 Hello and welcome, everyone. We're so glad that you're able to join us today. My name is Ruth Wiley and I'm from the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. And I am thrilled to be spending the next hour with these lovely people. My co-facilitator from Smithsonian Institute, Glenn Adamson, authors Tochi Onyabuchi, Madeline Ashby, and artist Brian Miller. I'd like to start by asking everyone to give a brief introduction. Glenn? Yeah, thanks Ruth. It's great to be here. My name is Glenn Adamson and I am a curator at large on the Future's exhibition team at the Arts & News She's Building. She'll be telling you about a little more in just a second. And my name is Brian Miller. I am an artist and a visual storyteller. And I am Tochi Onyabuchi, author, essayist, all that jazz and writer of half the stories in this exhibition. My name is Madeline Ashby and I am the other half of that equation and I am a consulting futurist and science fiction writer based in Toronto. Thank you everyone. I said just a little bit of housekeeping to walk through what we're going to do for the next hour. Ben and I have prepared some questions that we want to talk with the panelists about, also some questions for each other. But we definitely want to leave time for your questions. So please post them in the panel on the side and we'll get to as many of them as we can. I want to start actually with a question for you Glenn. So often when we think of museums, we think about them as places where we can go visit the past. Can you talk a bit about why Smithsonian was interested in launching something about futures? Sure. Thanks Ruth. And it's a fair question because at best you would imagine that museums can show us the present, but showing you the future sounds like quite a difficult feat, but we tried to pull it off. And I'll try to explain a little bit about why we tackled this big and rather amazing project and maybe we could have the first few slides up why I talked about this, just so people get a sense of what they'll be in for. We were able to actually travel to Washington DC and see the show which just opens later this month on the 20th of November. So the building where this exhibition is set is called the Arts and Industries building, and it was actually finished way back in the 1880s as the first US National Museum. So it's right there on the south side of the mall with all the other Smithsonian museums that you know and love. And it actually has been out of use for a few years now, almost two decades. So what we've done is to bring it back to life by putting together this exhibition called Futures, which looks at art and design and technology engineering across a very wide spectrum of human creativity. And I guess the one thing I would say about it is that it's meant to be an optimistic and forward looking show. So it's very easy for us, of course, to imagine dystopian possibilities in the future. And we all know how arresting and mesmerizing that can be. And I know our artists and our authors have thought a lot about issues of dystopia and their work. But what we wanted to do is really project an image of what might go right if we all get it together and work together. So, so the the exhibition which you now see here on the screen. Notably is called Futures with an S so it's the idea here of being that it's multiple futures not what will happen, but lots of things that might happen. And if you just go through the next couple of slides. You know the the idea is to really re inhabit this building with extraordinary cutting edge art like this piece which is called me and you by sushi ready amazing interactive digital sculpture, or next slide. We have, you know, everything from the project loon balloon which you see there on the left hand side of this slide, which was actually sent over parts of Africa to beam Wi-Fi signals down to remote communities. Next slide here in another of our halls, and another interactive sculpture which is by an artist called the manual Gala, it's called do nothing with AI. It's actually a robot that responds to you almost like it's dancing with you. It's programmed in such a way as to try to get you to just relax and chill and calm down so the idea do nothing with AI instead of AI that distracts you and gets you hyper excited. It tries to actually, you know, promote mental health. Next slide. And I think this is my last slide. This is our West Hall which is all about confronting climate change and other logistical and existential problems that confront us at the moment. There's objects in it like the mineral rover which is an AI powered robot that actually goes up and down rows of crops analyzing each plant and determining what it needs. So it's a really good example of how we work together smarter than maybe we won't have to work as hard and yet we'll actually be able to contend with these issues that are facing us. Within that big project, what we thought was really we should turn the camera on ourself, and we should think about the Smithsonian, what the Smithsonian might be doing. Let's say in 50 years. So we looked at the year 2071, and we reached out to research teams all across the institution. I'm not sure if folks watching are aware of this but the Smithsonian is just as important as a collection of research centers as it is as a collection of research teams and again working in all sorts of different areas from astronomy to history to biology, you know, we name it. And so we chose eight research teams across the institution. We brought them together for these workshops, which Ruth and her colleagues at the center designed for us. And then, of course, Brian and coaching Madeline will also in attendance those workshops and then we made these incredible posters and short stories. So Ruth, I thought it might be a good idea for you to describe a little more about that process and what it involved. Thanks, Glenn. Yeah, we were thrilled when we got the initial emails and initial phone calls from the Smithsonian to start to think about what these futures might look like. Mostly because it's so strongly aligned with our mission at the center, which is to ignite the collective imagination for a better future. And what we, you know, I was going back through my notes in preparation for this panel and realize that we begin talking back in 2019. So of course this was way pre pandemic. We had imagined a very different set of workshops at the time we thought that a team from Arizona State University would fly out to DC for maybe a week or two in the summer and convene different Smithsonian groups to engage in this collaborative will building and creativity exercises. Of course back then we