Perchance to Dream
A thought experiment opens to envision futures for the distressed Kennedy Center
“To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…”
As we approach the President's deadline for the Kennedy Center's temporary closure tomorrow, and as our courageous colleagues continue their fight to reverse the Administration's damaging and unnecssary direction…
…Over 80 volunteers, including many Kennedy Center alumni, have coordinated to begin the process of creating a platform for Americans and international friends to dream, voraciously, about possible futures for our national cultural center -- in "exile" during this period of tumult, and, ultimately, at its rightful home on the Potomac when it is restored to capable and visionary leadership.
We invite you to join this effort -- to help usher a conversation about the future of the Kennedy Center and, indeed, how the concept of "national cultural center" might expand beyond its walls.
Nothing can replace the loss ushered by the Kennedy Center's unnecessary closure.
But, today's mess does provide opportunity to develop a temporary, open-source, uncurated digital space where Americans can collaborate - through imagery, text, simulations, video, code, dialogue, animation, music, or any other digital media - to co-create, debate, and straw man possible futures for our national cultural center.
This effort will build a minecraft-style environment (for lack of a better digital analogy...) where interested Americans and international friends can propose and negotiate new possible futures - for a period, at least, without constraint of the physical world - and make something positive, creative, and perhaps visionary from today's rubble.
Perhaps this exercise will help prepare conceptual ground for the physical Center's rebirth.
Perhaps it births dramatically new ideas about how to think of "national cultural center".
If you are interested, a first meeting will take place later this month. Register your interest here.
Note: This is a personal initiative, not an initiative of the DeVos Institute.
