A fortnightly online talk series on cultivating care for the world beyond our lifetimes.
2020 is a poignant reminder that we need longer-term thinking now to tackle the existential risks we face and create a better world for future generations.
The Long Time Sessions is a fortnightly online talk series on cultivating care for the world beyond our lifetimes. It will bring together leading thinkers and doers from art, culture, philosophy, science, technology, law, finance and politics to take a longer view. Speakers will explore how engaging with the long-term can change the way we act in the short term.
The Long Time Sessions are organised by The Long Time Project, in collaboration with the RSA and the General Ecology Network at the Serpentine Galleries.
These sessions are recorded – click the tabs below to watch.
- The Long Time Sessions: Deep Time Culture: Future Art Ecosystems
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Thursday 9th July marked the inaugural event in the Long Time Sessions, as well as the launch of the Serpentine’s report, Future Art Ecosystems on Art and Advanced Technologies (FAE: AxAT), co-produced with Rival Strategy. On the occasion of The Long Time Sessions, FAE collaborators, Ece Tankal and Carmen Aguilar y Wedge of Hyphen-Labs, Marta Ferreira de Sá of Rival Strategy and curator Julia Kaganskiy discuss strategies for long-termism and the development of artist-led deep time culture, technologies and policies, with Serpentine CTO Ben Vickers.
The Long Time Sessions: Deep Time Culture: Future Art Ecosystems
- The Long Time Sessions: Timefulness: Deep Time & Geological Thinking
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Thursday 23rd July, 1pm
In this, the second session, geologist Marcia Bjornerud, author of Timefulness: How Thinking like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, will discuss how an awareness of Earth’s temporal rhythms might be critical for planetary survival. Bjornerud’s work explores how knowing the rhythms of Earth’s deep past – and conceiving of time in the way a geologist does – can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future. For this session, Bjornerud will be in conversation with The Long Time Project co-founder, Ella Saltmarshe.The Long Time Sessions: Timefulness: Deep Time & Geological Thinking
- The Long Time Sessions: Toby Ord on Existential Risk & the Future of Humanity
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Thursday 3rd September, 1pm
In this third session, moral philosopher Toby Ord will be in conversation with Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, to discuss the risks to humanity’s future, from the familiar, human-generated threats of climate change and nuclear war, to more unfamiliar threats such as engineered pandemics and advanced artificial intelligence.The Long Time Sessions: Toby Ord on Existential Risk & the Future of Humanity
- The Long Time Sessions: Operationalising Long-Termism, with Roman Krznaric, Sophie Howe and Indy Johar
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Thursday 17 September, 1pm
In the fourth event in The Long Time Sessions, we will hear from practitioners whose work is reorienting our politics, cultures and economies to account for future generations. Participants to this sessions include Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor; Sophie Howe, Future Generations Commissioner for Wales and Indy Johar, Founding Director, Dark Matter Labs. The conversation is moderated by Ella Saltmarshe, Co-Founder, The Long Time Project. - The Long Time Sessions: Whose Futures?
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Thursday 1 October, 1pm
In the fifth event in The Long Time Sessions, speakers from around the world will look at the ways that present-day inequalities get projected into futures; explore issues of decolonising the future and ask who has access to shaping and imagining futures. Participants include:writer and activist Yasnaya Elena Aguilar, publisher Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, filmmaker and activist Caterina Coppel, designer and futurist Anab Jain (Superflux) and artist and activist Shilo Shiv Suleman. - The Long Time Sessions: Art and the Distant Edges of Time
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Thursday 29 October, 1pm
In the seventh session, artist Katie Paterson, whose work considers our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change, discusses her practice and cultures of long-termism with The Long Time Project’s co-founder, Ella Saltmarshe.
