The Golden Institute (2009) is a film by Sascha Pohflepp about a future that grows out of a different past. Its alternate history begins with Jimmy Carter winning the 1980 presidential election and using a second term to build renewable-energy research at a scale comparable to the Apollo program.

The project follows the strange systems that emerge from that premise: weather experimentation zones, lightning harvesters, energy-generating freeway infrastructure, and the people who find ways to participate in them. The film’s corporate voice makes the world feel both plausible and deliberately askew.

Pohflepp’s work keeps the past available as a way to examine the present and the futures it still contains. Visit the project archive, and read We Make Money Not Art’s account of The Golden Institute.

What I find really compelling about this project from when I first saw it was the fluidity by which Sascha makes the world pivot on one tweak — a different election outcome in 1980 — and then shows a specific set of consequences that emerge from that pivot. The work is a reminder that the past is not fixed, and that the present is always contingent on the paths we take and the ones we don’t.

(This also inspired me to build on this specific project for the SLRPNK v CYBRPNK project in which that same election outcome and the creation of The Golden Institute as the harbinger of the SLRPNK faction which is quite satisfying if I get to collaborate with Sascha even after his untimely passing.)