Play the Future / Juega al Futuro
Ever wish politics felt less like a lecture and more like an actual conversation with your friends? Join us at ICA LA for a social event about envisioning alternative tomorrows – with free food!
This brain-twisting game session will turn your biggest questions and ideas about the future – for the city, the country, or the world – into something you can sketch, laugh about, and build with your friends.
Led by futurist Stuart Candy and curator Andrew McNeely, the event features The Thing From The Future – an award-winning imagination game that has been played by everyone from high schoolers to NASA scientists.
Lunch and intro: grab food, meet your group, learn the game (no experience needed)
Play: in small groups, imagine wild, funny, and genuinely thought-provoking futures on timelines near and far
Make it real: link your ideas to real issues on this November’s ballot (like environmental protection, housing, and economic fairness) and learn how to make your voice count by voting
There’s no debate, no “right answer,” and no pressure to already know the issues. It’s a low-stakes, fun and interactive social space to think out loud with peers, because showing up to vote is just one part of a bigger, ongoing practice of imagining and shaping the community you want.
Free and open to 42 players. Everyone is welcome, players and observers. Players 16 and up, spanning both current and future voters, encouraged.
RSVP now! Spots are limited.
Stuart Candy, PhD is an artist, creative producer and educator dedicated to growing humanity’s collective capacity to navigate alternative futures. His award-winning imagination and co-creation tools, including THE THING FROM THE FUTURE and THE FUTURES BAZAAR, have been used around the world. Stuart partners with cultural and prosocial organizations from the International Red Cross, UNESCO, U.S. Conference of Mayors, World Energy Council, and Cook Inlet Tribal Council, to the National Film Board of Canada, BBC, IDEO, Wired, and The New York Times. He was the first artist in residence at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, the first research fellow appointed by The Long Now Foundation, and a curatorial advisor to the Smithsonian’s FUTURES show, as well as to NASA JPL’s Getty PST show Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination. He recently served as TACIT Artist in Residence at Caltech, where he led the design of an immersive time travel gathering. Based in Los ...
Andrew McNeely is a civic assembly organizer with Public Democracy Los Angeles (PDLA), an advocacy group promoting the adoption of sortition-based deliberative assemblies across LA and beyond. In January of 2026, PDLA, in partnership with Healthy Democracy, launched LA’s first civic assembly on the topic of Charter reform. The project brought together thirty five randomly selected Angelenos to deliberate on increasing the size of the city council. Before organizing in the deliberative democracy space, Andrew developed experiments in so-called citizen curating, a model of exhibition-making where members of the public are invited to shape the curatorial decisions that determine how cultural objects are exhibited. His work aims to bring models of deliberative assembly into conversation with the politics of cultural heritage stewardship.
