On the night of June 5, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History will come alive with squid lights, video projections, interactive computer games, the sights and sounds of archives, and the rustle of recycled fabrics and flags.

This special edition of The Humanities Institute’s (THI) Night at the Museum invites guests to step through a portal into imagined futures.

This evening in downtown Santa Cruz features a multimedia exhibition by UC Santa Cruz graduate and undergraduate students, along with alumni winners of the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures.

The Coha-Gunderson Prize—established through the generosity of UC Santa Cruz alumni Peter Coha (Kresge ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson ’77, Philosophy; UC Santa Cruz Foundation Board Trustee)—has become a vital seedbed for visionary work on campus. Their support sustains a vibrant community of thinkers and makers who blur the lines between academic research, artistic practice, and activism.

At the MAH, visitors will explore Amending Worlds, an exhibition and panel conversation that invites museum-goers to reimagine what is possible.

The event, which is free and open to the public, celebrates THI’s 25th anniversary and opens the Amending Worlds exhibition which will run from June 5–15. .

“Amending Worlds is a testament to what the liberal arts do best: use imagination to create possible futures and to resist the idea that dominant systems—from colonialism to technological determinism—are inevitable,” said Distinguished Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness Carla Freccero, who has been leading the Coha-Gunderson Prize as the PI for the Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future project at The Humanities Institute.  

“It means using humanistic tools—critical analysis, historical awareness, ethical inquiry, and speculative imagination—to propose alternative futures that bear witness and care for—mend—what is broken in the world,” said Freccero, who helped prizewinners prepare for the Amending Worlds exhibition through a Creativity Workshop that met over the course of a quarter.

“Through a bold fusion of speculative fiction, rigorous research, and discipline-bridging creativity, these artists and scholars confront some of the most pressing issues of our time—climate crisis, colonial legacies, technological disruption—and chart futures that are both visionary and grounded,” said THI Managing Director Irena Polić. “This event, during THI’s 25th anniversary year, embodies our mission to foster work that is deeply thoughtful, radically imaginative, and urgently necessary.”

The Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future project centers on creative “worldings”—fictional futures that extrapolate from current technological or social conditions to explore their ethical, philosophical, and imaginative implications.

Members of the public can learn more about the project at this year’s Night at the Museum. 

Doors open at 6:00 PM on June 5, and THI offers guests free access to installations throughout the museum.

 From immersive films to interactive performances, video games to archival textiles, the exhibit unfolds like a speculative map of futures not yet written.

At 7:00 PM, the evening’s panel discussion around Amending Worlds begins—moderated by Professor Freccero.

The panel features:

• Micah Perks (UC Santa Cruz), whose novel What Becomes Us won an Independent Publishers Book Award and was named one of The Guardian’s Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse.
• Cathy Thomas (UC Santa Barbara), a writer, filmmaker, and creative-critical scholar whose work on the Black Fantastic and decolonial feminist thought explores play and resistance through comic books, literature, and cosplay.
• Kim TallBear (University of Alberta), Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science and studies both genomic and colonial disruptions to Indigenous identities and sexualities.

Their conversation will traverse literary worlds, queer ecologies, Indigenous cosmologies, and feminist utopias—each offering a unique lens on the urgent act of imagining otherwise.

Amending Worlds, the exhibition, runs from June 5–15 and presents multi-disciplinary, politically attuned work. Featured projects include:

• In Shades of Fake Green Grass, Hannah Barrett presents a series of short stories that takes place in the future and that portrays the ordinary lives of everyday people—viewed through a technologically dystopian lens.
• In a portal, Yasmine Benabdallah explores memory, archives, and non-linear time. Through video and a micro-chapbook, this project connects Brazil, Morocco, and Portugal—foregrounding resonant bodies across time and space to imagine liberatory futures rooted in shared histories of colonization and exile.
• In Whispers of Wear, Kristine Buriel invites visitors to walk into an archive—donning garments embedded with stories. This interactive textile project preserves human narratives through the craft of clothing and sound, ensuring they are remembered and shared.
• In Night Lights for Squid, Chaelim Lim asks: What if squid—drawn to light during night fishing—could create their own? Scientists remain puzzled by squid that avoid these lights. Could they be overwhelmed? What stories would self-created lights reveal?
• In A Martian Manifesto, Jorge Antonio Palacios offers a text and series of installations that combine craft and new media to form social sculptures. Reenacting speculative practices from a distant Martian future, this work becomes a process-based manifesto of science fiction.
• In The Third Person, Rowan Powell stages a hypothetical dialogue between historical “ranters” and contemporary “ravers,” drawing on 1649 Digger writings to explore non-ownership and relationships to land.
• In olam ha-ba (the world to come), Tyler Rai cultivates a conversation between heirloom Palestinian and Lebanese seeds, California soil, and local seed savers. Through these seeds in exile, Rai explores how ancestral agricultural technologies embody cosmologies of resistance, hope, and world-building.
• In Sea of Paint, Hongwei Zhou immerses visitors in a narrative-driven video game where players engage with a data-born “spirit” from the Sea—representing the ever-recording flow of information. The game prompts reflection on AI, labor, memory, and care.

The featured artists span disciplines including Anthropology, Art, Computational Media, Film and Digital Media, Literature, Politics, and more. What unites them is a commitment to speculative storytelling as a form of resistance, healing, and world-building.

Behind the scenes, the exhibition is coordinated by a dedicated team: Matt Polzin (UCSC Literature PhD Candidate, Speculative Futures GSR, and writer of queer utopias), Valerie Sainz (UCSC History and HAVC major, Humanities EXPLORE Fellow at the MAH, and curatorial historian), and faculty coordinator Carla Freccero, Distinguished Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness, who has nurtured the project from its inception. The evening is also made possible by MAH staff including Deputy Director Marla Novo, Exhibitions Manager Natalie Jenkins, and Preparator Shanti Nagwani, as well as  THI team members Linguistics Professor and THI Faculty Director Pranav Anand, THI Managing Director Irena Polic, THI Research Programs and Communications Director Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, and THI Events and Operations Manager Jessica Guild.Advance registration for Night at the Museum on June 5th is strongly encouraged. Visit the UC Santa Cruz Night At The Museum page for more information.