couldn't imagine that there would be living in a world where travel and in person meetings weren't possible. But in fact it actually, in some ways work to our advantage so the original version of this had us working with the Smithsonian group that were DC based. But as Glenn mentioned, there are Smithsonian researchers collaborators across the world. And so because we did these through online workshops, we were able to bring in participants from Europe from around the country. And I was particularly excited when we got to work with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute that's based in Panama. And as Glenn mentioned in total we worked with eight different units, number of researchers curators and their collaborators. I think about 27 people all together, coming together for these workshops. And each one was about three hours. It focused on a specific Smithsonian unit, and there was representatives from ASU. There is represented representatives from the futures curatorial team. Brian Miller attended all eight of them. And as mentioned before, Madeline and Tochi split them and each attended for. And throughout the workshop. Not only did we learn about the research being done by the Smithsonian teams and the amazing work being done in the museums. But at the heart of this workshop was a collaborative world building exercise that we call futures by choice and futures by chance. This is a timeline activity and it's depicted in the photos behind me. And it's a place where we imagine both positive and negative future events and discuss how the Smithsonian research might impact these events, and how it might be impacted by possible future events. But perhaps more importantly, these timeline activities serve as a collaborative world building activity, so the teams can start to tell positive stories about the future. And I also give an avenue to reflect on these possible futures, who might be benefiting, who might be disadvantaged, and thinking about issues around equity and justice is really important when we think about imagining our futures. And just to note, it's important to say that we are showing these images, very small, because it's not about predicting the futures. We didn't create timelines that we said this is definitely what's going to happen. But again, it was really about doing a collaborative storytelling process and using this as an avenue to think together to create together, and to tell stories together. And after the workshops, then the work didn't stop. In fact, for the team here, it's where the work really picked up. And so Madeline and Toti wrote short science fiction stories that were inspired by these conversations and the collective world building that we did. And Brian created the amazing posters that you'll see on your screen next. These stories and the posters are available on Slate's Future Tense channel, and Brian's posters will be displayed at the futures exhibit when it opens, as Glenn mentioned, in about a week and a half. That's a little bit about the process and how we got to where we're at. But now I'd like to turn it over to Brian and ask for you to talk through your reflections on the process and creating these stunning images. And thank you, Glenn. It's great to be here. So exciting after all the time that we spent working to be able to show this artwork to everyone. I feel like we've been hiding in a way for over a year now. You know, to me, the process was truly amazing. I'm used to collaborating, you know, I've collaborated with Lucasfilm on things for Star Wars and I've collaborated with Hot Wheels on imagining new vehicles. But I've never got to sit down with, you know, scientists and experts and writers and it was, it was really intriguing to me. And I think one example would be the Tropical Research Institute illustration. So many of the Smithsonian experts that we talked to echoed some very similar sentiments, you know, every one of them said, Oh, I had a parent who, you know, made sure that I was outside. I was interacting with wildlife and interacting with nature. And those words really resonated with me and one of the researchers even said, you know, my father would take me out into the woods to this fire lookout tower. And I was able to look out over the forest and just kind of see for miles and take everything in. And that's what really inspired that illustration was I thought what if we took that idea of the fire lookout tower, but put that, you know, into the water in the ocean environment and created an imaginary structure where in the future you could go there, and you could go down and be in the underwater environment but you could also go up and look over, you know, the mangrove forest and the water and the sea creatures and even the birds right so this idea of taking people and letting them back into nature, and letting them experience the world around them will then help them be more invested in the future of that place and how we management manage it. And how we preserve it so that's one example of how I was inspired from that process for sure. Of course, there were seven others so it just depends on how much more we want to talk about. I know you guys don't want me to go too crazy today. Let me ask you a quick question, Brian, which is just about the aesthetic of the posters. So you know, this year the Smithsonian is 175 so we're celebrating the anniversary. So we're looking ahead to the 225th anniversary of the Smithsonian imagining posters that might be shown at museums. How did you think about creating a range of different looks for these posters that would deal both, I suppose genuinely futuristic but also relatable for a present day audience. That's a great question. I think, for me, I feel like so many times as an artist when we try to imagine the future. We did it really wrong because we're stuck with our current present ideal, you know, you can, you've we've all seen the sci-fi movies where they whip out of Sony Walkman it's supposed to be, you know 100 years in the future like want law right so I was hoping to connect a little bit more to the human experience and the human element, and also with the idea of our positive futures. I think it's a quick inspiration from things like, you know, World's Fair artwork from the past, or maybe like, you know, attraction posters from like amusement parks and that sort of thing, things that are colorful and joyful, but are also serve as a way to draw people in and so we have these eight different future, you know, museum displays, and I wanted to do it like that attraction style, but also give each of them their own flavor so you know coming up with color combinations that hopefully suit