The House in the Sky is a series of anaglyph stereoscopic projections that re-create the mid-century modern Los Angeles home of Alfred and Roberta Wohlstetter, both strategists at one of the earliest think tanks, the RAND Corporation. An “atomic Villa Diodati,” as Geoff Manaugh noted, the house was where possible futures were discussed along with the end of the world. Occurring in the 1950s during the Cold War, these conversations presumably dwelled on a future that seemed especially precarious.

Modeled on photographs of the residence taken by Julius Shulman and Leonard McCombe, the videos re-stage these interdisciplinary meetings. In the process, they become a virtual territory in which a site-specific simulation of scattered mylar spheres, readings, and a real-time simulation titled Leibniz Cocktail Conjecture aim to investigate relationships between architecture and critical inquiry, technological acceleration, and our place within history – both in regard to the past as well as our speculative future.

Conversation participants: Laura Ballantyne-Brodie (NYU), Lars Büsing (Google DeepMind), Claire L. Evans (YACHT), Jacob Gaboury (Stony Brook University/Max Planck Institute), Sam Hart (Avant.org/Sloan-Kettering), Janna Levin (Columbia University), Kate Marvel (NASA Goddard Institute), Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College), Oliver Medvedik (Genspace), Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Institute), Kevin Slavin (MIT Media Lab) and Roberta Wohlstetter read by Joan Wohlstetter-Hall as well as contributors Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) and Phillip Stearns.

Sascha Pohflepp (*1978 in Cologne, DE) is an artist and researcher whose work has been known to probe the role of technology in our efforts to understand and influence our environment. His interest extends across both historical aspects and visions of the future and his practice often involves collaboration with other artists and researchers, creating work on subjects ranging from synthetic biology and artificial intelligence to geopolitics and space exploration.

Notable exhibitions include Talk To Me at MoMA New York, Hyperlinks at the Art Institute of Chicago, Micro Impact at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam, Pre-History of the Image at STUK Kunstencentrum Leuven, Åzone Futures Market at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York and The House in the Sky at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn.

Chris Woebken (*1980, Hamburg) is a german-born artist, curator and educator living and working in New York. Chris holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art in London and has been a visiting scholar at NYU’s Environmental Health Clinic.

Chris’s work was awarded the Core77 Design Award in 2013’s Speculative Design category and in 2015 got nominated for the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year award. Recent residencies include the Walker Art Center, Pioneer Works, Eyebeam and the Headlands Center for the Arts.
Recent notable exhibitions include 'Future Fictions' at Z33 in Hasselt, 'Talk to me' and 'Design and the Elastic Mind' at MoMA and 'The Prehistory of the Image' at STUK Kunstencentrum Leuven.

Chris is co-founder of The Extrapolation Factory, a studio developing experimental methods for collaboratively prototyping, experiencing and impacting future scenarios. The studio runs design futures-oriented workshops around the world, including events in Russia, Belgium, the UK, Mexico, and Canada, as well as numerous events throughout the US.