We’re delighted to announce a collaboration between the Long Time Project, the RSA’s Regenerative Future’s programme and the Serpentine Gallery on a series of online events exploring long termism. 2020 is a poignant reminder that we need longer-term thinking now to tackle the existential risks we face and create a better world for future generations.
The Long Time Sessions is a fortnightly Zoom talk series on cultivating care for the world beyond our lifetimes. It will bring together leading thinkers and doers from art, culture, philosophy, science, technology, law, finance and politics to take a longer view. Speakers will explore how engaging with the long-term can change the way we act in the short term.
More session details will be added over the coming weeks and will continue into the autumn.
9th July: Deep Time Culture: Future Art Ecosystems
Thursday 9th July marks the inaugural event in the Long Time Sessions, as well as the launch of the Serpentine’s report, Future Art Ecosystems on Art and Advanced Technologies (FAE: AxAT), co-produced with Rival Strategy. On the occasion of The Long Time Sessions, FAE collaborators, Ece Tankal and Carmen Aguilar y Wedge of Hyphen-Labs, Marta Ferreira de Sá of Rival Strategy and curator Julia Kaganskiy discuss strategies for long-termism and the development of artist-led deep time culture, technologies and policies, with Serpentine CTO Ben Vickers.
23rd July: Timefulness
Marcia Bjornerud in conversation with Ella Saltmarshe. In this session geologist Marcia Bjornerud, author of Timefulness, will discuss why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survival. Her work explores how knowing the rhythms of Earth’s deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does, can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future.
3rd September: Existential Risk & The Future of Humanity
In the twentieth century, we developed the means to destroy ourselves - without developing the moral framework to ensure we won't. This is what moral philosopher Toby Ord calls the Precipice, and how we respond to it will be the most crucial decision of our time.
In this session, Toby Ord will be in conversation with Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA. They will explore the risks to humanity's future, from the familiar human-created threats of climate change and nuclear war, to more unfamiliar threats from engineered pandemics and advanced artificial intelligence.
1st October: Whose Futures?
In this event speakers from across the world will look at the ways that present-day inequalities get projected into futures; explore issues of decolonising the future and ask who has access to shaping and imagining futures.
Speakers include:
Designer and futurist, Anab Jain
UK Publisher, Bibi Bakare Yusuf,
Nigeria Linguist, writer, translator, human rights activist and Ayuujk researcher Yasnaya Elena Aguilar
Mexico Artist and activist, Shilo Shiv Suleman
India Filmmaker and human rights activist, Carolina Coppel, Mexico
29th October: Art & the Distant Edges of Time
Katie Paterson in conversation with Ella Saltmarshe.
Katie Paterson is one of the leading artists of her generation. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, her work considers our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. She has created projects like All the Dead Stars that maps 27,000 dead stars and Future Library, a newly planted forest of 1,000 trees near Oslo will be tended for 100 years. Each year, an author writes a book and gives it to the library to be buried. The first was Margaret Atwood; the latest is South Korean Han Kang. In 2114, the trees will be harvested to print and reveal Paterson’s anthology of 100 books.
In this session Katie will explore her art and the distant edges of time.
