A few intrepid artists from the Future Migration exhibition have traveled to the future and brought back with them materials to help us envision what is to come. Their score of future booty includes digital archives of a synthetic-human soap opera, images of objects and environments, as well as a ghostly atomic priest. One of our dedicated artists even went so far as to kidnap a deep future historian (not that we condone this sort of thing at Proteus Gowanus and we will not be responsible for any resulting rifts in the time-space continuum) to tell us about the follies we will be making.

Our brave artists include:
Christina Corfield
Bryan Wilson
Eric Petitti
Donald Dedalus

Please join us for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel beyond the mists of prophecy into a completely true and accurate account of the future from people who have been there themselves. It will be a night to tell your grandkids about (and who knows, perhaps their grandkids’ grandkids’ grandkid is our kidnapped historian himself).

Join anthropologist Thomas R. Miller in a multimedia experience, “People Who Talk With Birds: Siberian Shamans in the Future Past.”

Siberian shamans are time-travellers and shape-shifters, moving across worlds and forms in the course of ceremonial healing and divination rituals. Through sensory mediation, Miller tracks their migrations and transformations between polarities of human-not human, animal-not animal, spirit-nature, living-not living, and past-future. Based on 20 years of Miller’s archival and field research, this multimedia presentation includes descriptions, interviews, oral testimony, images, film, and multichannel sounds from the first ethnographic wax-cylinder recordings to contemporary montage.

Thomas Ross Miller, Ph.D. is an independent curator, scholar, and media installation artist from Brooklyn. He holds degrees in Anthropology from Columbia University and Music from Wesleyan University, and teaches at Berkeley College and NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His specialties include visual anthropology, sound studies, museology, shamanism, and ethnohistory. A former staff member and Guest Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, he has been a visiting professor at Pratt Institute, Rutgers University, and Drew University. He recently completed research and teaching residencies at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany and the Museum Studies graduate program at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík.

On Sunday, join the Multispecies Salon host, anthropologist Eben Kirksey, for the second in our three-part discussion series exploring what happens when the natural and the human-generated meet. This question hovers over the Future Migration exhibition currently on view at Proteus Gowanus and, in this next session, Eben invites consideration of a central question:

“In the aftermath of disasters—in blasted landscapes that have been transformed by multiple catastrophes—what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?”

The Multispecies Salon, a resident project hosted by Eben at Proteus this Spring, has been a site where thinkers and tinkerers—culture workers who are deeply implicated in sweeping political, economic, and ecological transformations—have cautiously explored future horizons in the wake of recent disasters. We will discuss artworks in the exhibit that ground imaginings about elusive futures in actual biocultural becomings.

Printed copies of Eben Kirksey’s freshly written essay, “Hope in Blasted Landscapes”, will be distributed at the event.

Join us for the opening reception of the third exhibition of the Migration year: FUTURE MIGRATION, an exploration of the possibilities and predicaments of life in the anthropocene future.  Proteus Gowanus brings together artists, scientists, and visionaries in an exhibition of art, artifacts, and books, as well as talks, film and other events that consider where we are headed in our continual migrations toward the unknown. What sorts of resources will be preserved or invented to allow life on this planet to continue? Will Earth always be home or will we look out into the galaxy to find new and alternative solutions in the stars? Will we continue to exist as natural beings or will our technologies lead us to a new definition of what it means to be human?

Artist Krista Dragomer is co-curator of the  exhibition.

Bryan M Wilson, Monument to the Future

Participants include: Indrani Ashe, Scott Billings, Kevin Clement, Elizabeth Cope, Donald Daedalus, Eymund Diegel, Krista Dragomer and Rashin Fahandej, Sarah Edkins, David Eustace, Peter Fend, Rebecca Heritage, Rita London,  Beatrice Marovich, Elisabeth Pellathy, Eric Pettiti, Deanna Pindell, Debra Tillinger, Emily Tobey, Barbara Westermann, Bryan Wilson, Sen-I Yu.

Concurrently, for our third residency of the Migration year, we are delighted to welcome, as Anthropologist-In-Residence,  Eben Kirksey and his collaborators with the Multi-Species Salon. They will work in text, conversation and installation, with media ranging from wool fiber to amphibians to moss–questioning human entanglement with plants, microbes, and animals and to develop art/projects intended to help us think about living with and in a multispecies worlds. Their particular concern is finding hope in Blasted Landscapes.

In addition, as part of Future Migration, we welcome THE FOOL’S JOURNEY, a corollary exhibition on our shelves curated by our friends from Curious Matter in Jersey City, NJ. In the Tarot, The Fool symbolizes the beginning of a journey. He sets off to explore without knowing what lies ahead. He isn’t a fool in the sense of a buffoon, rather one who proceeds on an adventure in spite of his lack of experience. To confront the unknown; the accumulation of knowledge; transformation from ignorance to wisdom; moving from one place to another, whether physical or psychical, are aspects of The Fool’s Journey.

Artists participating in The Fool’s Journey at  Proteus include: Fanny Allié, Lasse Antonsen, Louise Barry, Angela S. Beallor, Joseph Cavalieri, Gail Goldsmith, Ian Addison Hall, Joe Lugara, Marianne McCarthy, Anatoli Savov Monov, R. Wayne Parsons, Sarah Gl Sharp, Melissa A. Stern, Claire Watson, Katarina Wong.