The Setting:
The American Wilderness Wax Museum is a fictive museum of the future that specializes in extinctions from the 20th and 21st centuries.  “Experience the Lost Wilderness” is our motto, as we represent the legendary habitats and study the cultural questions of the Middle Anthropocene, circa 2012.

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The Characters:
The AWWM offers to send Deanna Pindell, in her role as curator/director of the Museum, as an ambassador from the future.  She will lead an interactive dialogue titled the Post-Humanist Conversation.  With a menu of provocative questions, she will engage participants in empathetic examination of complex topics that have no correct answers.

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The Theory:
The  Post-Humanist Conversation is an artist-led “performative dialogue”, an interactive method of developing respectful discourse on provocative science-based subjects.  Under the specter of climate change and extinction, the human species must develop adaptive capacity through behavioral change.  This is a cultural issue, rooted in relationships and ideas and emotions. Scientific information must be communicated relationally, not didactically, to the broader populace.  Empathetic listening and a sense of creative play are key to moving beyond data to produce meaningful response.

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Example Questions:
How shall we mourn the extinction of an entire species?
What would it mean to develop a deeply meaningful relationship with one tree?
Why do humans cling to the idea that we are the apex predator?
Should dolphins have legal rights as “non-human persons”? Trees? Fungi?