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The Museum of the Future is a telephone voice mail project. Listeners
are encouraged to call our voice mail system, where they can explore
concepts of the future by accessing narratives, interviews, theories,
information and sound bites related to the shifting perceptions of the
future.
We feature narratives that deconstruct the desires that drive utopian
fantasy-desires for immortality, colonization, increased profit
margins, and how these issues develop in relation to technological
exploration. As we approach the year 2000, speculation about the next
millennia reaches a fever pitch. You are invited to share your ideas
about the future.
An excerpt:
"First
of all 140 years from now, no one is going to speak English in the
U.S., but probably not any other language either, other than a series
of grunts an probably hand signals, but it?ll be ok because people
won?t be using the phone they?ll just use a video phone, virtual
video-phone-thing.
...If there was World Peace all over the
place, you wouldn?t have a Peace Party, you?d have a War Party that
would want to return to the old days, or start new wars in order to
make things interesting. We probably could eliminate war, but we?ll
never be able to eliminate anxiety which you can tell from the fact
that we haven?t had a World War in over 50 years and people are still
anxious about war in spite of the fact that there are fewer wars going
on now than there were 20 years ago and I think fewer than then there
were 20 years before that. So in terms of percentage of a warring
population, the percentage of people at war or effected by war is
probably constantly getting reduced throughout history. It gets
smaller and smaller, yet none the less people get more and more anxious
about war. So I think in 140 years if there was even one little tiny
war somewhere, everyone would be upset about that little tiny war. And
finally it will get down to the point where there is no war at all, but
people will have to be anxious that one child is sick with a cold or
something, because once we eliminate disease, we eliminate hunger, we
eliminate war, we eliminate all these terrible things that plague
mankind, we?ll have to become anxious that we are not in outer space,
or that we are not living on the planet Jupiter or that we haven?t
eliminated death. We?ll still be upset. And the newspaper will be full
of horrible bad news like: ?Child Falls Down and Bruises Self.? -Michael Peppe, San Francisco-based performance artist
Medium: telephone, voicemail system on computer, flyers, graphics Date: 1996-97
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