The past futures of Howard Rheingold at the Institute for the Future

My art-making always has been a subconscious divination ritual that I’ve invoked in parallel with the rational techno-social forecasting I have done for fifty years. Institute for the Future was the perfect place to juxtapose my heretofore private art with my public future forecasting. It turns out that when you look at these twin strands of my work over my career, a strong theme emerges: mind amplifiers and consciousness exploration. The artist’s statement I wrote for the IFTF show turned into a full artobiography on Medium. An illustrated, truncated version was created by IFTF as a catalog for the show. On opening night in February, 2017, my daughter introduced me, I said a few words, then Stanford Communication Department Chair Fred Turner and I had a public conversation about my odd position as the public intellectual equivalent of an outsider artist. Fabrice Florin recorded a video of that An Evening with Howard Rheingold