Y3K: On Distant Keys (2024) was a speculative exhibition that imagined a future archipelago in the North Atlantic, emerging in the year 3000 from volcanic and ecological transformation. Presented in the Design Building Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the exhibition extended the research of The Futuring Lab (2023) into a fully realized world—a sentient landscape where islands possess legal rights, communicate through glyphs, and participate in a planetary parliament of beings.

Curated by Sandy Litchfield and Kelly Feeney with research design student Bella Donovan, the exhibition wove together maps, models, paintings, and display cabinets to form an immersive visual ecosystem. With eight color-coded booths representing eight different landforms, these curated collections functioned as both artifact and hypothesis– evidence of a civilization learning to live symbiotically with its terrain. The installation included field sketches, videos, glyphs, and fragments from the evolving travel guide Y3K: Ondacka, which served as both a fictional framework and research tool.

Visitors moved through an archipelago of rooms and projections where sound, light, and image evoked the pulse of sentient geology– ruminating rivers, forests, frogs, and flirtatious fields. Short wall texts explored themes of personhood, empathy, and the ethics of cohabitation in a post-human future.

Y3K: On Distant Keys was both an artwork and inquiry into the imagination’s role in environmental thought. It invited participants to ask: what if the future of design begins not with building, but with listening– to stone, to current, to the deep time of the Earth itself? By blending artistic speculation with ecological and philosophical investigation, the exhibition proposed a new mode of futuring, one that treats creativity as a practice of planetary empathy, and art as an instrument for sensing worlds that do not yet exist, but urgently need to be imagined.