Join us for an evening of discussion thinking about how the art and culture around deep time, palaeontology and related subjects can (and can’t) help us engage with the current world.

In our current moment, there are many acute senses of crisis. From climate breakdown, to biodiversity loss, international conflict, and turbulence in the economy, culture and politics, a number of overlapping challenges face us. Engaging with these requires new modes of thinking and imagining, and connecting different scales, processes and possible futures.

Can deep time and the lost worlds of prehistory and palaeontology help us? These fields show that our world is not the first one, and that many issues we are dealing with have roots going back into timescales that defy human imaginations. To understand deep time and its implications, we need science, but we also need art and creativity. So it is not surprising that in recent decades, we have seen an upsurge of ‘palaeomedia’ – art recreating extinct animals and their environments, writing which imaginatively ventures back into the deep past (and how we know about it), television showing evolution and life’s history through CGI and animation, and video games where an individual can interact with digital recreations of the deep past and extinct organisms. All of these give ways of approaching deep time, and thinking about how it might connect to our current world.

In this one evening of discussion, a number of leading artists and creatives will think about how the cultural value of palaeontology can relate to bigger concerns. How do deep time and palaeontological perspectives change the way we can think about, and engage with, our current situation? How can deep time help us imagine possible futures, as well as ancient pasts? And are there any dangers of focussing on deep time, when we are trying to understand our human timeframes?

Chair: Jamie Perera

Panelists: Jay Balamurugan, Emy Moss, Elsa Panciroli and Mark Witton