the aesthetic of what we're talking about so I think one example of that would be the the augmented athletes where we're talking with the sports innovation team, and they had so much focus on not necessarily winning sports or being the best at sports but inclusion how do we get more people involved in sports, you know regardless of their ability of their race of their gender, and using technology to make it fair and equitable for everyone, and it was, I was so impressed by listening to them speak that that then inspired me to you know imagine these situations like one of the things we talked about was, what if there were two teams at two different stadiums, you know miles away or countries way, how could they play together and so imagining the technology that could enable that but not being specific about the technology, just being general I mean like, here's how it helps the players here's how it helps people, and hopefully that gives a little bit more of a hopeful representation, then maybe like a cold, you know, you know, here's a device that we've imagined and you know what fun is that we want to see how it helps people. Yeah, and it you know it might just be worth saying as we now turn to our short story writers that a lot of these posters were based on a kind of really compelling what if question that would come out of the workshop so what if we could use mosquitoes as data collectors to track the passage of disease as well as spreading disease, what if kids could vote. What would that mean, what if the National Air and Space Museum actually started a space annex, you know, and you could go up and visit that so that's a kind of common link between the posters and the short stories but I'd love to hear from our writers now maybe we could turn first to Tochi, and just hear a little bit about your perspective and how you approach this to the medium of fiction. And it was such a such an edifying process, both like intellectually but also spiritually. One of the things that I found myself constantly taking away from these workshops and it was a point that was that was being made over and over and over again. The discussion with these teams was the this sort of optimism so much of the work that they were engaged in and I think a lot of the work that museums tend to engage in in general a research teams tend to engage in in general is a sort of a reflection, or a sort of repair. I remember, you know, speaking with, you know, the, the, the teams focused on the history of women in science that ended up spawning my short story here Rika, and so much of that was about, you know, sort of unearthing these previously written stories and these these women who had made these incredible contributions, but for one reason or another weren't talked about or were sort of brushed aside or airbrushed out of the picture with regards to scientific innovation. And so listening to these people talk about their, you know, the sort of excavation work that they were engaged in was incredibly was incredibly revitalizing and similarly with, you know, the story that spawned bloodstream which is the story around the, or the workshop that spawned bloodstream which is the story around the idea of mosquitoes as vectors for for vaccines, as opposed to just diseases. I hate them, I, there are few living creatures that I abhor and who's, whose utility I question more than I do mosquitoes. But out of that workshop came this question what if mosquitoes could be used for good, because there are so many of them, and that's not something that I think would have occurred to me, you know, on my own I'm very good at dooming gloom I'm very good at heartbreak, all of that stuff I can do that very very very well in my fiction but you know one of the ways in which the workshops and this process in general challenged me was in envisioning an optimistic future and that isn't to say utopia per se but it is to say these things that I was witnessing these dynamics that I was witnessing in these workshops of these people fighting the good fight over and over and over again. So how do we go away in our future. So how do we replicate that how do we dramatize that in these sort of future imaginings. Cool. So Madeline, do you want to speak to the four stories that you wrote and how you tackle this broad range of subjects. Yeah, sure. Tochi I also, you know, I've been asked to participate in optimistic science fiction projects like this before, but this was the one that really challenged me to be fearlessly optimistic, you know this was the one that you know I really felt at a certain point during the writing there was a moment that I had where I felt like Wiley Coyote looking down over the Grand Canyon, there was this sudden like this is really happening. In part because of the quality of the people involved like that when you are bringing to life the ideas of people who have given their entire careers to the pursuit of something. It's a huge responsibility. And it's a huge responsibility to know that your stories are going to be read by people who are wildly different from you from different generations from yours, old and young. Going through as I wrote these I imagined them being read aloud from a grandparent to a grandchild. And because I thought about who goes to museums and who who experiences museums together in a group as a community. And who, you know who moves in those spaces, and then who accesses who also in three accesses remotely as we are all doing today. So there was this huge sense of responsibility in a way that I really hadn't felt it so keenly before or I hadn't been able to imagine it so in such a granular way before. The thing about, and we, I think talked about this before is that, you know, the thing about this, the thing about dystopia is that I've always that I've come to feel about them is that they, they are very easy because, you know, they become the same at a different day. It's, it's about, you know, authoritarianism fascism evil, look the same no matter where they are. You know, they do the same things they perform the same functions they may wear different uniform that the jackboot might be a MIDI boot, I don't know. But, but they look the same everywhere because they, they do the same thing. Whereas a utopia is highly individuated an ideal future and optimistic future is highly individuated. And why is that it's because it is pointing at places that have been wounded in the past. And, and those optimistic futures show us what life might be like if those wounds were healed. And I think that goes back to toji's point about about these are points of repair this is this is like, Okay, what if we, what if we could mend things, because