The public addresses what the future looks like. On September 21, 2014 we installed a 3,500 pound ice sculpture of the words The Future at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 23 Street in New York. This video is a sample of some of the public’s reactions to it.

“When you begin to witness the rapid changes occurring on the planet, rising temperatures, increasing droughts, the extinction of vast numbers of species, you think about loss and disappearance,” Marshall Reese says. “Ice is the perfect material for bringing awareness of what that kind of change means.”

We call the piece ‘Dawn of the Anthropocene’ to describe the effect of humanity on the Earth’s systems. The term comes from Nobel prize scientist Paul Crutzen. In his and other scientists’ view, humanity has entered an age when the power and impact of humans is as great, if not greater, than nature’s.

Sculpture Design – Nora Ligorano; Cinematographer – Ben Wolf; Editor – Marshall Reese; Music – Tree Laboratory; Ice Sculpture – Okamoto Studio

For more information:
Sound design: Tree Laboratory
Climate Action partner: 350.org

This is a collection of Twitter feeds from The Future during the planning and preparation for the launch of the project, including posts from the day of.

Here at the Flatiron – building the Future with Regen, Luke, Shintaro, Nica and Libby.

We will unveil the sculpture at 10 AM. Very exciting day and an emotional one.

It’s been hard to wrap our heads around the seriousness of this action – melting the future.

Carving F at Okomato Studio

In many ways our present is future to the past.

The changes we’re seeing in our world stem from the rapid growth and expansive trade during the post-war era. Predictabilty of seasons and climate has lost its validity as the weather turns anew. Much of this unpredicatability is based on past human actions driven by deforestation, industrialization, pollution and population growth.

What is the future from such a vantage point – how can we, as artists, stage a symbolic action to encompass the idea of change? Even of thinking that the future may be lost? For many years, we’ve made artworks with extended duration and open form. These pieces can last several hours and even though they have a beginning and end, they have an ability to be open.

In the case of the ice sculptures, they go through an incredible metamorphosis from solid to liquid. We know they will disappear, but we don’t know how they will do that. What letters will vanish first or even the length of time it will take for them to melt away. They have an astounding sense of physicality, which much of us in our daily lives are largely divorced from; they have weight and scale, temperature and a sense of fragility.

Since they exist in time, there’s the need to capture their transformation and for that we use video, digital photography and other tools. The question remains: how do we enlarge their presence? How do we expand the socius of the sculpture to other audiences?

Inspired by Nam June Paik’s live TV and the pioneers of video art with closed-circuit video systems, today we’re using the internet and streaming to recapture and transmit the live event – the disappearance of the future.