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Un-Estranging the Future
- Leonardo
- The MIT Press
- Pre-Print Articles, Vol. 51, no. 3
- Article
- Additional Information
230 Leonardo Gallery Scientific Delirium Madness 4.0 Gallery Un-Estranging the Future Ken Eklund Some places seem timeless, but not Djerassi. Here the divide is thin between what was and what is to be, as though everything is present, stretching out of sight in every direction. Glance back as the loggers fell the redwoods and the rancher clears the brush for cattle; look ahead as the coyote brush swallows the ruin of the last artwork and the eucalyptus marches in like Birnham Wood. The future is a strange place; we will never live there; it ever recedes from our view; yet it is no mirage. Has it ever been as estranged from us as it is now? We seem to live in the crooked castle built by King Midas and Doctor Frankenstein , where our every touch spawns more monsters to boomerang back at us. When we look to the future, we see monsters. At Djerassi two (three) of us looked to un-estrange the future. Katharine (and dancer Elizabeth Chitty) took its hand and danced with it, a marvelous intimate way to get to know any stranger. As for me, I played a game with the future, a storytelling game like you might play with puppets . What if Money loosened her death grip on Work? Can Ocean and Sky revive ailing Soil? What if Love sur renders to the Unknown? What would these futures look like? Which ones do we want to live in? That is the game we play. Meanwhile the sky grows dark and the fog creeps in. The deer bed down next to my cabin, while cougars and coyotes in the brush bide their time, dreaming of tigerdom and wolfdom, dancing a dance and playing a game of their own. Ken Eklund Email: Katharine Hawthorne planning dance work Between the Wish and the Thing, 2017. (Photo © Ken Eklund) Ken Eklund, Clockwork World, Human Hands, a game as theater by four character tree–mannikins. (© Ken Eklund) 271 ppi at this size ...