I think that's the most optimistic thing about this project is like one, museum still exists. So, this is a future in which science and research and facts matter. And, and that we continue to press forward on those, you know, on those guidelines, and, and that was what was almost more challenging than any other than any one aspect of the story, aside from tapping a bunch of constitutional scholars to tell me what adulthood legally means. Thank you to the constitutional scholars who spoke to us on their vacation. Short of that, that was the, that was the most, I want to say difficult, or at least challenging and I want to say difficult challenging aspect of this for me. And I think that's one of the things I want to pick up on perhaps another challenge. So one of the, one of the themes and many of the stories is that they take place in museums or they're about exhibitions or galleries. And that's pretty different than the way people tend to think about science fiction, which is said in space or big cities or large frontiers. And so, you know, Madeline Ortochi, can you talk about the challenge and threading museums into the story and how that impacted your work. Oh man, that I mean it was, I think what's interesting is I tend to look at museums as as portals in a sense, you know, I'm, I'm in a present reality looking at this, this item that was that this item wasn't as it was in the past if that make that I mean that's very sort of metaphysical but it does seem as though I am, you know, every time I encounter a piece of of artwork or exhibition or installation. I'm standing on the threshold of, I'm standing on some sort of temporal threshold. And, you know with 32nd situation which was the story that came out of the workshop with the National Museum of African American history and culture. And it was a story that was very much written, like during the pandemic. You know, that was the backdrop of my life and it couldn't help but be the backdrop of the story that I was writing. And, you know, one thing that that my mom has always said since I was a kid was this to shall pass right like whether it was a good thing whether it was a bad thing. And, you know, in the think of the pandemic I, you know, I, I know me personally but I imagine this, this might be true for a lot of people were wondering what does the end of this look like, is there an end to this. What does the after look like, is it even a desirable outcome, you know, isn't even a desirable reality that I that I want to be in. The, you know, the sort of optimism of the story was located in the idea that yes there, there is an after it's not quite, you know, the after where things are 100% and better. But what would it look like to stand at that after and to look back at what is going on right now. I think to historically, one of the things that that I'm constantly running up against in museums and in my sort of, you know, interaction with history is that, you know, particularly during periods of tumult, whether it's, I don't know, like the French Revolution or, you know, civil rights struggle in America or what have you. And there's this picture there's this idea that that that the the upheaval is going on all the time everywhere that people are not living quotidian lives or that they're not these sort of more domestic moments of uplift or tragedy or what have you. And that's something that I wanted to tap into what would people in the future, what would they, what would they see 2020 look like in their history books, would it be just constant upheaval all the time. Because oftentimes that's what it felt like but what would it look like to tap into the personal history of somebody who was living through that time. And that was something that I wanted to that I wanted to get at there and a museum was the best vehicle that I could think of to, to engage that question. Anything to add to that Madeline. I, I actually found it, I want to say more like difficult to sort of thread the, like the museum as a place, like the placeness of a museum into some of my stories in part because they took place. You know, in such weirdly the place the the story of mine that like directly deals with the existence of a museum installation and with a museum curator takes place on the moon. And it's called in pursuit of extraterrestrial life in which an astronaut has to reckon with what it is to get pregnant on the moon. And then approaches a museum curator for help about it because they have access to all of this, this cool stuff. And so it was threading the existence of a museum as a place was difficult for me but not the idea of threading in the existence of ongoing research institutions. And that I think I was able to thread in a little bit more to to acknowledge the fact that the museum is is a place, but the mute like the research institutions as you pointed out earlier are global. And they are a community of practice. And that community of practices global, and that goes everywhere, you know the building could, you know, in theory fall tomorrow, and the museum would still exist because the people who make it happen still exist. Great. Thank you. Thank you guys. I have a question for Brian, but first I just want to remind the audience to put their own questions into the box right next to their viewing screen. We've already got some great ones coming in so they will probably cut to the questions as soon as we can because there's there's some really interesting topics being raised. Before we do that I did want to ask you first Brian and maybe our writers could speak to this as well about the idea of research within the context of this project so of course you're talking to researchers who are, you know, studying the prospect of mining or whatever that topic is. But you also had to conduct a lot of research to come up with those images and then obviously tochi and Madeline you had to do the same for the stories. But how do you research the future. And in a way it's a parallel problem to the one that we were posing ourselves as curators how do you make an exhibition about the future, because it's very easy to understand how you do historical research or scientific research, but how do you do credible research that's forward looking. So Brian what do you think about that and then maybe we could hear from Toshi and Madeline about it too. You know, most of my career has been spent working telling other people's stories visually. So something that was from a written word or from a movie or you know something like that. So I found it important for me to really listen to the researchers to the experts that we were talking to from Smithsonian, and to try not to make