The Echo Park Research Institute Concerning Time Travel (EPRICoTT)

Our plan

The idea was to create a workshop to complement the theme of the 826LA Echo Park Time Travel Mart. 826LA’s Julius Diaz Panoriñgan described this perfectly: “The core premise of EPRICoTT is simple. Our students will get mixed up with some rather eccentric adults and have fun jaunting through the fourth dimension. They'll accidentally wipe out humanity (by writing well-intentioned but ultimately short-sighted letters to the future). They'll scramble through time to catch and revise the letters before they can do anyone any harm. And they'll return to the present to find their parents have become way cooler, before embarking on two more, equally disastrous (yet less lucrative), adventures.” So we set off on our own adventure to create a workshop that could work within the boundaries of the Time Travel Mart. After some hard thinking, we came up with a workshop comprised of one academic lesson and one hands-on lab. The academic lesson, or TT101, as it was to be known, would address time travel ideas in literature (Dickens, Twain, H.G. Wells) and film (Back to the Future, Bill and Ted). After a firm grounding in the history of time travel in art, it would be time for some serious ideas to be introduced: we decided we'd continue the lesson by introducing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and explaining the concepts of wormholes to students. These concepts would build a foundation of scientific knowledge that students would need in order to understand time travel. A discussion of the potential link between Medieval Dragons and Pterosaurs would follow all of this hardcore academic instruction. Finally, the ethical considerations of time travel would be discussed. That would bring the academic section of the workshop to a close. The lab, or TT102, would start with students writing letters to themselves about the future and the robots who inhabit it. The students would then enter the Time Travel Mart (the store at the front of the 826 center) to test the robo-centric products. The time travel party would then continue by traveling to 11th Century England and the Mesozoic Era to deal with the dragons (remember we discussed this potential link in TT101). Finally, students would have to travel back to the future to deal with a robot uprising and help create a world where robots and humans could live in harmony.

What we did

This workshop closely resembled a theater production because of all the behind-the-scenes work that needed to be accomplished. Several core volunteers, in collaboration with other temp volunteers, spent a month of weekends prepping the Mart of the workshop, doing a variety of activities from sewing together a canopy that would serve as a time travel device, to making a model Pterodactyl out of foam, dowels, fabric, duct tape and decoupage. When the workshop day finally came, the volunteers served as zipline operators, knights, damsels, robots, and futuristic humans. The workshop went brilliantly — students loved TT101, and had a blast talking to medieval knights and helping save the future from robotic tyranny. (In case you were worried, it's important to note that upon return to 3000 A.D., students found humans and robots living in harmony.)