30 Carbon Culture & Environmental Humanities with Malcolm Sen