assumptions. Because I think, you know, as a creator, you're trying to jump to what that imagery is that you want to display, and it's easy to make that leap before you have all the information so I really tried to like call myself and listen and ask good questions. And I found that that took me down avenues that I would maybe not have found or discovered on my own. So that was sort of the foundation that I used and then from there, I would start the imagination process. So like you brought up asteroid mining Glenn I think that's a good one to talk about you know, that might mean my movie, my mind goes to the movie like Armageddon or something right, but that's not really the reality of what's happening out there that's that someone else's imagination so we have to think about things like what does asteroid mining mean to our planet. Can we reduce the amount of resources that we're taking from our own planet if we take them from an asteroid but then the question becomes, how much do we take from the solar system what's our responsibility there. So these big questions that come up and we don't necessarily have to answer those questions today, we have to think about them, and then infuse that into the artwork and so that was, I guess my take on the research I mean maybe didn't answer your question exactly but it's sort of my response to that. Well yeah I mean I think it highlights two things one is that we had researchers who were able to extrapolate from their present day experience and in many cases already thinking about consequences of their work. So as you said, this is really true throughout the show, in a lot of ways thinking about the future as a matter of sharpening your questioning, rather than coming up with a definitive answer is more about field of view and focusing attention in the right place. And I think particularly a visual artwork, like the ones that you generated for us is a great tool for doing that. Tochi, do you want to say a little bit about the research process you underwent for the four stories you created. I learned so freakin much. There's there's something incredibly, there's something incredibly thrilling about being in a room in a zoom with people who are so like with experts with people who just know so much and are so brilliant. And it's not just that they know so much in their particular field but the their capacity for critical thinking and question asking. Glenn I know that something that you that you brought up earlier is just so galaxy brain that like oftentimes it felt like I was just like staring at the sun like I wrote four stories based off these workshops I easily could have written 40 like easily based on the ideas that that came out of this. And with regard to writing about futures. I just had to look at what people were doing now. And I think, because so much of the work that we talked about was future oriented. And part of this goes back to the idea of repair. What would it look like what does mission accomplished look like, or what does it mean to, what would it look like to get closer to mission accomplished. I think was the animating question and a lot of these things particularly with a story like Harika like, what would it look like to visually display the sort of unearthed, you know, contributions of all the women who came before. And how would that, like, so the story is basically about like this, you know, visual blockchain display of the history of women's contributions in science but it's also about, you know, the contributions that led specifically to the fact that there can be this visual blockchain display. That's like, you know, that is a genre of mission accomplished that's a future that I think is very much embedded in the efforts of what people are are about or after today. And that way, if I zeroed in on that, and try to think about the specific questions that these researchers were asking, or the specific goals that they were sort of hunting after, then it almost felt like, you know, marrying that to the optimism vector. The future was already written in a sense, at least in terms of the story so yeah no it was it was a really fun and interesting and illuminating process. Yeah, you know, that's one of the reasons it was such a thrill to work with you all because you have this skill of interweaving different thematic strands into the story so might be confronted with a request to write a story about women in science but then you take the research into the blockchain and twist them together and then you have the DNA of a story. Right. And that's a really exciting thing for me because curators and historians don't usually get to be quite that creative with our data sets, you know, so it was really freeing also for me to be part of the process that involved as much speculative projection. Madeline what do you what would you say about your own research path through the project. Well, I, you know, I've been a practicing foresight consultants for 10 or 11 years now I've done a lot of work that is similar to this with different groups so the idea of sort of using foresight techniques as a research process was not new to me. Where writers and artists and curators and researchers and foresighters online is in that we often have to justify our research by demonstrating the implications of that research. And, and you know, I think a lot of people in writing a research grant, no matter what it's for have had to have had to underline, and then highlight, and then you know point a neon sign at, you know, and if this continues that this might happen. Right. And so I think that's a, that's a place where we could all meet. And so on so that was not that that was a point of that was an intersecting point, I would say. In terms of the research there were for specific stories I think like the one that was the most difficult for me was Claremont v Florida. Claremont v Florida went through so many different drafts Claremont v Florida is about giving minors the right vote. And we spoke to many different scholars at multiple levels and lawyers and attorneys and lay and people of specialization to like to really get that like to see how possible was this because this was when it's about the law. You're not talking about something theoretical necessarily I mean you are in use cases maybe. But this was, you know this is stuff that is already written. And how would you, you know how might it be rewritten was sort of the next question and that was, I think like the most intense research wise, there were probably. I forget how many drafts there were of it there were just so many of them. Well, that makes me think how many drafts of our exhibition have we gone through. But you