Probabilities, Predictions and Prophecies Part 2 | The New School

It Happened Tomorrow: Probabilities, Predictions and Prophecies Part 2

THE NEW SCHOOL | http://www.newschool.edu

Comprehensive and sly, "Change Encounters" is a new project by Lin + Lam, developed over the course of the duo's 2009-10 Vera List Center at the New School Fellowship and now making its debut.
Conceived in response to the Vera List Center's focus theme "Speculating on Change," Lin + Lam have collected an array of cultural and historical predictive devices and artifacts from popular culture, historical sources, and scholarship—including original interviews with professionals from diverse backgrounds—and arranged this archive into an interactive website. It Happened Tomorrow offers multiple perspectives on the nature and process of change and speculation and is accessed through a random number generator based on the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching, one of the oldest books in the world and a predictive device still in use today.

The event takes its name from the title of René Clair's 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow, a comedy about a journalist who wishes for the ability to predict the future in order to get a jump on breaking news. A desire for precognition has influenced human behavior across history. The capacity to aspire to a different future is, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes, critical for those striving to overcome dire conditions. Can this capacity be learned and shared? What enables future thinking that is not a product of denial, defense, or fantasy but is constructive to change? For contemporary forecasting on the current recession and repressions, professionals from a number of fields join Lin + Lam and present their perspectives on how the future is imagined and created.

Panel discussion with:
- Patricia Ticineto Clough, professor of sociology and women's studies at the Graduate Center and
Queens College of the City University of New York
- Orit Halpern, assistant professor, Department of History, The New School for Social Research
- Mitch Horowitz, editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and author of
Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
- H. Darrel Rutkin, independent scholar and historian of science specializing in the
history of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern astrology

Hosted by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics | http://www.newschool.edu/vlc
http://www.veralistcenter.org

*Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center's 2009/2011 focus theme, "Speculating on Change."

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Education

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• The New School
• New School University
• New School
• Vera List Center
• Change Encounters
• Lim and Lam
• Lecture
• Social Research
• Media Studies
• Media
• History
• New
• School

[ophiolatreia]

mitch is the man