Those of you who attended the AAM annual meeting this spring may have stumbled upon a curious exhibit in MuseumExpo—a set of cases (generously lent by Gaylord) filled with artifacts documenting the time travel expeditions of the Pinky Show cats.
You may be familiar with Kim’s interest in museums (documented in this wickedly accurate Pinky Show episode.) These recent expeditions resulted from Kim’s desire to see how museums develop in the future. While not formally trained in futurism, the cats caught on fast to the fundamental principles of our practice:
“One of the things we noticed when we first started time-traveling” reports Pinky, “was that often there seemed to be no obvious connections between the various moments-in-time we visited. In fact, many of the futures we experienced seemed wildly different – sometimes even apparently ‘opposite’ – from each other, even when separated by only a few years. We later learned … that the reason for this is that the future, as it relates to the present, only exists as an infinite array of possibilities fanning outward.”
Cone of Plausability |
This is great description of what futurists call the Cone of Plausibility (depicting the range of possible futures diverging from the present.)
There are many ways to explore the future, and this was a pretty interesting experiment. I hope you check out the report—as Pinky says, “perhaps the diversity of artifacts presented here will serve as a reminder that a positive future can only be what we are willing to desire and fight for.”
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