Other worlds.

‚Other Worlds‘ by Julia Freyer, Julia Kaczmarczyk, Matthäus Mayr und Natalia-A. Bakula is a project responding to the semester brief Jelly Worlds‘ where the Design Investigations class partnered with Vienna‘s Natural History Museum to imagine and speculate deep time and alternate evolutionary histories. The brief emerged from NHM‘s desire to explore stories around the recently discovered Gabon fossils that suggest multicellular life existed 2 billion years ago.

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We speculate about a change in evolutionary history in which the so-called boring billion was not boring at all. Geologists use this term to date back to the period between 1,800 and 800 million years ago, when there were only minor biological, climatic, and chemical changes in the oceans and atmosphere. If we imagine that some multicellular organisms actually evolved and thrived during this period, we would change our assumptions about this time and rewrite the entire evolutionary history.

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This made us curious about an alternative evolution of the world. We speculated about a world in which these multicellular organisms had not died out early, and wondered how they would have evolved. We imagined if they would still exist today.... This project is a story about the “Golden Age of Gabonianta?”.