Fantastic Futures

Our collective, Fantastic Futures is a collaborative team of students, artists, doctors, and future leaders from Iraq and the United States. For our recently completed Rhizome Commission, we created a free and open online sound archive that examines concepts of time through the recording, collaging, and sharing of sounds between these two countries. As we are faced with huge questions about their future, the website serves as a platform to subvert unjust structures of power used to divide us by instead supporting each other and offering a means through which our stories might be heard. Our goal is nothing short of social justice and the means of achieving that are slow, steady, and subversively poetic. For the performance event, which took place in the New Museum Theater this past fall, we created a participatory performance of the website, enacted by humans wearing sounds. To further explore shared experiences of time, memory, and trauma between countries in conflict, audience member

 

About the Artists

Fantastic Futures is a collective that began two years ago as a group of about 20 artists, designers, students, doctors, and activists from Iraq and the U.S. This project developed from conversations about the importance of sharing stories and collectively envisioning the future. To that end, the group created an interactive sound archive (www.fantasticfutures.fm) through which they could collect and share sounds from different locations and collage them together to form chance-based compositions. Since then, wehave created a collaborative performance which we presented at the New Museum and are currently (as part of the iLAND residency) collaborating with scientist Jason Munshi-South and movement-based artist Sonia Finley to 1 investigate the biodiversity and history of Queens Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (as the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs and temporary site of the UN) and current changes around its use as a public space.

http://fantasticfutures.fm/