The Alchemists ........ The Squiches ........ The Mossbacks
COTI: Cultures of the Imagination
An experiment in creation -- participants design an integrated world,
alien life form and culture, and simulate contact with a future human society.
One team constructs a solar system, a world and its ecology, an alien
life form and its culture, basing each step on the previous one and utilizing
the principles of science as a guide to imagination. The other team designs
a future human colony, planetary or spacefaring, "creating and evolving"
its culture as an exercise in cultural structure, dynamics and adaptation.
Through a structured system of progressive revelation, the teams then simulate
-- and experience -- contact between the two cultures in real time, exploring
the problems and possibilities involved in inter-cultural encounters.
This simulation, which began at the first CONTACT conference in 1983
as a thought experiment for professional scientists, writers and artists,
has developed into an educational curriculum for college and junior high
school levels, which have been funded by NASA and the Smithsonian Institution.
COTI has also been featured in OMNI and in a PBS documentary and has become
the foundation of a three-year international design project for professional
scientists.
For a more detailed description of the COTI simulation, choose "History of CONTACT" on the Home page.
For the stories of the first three aliens to be created at CONTACT,
press your favorites above.
For the story of the human voyagers on the 1987 Achilles Expedition
to the planet of the Centaurians, press ...
COTI Mundi is a three-year, international project developing out of
COTI. A team of scientists, writers and artists has produced for us this
wondrously rich and exotic world, Epona, quite possibly the most thoroughly
researched imaginary world ever created.
© 1997,1998,1999,2000 CONTACT: Cultures of the Imagination,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.