It Happened Tomorrow: Probabilities, Predictions and Prophecies Panel

"Mystères de la Main — Révélations Complètes — Chiromancie, Phrénologie, Graphologie et Études Physiologiques," by Ad Desbarrolles. Courtesy of the New York Public Library Image Collection.

Here's another one I wish I could go to.  So much good stuff happening right now, so little time:

It Happened Tomorrow: Probabilities, Predictions and Prophecies

Saturday, September 11, 2010
2:00 to 5:00 pm
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
New York City
Admission: Free

Comprehensive and sly, "Change Encounters" is a new project by Lin + Lam, developed over the course of the artists 2009-10 Vera List Center 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 interdisciplinary array of cultural and historical predictive devices, appropriations from popular culture, historical sources, and academic scholarship, including original interviews with professionals from diverse backgrounds, and arranged this archive into an interactive website. "Change Encounters" offers multiple vantage points on the nature and the 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 that is still commonly used today.

The event takes its name from the title of René Clair's 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow, a comedy in which a journalist longs for the ability to know the future in advance in order to get a jump on breaking news. This desire for precognition determines human behavior across many fields of experience. Many a head of state — emperors, presidents and dictators, including Napoleon, Hitler and Reagan — has turned to oracles to authorize and consolidate their power. The capacity to aspire to a different future is, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes, critical to the possibility for the underprivileged to overcome dire conditions. Can the capacity to aspire be learned and shared? What enables future thinking that is not a product of denial, defense or mere fantasy, but is constructive to change? For contemporary forecasting on our current recession and repressions, professionals from divergent fields join Lin + Lam and present their perspectives on how the future is speculated and formed.

 

Program

2:00 to 3:00p.m.

• Introduction by Carin Kuoni, director, Vera List Center
• World Premiere of "Change Encounters" by Lin + Lam

3:00 to 4:00p.m.
Discussion

• 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 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, historian of science with an emphasis on the history of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern astrology

4:00 to 5:00p.m.
Celebratory Slideshow: Interactive demonstration of speculative devices and reception


*    *    *

Lin + Lam

Inspired by a particular site, historical incident, or political issue, Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam) collect research in the form of interviews, archival materials, and found objects. Their collaboration brings together their backgrounds in architecture, photography, sculpture, installation, and time-based media. Their work has been exhibited at international venues including the Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, The Kitchen, and the Queens Museum, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Arko Arts Center (Korean Arts Council,) Seoul, the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany, and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China. Their work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. Lam received her MFA from CalArts. Lin received her MFA from Bard College. Lam is faculty at Goddard College, MFA-IA program. Lin is faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts and Jacob K. Javits Fellow in the Media, Culture, and Communication doctoral program at NYU.

"Change Encounters" Project Participants

• Claudia Bader, psychoanalyst, astrologer, and Adjunct Faculty, The New School
• Lopamudra Banerjee, Assistant Professor of Economics, The New School for Social Research
• Gregg Bordowitz, writer and artist
• Andrew Culver, composer
• Orit Halpern, Assistant Professor of History, The New School for Social Research
• Rachel Harris, Gender Equality Architecture Reform Lead, Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO)
• Benjamin Lee, Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
• Colleen Macklin, Director of PETLab, and Associate Professor of Communication Design and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design
• Cate Owren, Program Director, Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO)
• Henry Weingarten, Managing Director of The Astrologers Fund
• Robert Wosnitzer, Research Fellow, Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University
• Margaret R. Zellner, Ph.D., L.P., psychoanalyst and behavioral neuroscientist

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