celebrate the changing of our north star
In the not so distant future, the night skies overhead will look decidedly different. By the end of the next millennium we’ll have a new North Star. Because of a lesser-known phenomenon called Axial Precession, our Polar Star is perpetually in slow transition.
Like everything else in the world—and in our lives—our North Star changes.
Given our propensity for star parties (New Year’s Eve marks another rotation around our closest star, after all) and the planetary challenges humans will be facing in the coming centuries, welcoming our next North Star will be cause for quite the celebration. This speculation leads to a flurry of questions: What would an event of that significance look like? Will there be special songs? Dances? Snacks? Who will plan it? When will they start?
What if it’s… us?
And what if we were to start now?
And perhaps most importantly:
What do we need to rEPAIR AND PREPARE IN THE PRESENT before we can host the future?
For the last few years American artist George Ferrandi has been uniting scientists, musicians, artists and arts organizations to collaborate with communities around the country in the invention of an answer to the question:
How on Earth will we say goodbye to Polaris—the light that has guided us for hundreds of years, leading ships to shore and enslaved people to freedom?
George Ferrandi's rendering of Earth's anticipated future pole stars.
*** JUMP!STAR has gotten a major jump start thanks to the generous support of the Japan-US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.
George is developing the interdisciplinary initiative Jump!Star so that communities can ritualize how future generations might say goodbye to Polaris and hello to our next pole star, Gamma Cephei. For the last several years, with the support of a National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant and organizational partners in several cities, Jump!Star been hosting a series of themed dream-storming sessions called “Constellates,” which focus on the changing North Star as a way to engage in thinking deeply about the future and creating cultural customs (songs, dances, food, regalia, ritual objects) to welcome it. This is important because, as adrienne maree brown articulates, “We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.” Jump!Star embraces that responsibility by fore-fronting the role of traditionally excluded people in the invention of future culture, and prioritizing their agency in the reclamation of the futurist narrative.
At its core, the Jump!Star initiative is about recalibrating our relationship with time by asking us to think about it on a much longer scale than we usually do. It asks us to visualize the future and our aspirations for it, allowing us the possibility to reverse-engineer those hopes into active decisions we make today.
Jump!Star gives us the opportunity to imagine the citizens of the next millennia and speculatively celebrate their survival, while being tangibly implicated in it.
why now?
So many reasons…
1. In recent years, it’s understandably become easier for us to imagine the apocalypse than it is to look into the future with hopefulness. And yet if we don’t start working immediately to invent the future we hope for, the one that we will get is horrifically unimaginable. JUMP!STAR asks us to look forward with love to the resilient civilizations of the future, and to take action to ensure them a livable world.
2. From the perspective of a country as young as the United States, 1000 years seems abstract—almost fictional—but there are many countries in the world that have been celebrating festivals and traditions for more than a millennium. These long-running traditions become defining facets of a culture, connecting them to both their ancestors and their descendants.
3. Planning the festivities for an event 1000 years into the future requires thinking less in terms of the human lifespan and more in terms of the planetary and celestial. This kind of temporal paradigm shift is long overdue, and will only benefit the planet at large, as anthropogenic climate change is directly attributable to our disregard for the long-term impacts of our actions.
4. Contemporary technology makes it possible for us to sit in a coffee shop, plug in to nothing at all, and before getting our lattes have real-time conversations with friends on the other side of the planet. We are increasingly a global culture; we should inaugurate a secular global holiday.
5. The rampant success of social media can be regarded, among other things, as a craving for structured interaction. Working with friends new and old on a social project like JUMP!STAR enables meaningful interaction, within a structure that empowers us to create something larger than our individual selves.