As a company member with Theater Mitu, Alex Hawthorn co-authored their 2021 piece, Utopian Hotline, which was borne from the question: “how do you imagine a more perfect future?” They interviewed everyone from philosophers to schoolchildren and, in partnership with SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative, astronauts, physicists, and futurists. To collect a wider array of responses, we set up a telephone number so that people could leave us voicemails about how they imagined a more perfect future. The resulting research became a performance, an installation, an album, and a digital archive.  The piece is currently touring as an installation and performance, and the phone number is still active, collecting voicemails, adding to the archive.

‍

Alex will share images, video, and audio from the performance while talking about the process of creating the piece from a growing archive. Alex will explore how disparate voices from around the globe can contribute equally to an archive and how difference in opinion or outlook doesn’t make the archive weaker but in fact creates a more potent space for co-imagining and co-creating our more perfect future. Far from the billionaires funding private missions to Mars, what do the thinkers and dreamers of today have to say about our possible futures? And how can we take an active role in choosing our future?

‍