know, I particularly love that story and poster in terms of it's the way it locks into the exhibition, and actually that that that particular workshop is a research or John Grinsband, a great historian of American democracy. And basically his perspective is that American democracy has always been a rough and tumble business, especially in the 19th century was literally fist fights at the polls. And so it was fascinating to talk to him about what would be a comparable transformation 50 years ago, the ones that we've experienced in the past, i.e. inclusion of ethnic minorities and women who were excluded from the franchise. The idea of what if kids could vote, which is kind of initially shocking but then you think well, in a way why not because they're the ones that are going to inherit the situation that the politicians of the day are actually creating. And of course it's very compatible with the narratives about who decides the future while we all do together, and how do we each participate as you know fully change making agents in that context. So it's fascinating to see where you took that in the story as well as finds poster of this, you know, looking at that amazing skyline. But you know, I think we might as well turn to questions that we have so many good ones, what do you think Bruce. That sounds great. While I'm doing a quick pass now and where you want to jump in to the Glenn's response there. I just wanted to say that there's I'm I foolishly did not look up the quotation that inspired me most on this and I'm like searching Google images and of course it's not there. Right when right when you need it but it was about. He shared with us this quotation about how democracy can be like a, like an old dark house. And in it, you know, it might be snug but in it your enemies can still hide or something like that and it was it would it blew me away. It blew me like I literally I got goosebumps like I actually got the hairs on my and he just casually mentioned it and I just thought. And I will say that in that project also the, you know, the person that we worked with said, you know, I want you to imagine is that like it's it's possible that there's a future in which my job doesn't exist. It's possible that there's a that there's a future in which this field no longer exists. And, and he was really willing to countenance that as a possibility. More so than I've seen, not just in other teams here but in other industries other teams other stakeholders and I've been in other projects like, you know, there was this willingness to sort of step forward and say, yeah, and it's possible that that this would not be true, or that this that I might not be here for this or that my field might not be here for this and I really respected the kind of the bravery that it takes to say that. And, and to to acknowledge that as a possibility and that is the that is again like speaks to the quality of research when you can imagine yourself out of existence. That really, that really sort of blew me away. Yeah, so thank you all for throwing in questions, please continue to do so. We have some great one like I said we're going to try to get to as, as many as possible. And there's definitely some common themes coming up there. So one question that I'd like us to think about a little bit is, what can these stories do. So what what's next. I want to ask about how do we inspire strategic imagination. So in government or science or institutions, particularly ones that might be resistant to specter the futures and forecasting. So, open the floor for to respond to that one. That sounds like a good one from Madeline because you've been doing the forecast work yourself so you've kind of been at that in the front lines on that one and try to persuade people by ability of that kind of work. So why stories Madeline. This is really funny because I have to deliver some slides on that later today. I think that there, there are a bunch of different reasons why stories. One is that it's the birthright of humanity. And the other is that our species has done from its inception from the Alaska paintings in in France from those cave paintings in France to to the or the oral tradition that gave birth to the, you know, the early on the Odyssey, which were, you know, effectively the world's first fan fiction. The high Claudius, are you do you have a perspective on this. Thank you. To, to, you know, storytelling is a way that we make sense of reality and of what might happen. If you look at downloads of contagion. The movie contagion Steven Sputterberg movie contagion, and you, you map the illegal downloads of the movie contagion against the process the progress of the pandemic, they rise together. Now why might that be. I think we needed a vision, a story, a narrative that would speak to the complexity of their lived experience and might offer visions of white, what might occur. Now is that an answer is that what's going to happen. No, not necessarily, but I think the function of art is to create a discursive object like a thing that a thing that we can use as a point of conversation or a jumping off point, or a thing that exists between us that is neither of our idea. When I write foresight scenarios or when I sort of do when I deepen science what brand David Johnson calls science fiction prototypes for my clients, like one of the things that I emphasize is like the strengths of this, and the strengths of all storytelling is that it is not necessarily about, you know, this isn't Bob and accountings idea. This isn't, this isn't his idea or her idea or what have you this is an idea. And it can be, it can exist between you as this point of either agreement or disagreement, without you attacking another person. Now that isn't to say that storytelling and narrative drive and narrativizing can't be destructive. There's tons of destructive potential there. And in fact, that if that were not the case. We really wouldn't have this power like we wouldn't all be here, if there weren't that power, right. And, and so I think that, you know, there's, there's so many reasons to tackle it this way. The first I think is that it's a thing that we all naturally do. It's a thing that we all all naturally do it's like I often like and what I do in this type of work to putting a human being in a scale model. And I think that art, you know, for as awesome as Brian's, as Brian's posters are, is that like their one image, whereas a scale model will show you sort of the lie of the land and also how a human being fits inside of it. And I think that that's what stories do is they create depth, and, and they plunge you in and show you the scale of those implications and how they