Your Future Now is a participatory performance project. Members of the public have their future foretold by five professionals who deal in prognosis. C-LAB is the venue for the project. This historical venue becomes the place the future is told. Presented as a sequence of one-to-one interactions, participants have their destiny revealed through professional consultations.

29th-31st January 2021, 5th-7th February 2021
Art Space I, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB)
No. 177, Sec. 1, Jianguo S. Rd., Da’an Dist., Taipei City 106, Taiwan

– The performances will be held in Chinese.
– A ticket is required to attend the performance as a participant that receives the prognoses.
– Art Space I, C-LAB is open to the public to visit 11:00-20:00 during performance days.

Book at Ticket

Produced by Prototype Paradise, Taiwan
Hosted by Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab
Supervised by Ministry of Culture, Taiwan

Originally conceived by Joshua Sofaer
Developed by Yoyo Kung and Joshua Sofaer
Hosts: Corinne Hsiao, Yue Su, Yuan-liang An
Expert Prognosticators: Alex Liu, A.Y. Lee, Cecilia Chang, Chiao-mei Lin, Ed, Huai-hsuan Chen, Hsiu-lin Ku, Rome, Zoe Ou
Producer: Yoyo Kung
Expert-Prognosticator Coordinator: Corinne Hsiao
Production Assistant and Observing Writer: Yu-chun Chen
Publicity and Events Officer: Jou-chien Lai
C-Lab Stories Editor: Ya-feng Mon
Subtitles Editor: Ya-feng Mon
Technical Coordinator and Lighting Designer: Ya-chuan Tsou
Stage Designer: Yu-quan Lin
Roundtable Camera Mechanic: Liang Wang
Video Software Technician: Wei-chi Lin
Music Designer: Ching-shu Huang
On-site Crew: Wei-chi Lin
Key Visual Illustrator: Chia-chi Yu
Graphic Designer: Cath Ko
Prototype Paradise Webpage Designer: Weslee Chuang

POINT OF DEPARTURE
Expert opinion rates human extinction by 2100 at 20%.* That seems remarkably high: global warming, nuclear war, untreatable infection. We are familiar with these risks. Taiwan is aware of the threat from the awesome power of nature, aggression from supranational powers warmongering, the risk to the population from uncontrolled viral contamination.

It is sometimes easy to be lost in the magnitude of this global entropy. What can we as individuals do? How do we map these larger concerns onto the future of our city, our street, our daily lives and the lives of those we love?

Your Future Now predicts the future of the audience in a series of one-to-one interactions. It is a performance that unfolds over the course of the lifetime of those that attend, attempting to reclaim individual experience in the morass of global politics and environmental concerns.

In terms of the speech act (as proposed and defined by J L Austin**), the prediction is an utterance that performs. Alongside utterances that are requests, warnings, invitations, promises, and apologies, the act of prediction puts into play a kind of contract. But do you want to know? And if you have the prediction, what do you do with it? Do you believe it? Do you try and change it?

Your Future Now is not an entertainment. It puts the audience in an awkward position. It asks the audience to think beyond the immediate and to consider how they take responsibility for their own future and the world around them.

In a world of increasing threats, with a 1 in 5 chance of human extinction in the life time of our children, we urgently have to think ahead.

*The Inquiry: Will humans become extinct by the end of the Century? BBC World Service Monday 6 January 2020.
**Austin, J.L., 1962. How To Do Things With Words, 2nd Edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and M. Sbisá. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

OTHER EVENTS
工作坊 Workshop
讓我們一起實踐新年新氣象！
Let’s make our New Year resolutions come true!
23rd January 2021 2pm-5pm, C-LAB, Taipei

公開講座 Public Talk
我們為什麼要「參與」？
​談參與式藝術的社會意義
Why participation?
​Social interaction in participatory art.
4th February 2021 7pm, Art Space 1 (Grey Box), C-LAB, Taipei

For more information and to book a FREE place, visit Prototype Paradise.