While in Rio de Janeiro on the occasion of the recent Earthshot Prize, I visited The Lumisphere Experience, an immersive environment of visuals, voice, and storytelling, whose ambition is nothing less than to change how we think about the future.
Housed in a series of three linked geodesic domes on the plaza in front of architect Santiago Calatrava’s iconic Museum of Tomorrow (Museo do Amanha, itself celebrating its 10th anniversary as an interactive science museum), The Lumisphere Experience is muy simpatico, as they say in Brazil, with the Museum of Tomorrow, because both aim to make us see that we are part of communities larger than ourselves and that we can impact how we live and what our collective future is like.
The Lumisphere Experience was first launched in 2023 on the campus of CalArts, a multidisciplinary art school and arts community, outside of Los Angeles in California. Thousands of visitors took part and validated that the experience caused a shift in their consciousness (however large or small). In Rio, The Lumisphere Experience can be visited until late December 2025 before touring to other locations.
The Lumisphere Experience is the brainchild of Visions2030, an organization founded by curator, art critic, playwright and impresario Carey Lovelace.
Lovelace’s own creative journey from artist to visionary, and from performer to activist, mirrors the three part personal journey experienced in the Lumisphere. Lovelace began her creative career as an actor. However, she readily admits, “I was not very good.” Lovelace then went to CalArts as an avant-garde music composer, followed by further studies in Avant-garde music in Paris. However, discovering that “there were only four people doing it besides me,” Lovelace decided she wanted a larger audience.
She then returned to New York where she’d grown up and enrolled in NYU’s Graduate Journalism program. “I had a fabulous time.” She said. “I knew a lot of people who were becoming the young hot artists.” Her master’s thesis contained a section where she critiqued some of the current crop of artists as, in her words, more “callow opportunists” than dedicated artists. When that excerpt was published in Harper’s Magazine, Lovelace was suddenly anointed an art critic and was flooded with opportunities to write for prominent art publications. Along the way, she became co-president of the International Art Critics Association, which in turn led to her becoming a curator and being a co-commissioner of the 2013 US Pavillion for the Venice Biennale with Sarah Sze. She also remained connected to theater by writing a number of plays.
And then one day, in 2018, “I had an epiphany of what I was meant to do with my life,” Lovelace told me. “I had this idea of creating an organization that was focused on what’s called ‘social sculpture’…[which is] the idea that society is an artwork and we can shape it.” She founded Visions2030, with the idea of assembling a team who could use art and the creative imagination to solve some of the world’s problems.
Lovelace was struck by how much of the conversation about climate change was panic-based and worst case scenario-oriented. She observed that most people were told what the future would be like and were rarely asked what they wanted their future to look like.
Elizabeth Thompson, the former Executive Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute joined as Executive Director of Visions2030. She saw the potential in experiential environments as a way to connect people and fill them with optimism.
Visions2030 engaged Minds Over Matter, the experiential designers and programmers who worked on Las Vegas’ Sphere, to help create the immersive environments of The Lumisphere Experience.
Fabio Scarano, the curator of The Museum of Tomorrow who is also a full professor at the University of Rio explained that humans are, in some ways, programmed to base their expectations of the future on the present. Humans often imagine a dire future because then they can prepare for the worst. However, if given the opportunity to use their imagination, these same people can envision a future none of us would have imagined.
So what is The Lumisphere Experience like? The Lumisphere website describes it as “a three staged journey through the universe, into a microverse.”
Here’s what I experienced: As I entered the first dome, I was given headphones (they have them in several languages) and directed to take one of the dozen or more seats arranged in a circle around an orb or, in their nomenclature, a “digital campfire.” A deep resonant voice (think James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman) spoke as a we stared at images that looked as if we were journeying through time from the big bang to planet earth. We are told that the planet faces dangers but that the human imagination has always triumphed over adversity. As a journalist, I was paying attention but remained skeptical.
In the second dome, I and my fellow travelers were asked to lie down on chaises. Looking up at the visuals which filled the entire dome, there was a guided meditation. “There is a collective dreaming experience that the Lumisphere is offering,” Elizabeth Thompson explained.
The visuals are somewhat like being inside a giant kaleidoscope. It is a little intense, but in no way threatening or overwhelming. To the contrary, at a certain point, I let go of my resistance and gave in to the experience.
In Dome three, we surrendered our headphones, and each person in our group was given a tablet that asked a series of multiple choice questions about what your ideal living situation would be, what landscapes your ideal eco-future would have (urban, seaside, mountains, outer space, etc…) and whether they would want their environment powered by nuclear, wind, solar or none of those. The Ai then produced a image of that future living environment – and it is, in all the images I saw, quite beautiful.
And that’s where the magic trick occurred for me (and certainly for others as well). Looking at these images (including the one I created), I realized that the dystopian apocalyptic future that is so common in movies and streaming series is not inevitable. After agreeing to sign up as part of the Lumisphere Experience, I was sent a series of steps I could actually take to make my vision a reality. I began to see that there was a possible future that was better – better for me but also better for all.
I am not alone in feeling this way. Visions2030 has asked the Institute for the Future (IFTF) to measure the exhibition’s impact, and whether they feel differently about our future and the climate challenges we face after the experience. They have gathered more than 14,000 responses so far and the attendees overwhelmingly have a more positive feeling about the future after experiencing the Lumisphere, much as I did.
Visions 2030 is now scouting for new locations for The Lumisphere Experience. Elizabeth Thompson told me that she would like to take the experience to venues all over the world to create a community of people who are deciding for themselves what future they would like to envision.
The Lumisphere Experience was in some ways simpler than I expected, yet I found it more powerful, more transformative. Even now, the after effects remain with me. In a way that is so subtle and sly as to be covert, I now realize that the three-domed- immersive video and audio is not the entire experience but just the start of a growing ongoing community.
Lovelace told me that The Lumisphere Experience is “intended for everyone.” The point, Lovelace said, is “not to make people more optimistic, it’s to give them a vision.”