impact people. It's an amazing toolkit to think with, of course, you know, and people have been doing it since, you know, people were putting up altarpieces of the last judgment and medieval cathedrals and it doesn't seem like it's got likely to stop so just doing it our way. We got a question here which is super important one which we've mentioned briefly but haven't really tackled directly which is about the topic of climate change and I have to say, there's one thing that people come to us most often. They want to show about the future and ask us how did you handle that. That's definitely it and of course for good reason it's on everyone's mind, because it's going to dictate so much about what the future might be like in every other respect. So maybe tochi and Brian you could talk a little bit about how you handled the topic of climate change and the parts of the project that you were involved with to cheat you want to start us off. Certainly, I mean I think that the, the biggest and first aspect of it was to have it present or to have some consequence of climate change present. It almost felt, it almost felt irresponsible to like leave it out to not even have it in the, you know, background of my mind as I'm conceiving these stories because it's, it's very, you know it's like gravity at this point it's like a thermodynamic principle. It's just a matter of, of thinking about the ways in which our behavior, our viability, our habits are going to be affected by it, and I often think about the disparate impact say for instance in, you know the Sahel or parts of sub Saharan Africa versus you know a lot of the developed west. The worst of climate change right now is already happening at the bottom of the Sahara. A lot of the worst of climate change is already happening in parts of India, a lot of the worst of climate change is already happening in parts of the global south that you know just aren't necessarily talked about as much as perhaps they should be in a lot of Western media. And that's something that that is always always always in my mind and that isn't to say that there, there's no sort of institutional response to it I think in the story bloodstream, there are these devices that like, you know spray these insecticides that can, you know, you know, eliminate disease carrying mosquitoes but they are malfunctioning because of governmental ineptitude. You know, so I feel like that is that is also a thing that's not going to go away in the future but I also, you know, thought about the ways in which climate change could force us into a sort of equilibrium or like a return to an equilibrium with the environment a way of coexisting with the environment and that's a lot of what animated the story of equipoise, which is about a museum that is basically part mangrove. I like that was really cool to imagine because it was like okay what does, you know, what does, what does equilibrium look like what does it look like when you can exist in a place and not in an exploitative fashion, or not in a destructive fashion. That is incredibly optimistic but also like really fun because it's not a space that, you know, intellectually I've occupied before. And so it was really interesting to dive into that question because I do think, you know there's a very strong and deserves temptation to get into a lot of the dooming gloom with regards to climate change and our institutional response to it. But there's a lot of good work happening. There's a lot of good stuff happening that can tend to get drowned out in the noise and what does it look like to sort of put the microscope on those on those things. Great, thank you. And it's great to have that big picture view and think of it as in the backdrop like you said it's like a gravitational pull on our imaginations. It's great to think about that as a kind of guiding principle of the project and I certainly would say the same is true the exhibition in general. Brian, what do you think about the presence of climate change in the imagery. Like climate change was integral to at least four of the illustrations but the one I would like to focus on would be our conversation about mosquitoes and conservation biology. Part of the idea there was that in some future Smithsonian might have this like eco tracker system, which I guess the shortest way to describe it would be like ways, except for for the environment. And so we would have these devices that we could interact with. And as citizens of the earth, we could all contribute to, you know, protecting the climate through monitoring our environment, wildlife ecosystems, and all that data being collected in a way that would benefit all mankind all humankind. So, to me, it's so easy like to say to go down the doom and gloom path and I know one of our discussion ideas that was never going to be part of the artwork was like you know what if, you know what if the Empire State Building was, you know, half submerged underwater and there's you know all this kind of dystopia stuff. And that's, that's an interesting discussion path to go down, but then to steer the conversation to what if we considered people of the planet to contribute to making the environment better, as opposed to just talking about it or leading it up to the politicians I thought that was a really inspiring idea, and one that really could have applications for our future. There's a kind of almost an Easter egg level thing where the Tropical Research Institute is now the topical research Institute north and it's in Cape Main New Jersey. So that's a nice little subtle. It's not the Empire State Building underwater but it's sort of in that direction, but yeah it's definitely was great to acknowledge not just the perilous reality of climate change but also some really kind of leading edge thinking that's actually addressing the challenges and that's again something people see through the exhibition. Ruth, what do you think? One last question. Yeah, I think we'll hit on the last one again. Thank you to all the audience questions as we're wonderful. And I want to end with a bit of a reflection question. Madeline, would you start us off of discussing how has your work in collaboration on this project impacted you and the work that you're doing now. I found it really healing to do. I found it incredibly healing to do, like in a way that I couldn't see until it was finished. What I noticed after having done these was that I was suddenly just capable of more writing. And I was having more and better ideas than I'd had before and I think it was because I'd been pushed, you know, out of a comfort zone and into other people's research, and really had seen sort of people really