Equal parts Conference, Festival and an immersive ArtScience event, The Science of Fiction from USC’s World Building Institute brings together thought leaders and cutting-edge storytellers for an extended act of collaborative world building. In 2014, 300 attendees explored the fictional city of Rilao and its history, systems, cultures, and tribes, and together they created 1000 stories and 200 artifacts in a single day, making Rilao a deep, wonderful, fully-realized world.
We are delighted to announce a new partnership between the World Building Institute and the Buckminster Fuller Institute when, in October 2016, our connected community turns its focus to the real world for Science of Fiction III: Spaceship Earth 2036.
In his 1968 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, R. Buckminster Fuller compared the Earth’s resources to those of a spaceship and its inhabitants to astronauts that must cooperate to survive. Unfortunately, as Fuller noted, “an instruction manual didn’t come with it.” Nearly fifty years later the speed of both technological advancement and resource depletion has become disorienting, the alarms are sounding on our spaceship, and now more than ever we need that missing manual.
Science of Fiction III: Spaceship Earth 2036 will assemble experts from 7 to 70, from every discipline and from industry and academia, to examine the interconnected ecosystems of the Ocean, the Shoreline, the City, the Forest, and the Desert, as well as the interconnected disruptors of pollution, urbanization, agriculture, climate change, rising sea level, and shifting population, through the rigorous and highly-focused lens of storytelling. In collaboration with the Buckminster Fuller Institute, we will employ Fiction as a powerful tool to reimagine our planetary home, revisit the Manual, and, most importantly, plot out paths to real, tangible near-term outcomes to chart the course to 2036.
Join us in creating the new stories of our living spaceship, in developing the narrative platforms that will convey them, and in building the essential outcomes for our future.
Updates and ticket information will be posted to the website as it becomes available. Event sponsorship opportunities are also available; please email us for more information.