From inside the stillness of lockdown, we used The Hologram’s viral healthcare system to make a space for radical planning for the post-pandemic futures we wanted. In this Live Action Role-Play, or LARP, 12 people made contact with who they would become, individually and collectively, by 2050. In this immersive game participants played characters based on the most powerful and well-supported version of themselves. They time travelled 30 years in three weeks to enact their survival and thriving through multiple emergencies and crises. Human systems collapsed and reformed, in the wake of social upheavals borne of entrenched colonialism and racism and environmental crises. Capitalism ended.
We were made for this // 2050 Fugitive Planning
12 people participated in a series of 3 online events as part of a Live Action Role-Play.
The documentation will be used to generate a sci-fi trailer to inspire future Hologrammers
The Hologram LARP was co-created by Cassie, Lita, Ruth, Magda, Melanie, Shawn, Alessandra, Maggie, Lauren, Stella, Katrine, Darcey, Lyra, Lara and Tamara.
The Hologram is a viral four-person health monitoring and diagnostic system practiced from couches all over the world. Three non-expert participants create a three-dimensional “hologram” of a fourth participant’s physical, psychological and social health, and each becomes, the focus of three other people’s care in an expanding network.
The Hologram is supported by Furtherfield and CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.
In a series of six online sessions we practice and discuss the social skills, values, and priorities that are central to the Hologram model. Each person leaves the course empowered to assemble and participate in their own Hologram.
Pragmatics: six consecutive Tuesdays, starting September 8 and finishing on October 20th. 6-9pm London Time, [1-4pm Thunder Bay (Eastern Standard Time)], and [1-4am Singapore Time], on Zoom.
The course is fully booked but find out here how you can get involved.
The Hologram is a mythoreal viral distribution system for non-expert healthcare, practiced from couches around the world. The premise is simple: three people – the ‘Triangle’ – meet on a regular basis, digitally or in person, to focus on the physical, mental and social health of a fourth – the ‘Hologram’. The Hologram, in turn, teaches these listeners how to give and also receive care. When they are ready, the Hologram will support them to each set up their own triangle, and so the system expands. This social technology is based on the experimental care models developed in the Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the height of the financial and migration crisis. The result is the construction of a robust multidimensional health network, collectively-oriented social practices, and trust that can outlive capitalism. Its protocol ensures that all caretakers are cared for, and regards properly supporting someone else’s wellbeing as therapeutic in itself.
In the second ever Hologram course, people from all over the world are invited to study and practice what it means to ask for help. In We Must Begin Again: Asking for help as a new world, participants will be guided through a process to remember together why and how to ask for support, and how to ensure that our supporters are supported.
As the racist, capitalist and patriarchal world crumbles around us, we invite people to design long-lasting systems for support and solidarity that can ensure that our species can outlast the coming social, economic and planetary emergencies. Participants in the course will experiment with how to organize and value the support they need to survive and thrive in the coming new world. We believe that destruction is making space for new beginnings and that we have no choice but to begin again. We see asking for help as a way of coming into a new world with humility, curiosity and interdependence with all beings.
We want to work together with you to remind ourselves what we have been forced to forget: how to be a cooperative, interdependent species. In this project, the person who articulates their needs and asks for support can take us to a whole new world.
Contact cooperativespecies@gmail.com if you need any further information or assistance.
Apply to join the course here.
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her new book is available from Pluto Press called The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future. She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social centre at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.
Lita Wallis is a youth worker, organiser, and informal educator based in London. Whether in work or her personal life, Lita has spent much of her time experimenting with different shapes of supportive relationships (eg. cooperatives, triangles, flows and webs.) She is still working on ways to build sustainable support networks that challenge isolating social norms, and then how to commit to them in a social context that is so hostile to putting down roots. Four years ago she and two friends made a lifelong commitment to The Tripod, a platonic support system, which aims to provide much of the financial, emotional and housing support that many people end up relying on couple relationships for. She hopes to bring some learning from this experience, plus some seeds of inspiration from her work with young people and her avid sci-fi habit, to set founding Hologram members fourth in good stead.
This course is supported by Furtherfield and CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.
Artist Cassie Thornton, of the Feminist Economics Department (the FED), will discuss The Hologram, a mythoreal collective peer-to-peer health project currently incubating at Furtherfield Gallery in London.
The Hologram, based on the understanding that all our crises are connected and everyone is a little sick, is a viral four-person health monitoring and diagnostic system practiced from couches all over the world.
Three non-expert participants create a three-dimensional “hologram” of a fourth participant’s physical, psychological and social health, and each becomes, in turn, the focus of three other people’s care in an expanding network.
This health distribution system is based on the experimental care models developed in the Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the height of the financial and migration crisis. The result is the construction of a robust network of multi-dimensional health, collectively oriented social practices, and trust that can outlive racial capitalism.
The presentation will be followed by a discussion of themes and topics. We welcome artists, healers, activists and system builders with an interest in alternative infrastructures and care as an act of resistance.
Please note The Hologram talk and workshops are now taking place online due to pandemic restrictions. Contact info@furtherfield.org if you need any further information or assistance.
About the artist
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). She has worked in close collaboration with freelance curators and producers including Taraneh Fazeli, Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova, Dani Admiss, Amanda Nudelman, Misha Rabinovich, Caitlin Foley and Laurel Ptak. Her projects, invited and uninvited, have appeared at (or in collaboration with) Transmediale Festival for Media Arts, San Francisco MoMA, West Den Haag, Moneylab, Swissnex San Francisco, Pro Arts Gallery & Commons, Dream Farm Commons, Furtherfield, Gallery 400, Strike Debt Bay Area, Red Bull Detroit, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Flux Factory, Bemis Center for the Arts, Berliner Gazette and more.
The Hologram is part of Furtherfield’s three-year Citizen Sci-Fi programme crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
2020 is the year of Love Machines, nurturing living and machine systems for mutual care and respect on earth and beyond.
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