considering the ramifications of their research in a different way on the ground, you know, day to day. And I found it. I found it an incredible responsibility. It was, I think like that's the thing that that sort of I found most inspiring and most challenging at the same time was that responsibility. And that I mentioned before, and that was what really kind of gave me the sense of like, okay, yeah, now, now, you know, we're in the big leagues now. And it was sort of like, oh, okay, this is this is this is this is professional sports, all others get off the field kind of kind of feeling, I don't know. But it really I found it. You know, in very challenging but also at a time is as totally the same before when things were when it was so when it was very hard to imagine a future at all. And it really could hold to this and hold to the optimism, if not in myself of the people I was working with, and the people I was hearing from who had such a perspective on history. I was trained as an historian before I was trained as a futurist and it really also kind of took me back to my roots in that way. And, and so yeah I found it like. Yeah, very restorative. Yeah, definitely echoes some of the feelings of just the generosity of people's times and ideas that were shared with us throughout all of the workshops. I found incredibly rejuvenating not only for this work but the other projects that we're working on. Brian, how about you, how is this fitting on this impact of the work that you're doing. Well, for me, you know as someone who works with Hollywood studios and different publishing companies, you know I'm used to dealing with fantasy science fiction. So to work with these experts and scientists really open my eyes. You know I always joke that I, I'm a visual storyteller because I don't consider myself to be the best speaker or the best writer. In interacting with the scientists and experts I realized that they need a champion to show visual representations of what they're thinking and what they're dreaming up. And it even makes you question like the place of art and society it's like well maybe every one of these museums needs like an illustrator on staff because you can have a report with all the numbers and all the statistics but when you take that to, you know try to get your funding to get the public on board, they might need some visual representation to get them excited about it or to help open their minds to it and so working with them and impact my art in a way that like, I appreciate more of the how you can get information from others and listen, and then use that to reflect back but it also made me think a bigger picture thing of like, how can we incorporate art back into the sciences and get artists and science working together. And to maybe propel things forward at a faster rate, who knows. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think there's real power and bringing people together. And someone that's been realized and the work that we've all done. How does this project influence the work that that you're doing now. I came out of this just feeling better, like, emotionally. You know, while I was working on these stories I was also working on my next book the life which is a climate change book it's a post climate event novel. I, you know, I had to go to some very sort of dark places to, you know, say what I wanted to say with that book. And these stories were so much of a spiritual like curative and also told me that I was capable of doing this sort of thing I was capable of like there was. There was a moment during I think the workshop with the Tropical Research Institute where one of the scientists was talking about her relationship with mangroves and when she was a kid. At night the mangroves which are normally these like smelly like super disgusting type of places. They'd be sort of covered in these little crabs that you couldn't really see during the day but you could see at night, because they would glow. And that was just hearing that was the most beautiful thing that I that I'd heard in a very, very, very long time. And so I feel like this story opened me up to being more perceptive with regards to moments of beauty and, and, you know, sense of wonder in a way that I'd probably never have closed off to for like a while. And so I think now that's starting to make its way into my work. This is a marvelous world that we occupy an incredibly marvelous world that we occupy. And I'm so grateful to this project for letting me participate in it, and allowing me to remember that truth. Thank you so much. Yes, and it is my hope and our hope that that sense of wonder and the curiosity and hopefulness is what the people reading your stories and seeing your art will be able to experience for themselves at all as well. Glenn, do you want to share with everyone about where they can find the stories and see the art. Absolutely. So, first of all, if you want to come see the actual show, go to Washington DC, and the museum that person industries building is right next to the Hirshhorn, they're on the south side of the mall. If you are further away than that, or if you are in DC and just want to check out the virtual offerings, which there are many I saw we had some questions about getting involved educational programs. So, let's go to our website, which you can probably find most easily to be honest by just putting futures Smithsonian into a search engine, but it is a i b dot s i dot e to use slash futures. Anyway, future Smithsonian in the search engine, and I'll take you to the website and we have social media of course up and running the show opens on November 20, and it runs through July of next year so you got a lot of time to see it as well. And yes, we've been focusing in this conversation about these short stories and posters are amazing, but boy is there a lot else to see there's a flying car literally, there's a supersonic maglev train. There is artworks of every description on the outside and inside of the building it's an absolutely extraordinary experience that people are going to have. And Ruth maybe do you want to give people the actual, the actual instructions for reading the stories because that's important and say goodbye. Great, yes. So the stories can be found on slates future tense channel, all eight are now been posted so we invite you to go check those out they are amazing. And as we wrap up just a big thank you to slate and future tense, as well as Smithsonian, all of our panelists today, and also all of the wonderful Smithsonian curators and researchers and collaborators that made all of this work possible. So thank you so much for joining us and enjoy the stories and art.