Play-back, play-forward

What are the ways of engaging histories that can help build capacities for radical imagination and action today? How can we elucidate the present and create potentialities for the future through activation of the past? I would like to invite others to swap forms, approaches and practices of knowing. In particular, I am interested in examples of practices that are embodied and shared.

My own examples come from working with BLW, and artist collective that develops workshops for the memorization and public recitation (re-speaking, re-enactment) of significant moments in the history of radical media in the US. BLW considers the role of media in radical practices: how do video recordings, or other new media, act as repository for memory and/or vehicle for interjection. Can we, through an embodied recitation, give this act of “play back” a different outcome? We have recently also begun to develop participatory and public forms of “playing the future”, by helping to form the Philadelphia Coalition of Inquiry into the State of the Future. The Coalition's investigation utilizes the The Public Hearing as a form for recalling/summoning/conjuring the future.