Ahmed Best: Feel The Future

When you feel the future, how do you share that feeling in order to build community? Ahmed Best’s Long Now Talk was the first in the more-than-twenty-year history of Long Now Talks to be held on Valentine’s Day. It was also the first to feature a sing-a-long performance of Al Green’s 01970s soul music classic “Let’s Stay Together,” with the speaker accompanying the audience at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre on a 7-piece drum kit. Finally, it was the first to feature a live theater performance from audience volunteers, depicting the past, present, and future through glances, gestures, and play. Yet beyond these firsts, Ahmed Best’s Long Now Talk felt deeply rooted in the spirit of Long Now Talks. Over the course of _Feel the Future_, Ahmed’s Valentine’s Evening Long Now Talk, he lead the audience on a journey through creativity and imagination, drawing on his experiences as a cast member on the award-winning percussion performance Stomp, as Jar-Jar Binks, the ground-breaking first major CGI character actor in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and as a lecturer at the Stanford d.school and one of the leaders of the AfroRithms Futures Group. The core of Ahmed’s argument? Feeling is a form of communication in itself, beyond words — and only by taking action and sharing our feelings of the future with each other in our communities can we create the futures we want for ourselves. Using a diverse range of creative and imaginative tactics, Best incorporated play and motion in order to help us Feel The Future.