StudioCone’s Temporal Transmitter Wants You to Hear the Future

The Temporal Transmitter is a radio-like device that tunes into broadcasts from possible climate futures between 2030 and 2100. It’s controlled via two dials: time and temperature, to navigate scenarios grounded in real climate projections, from societal collapse to recovery and transition. By making the consequences of present choices audible, it asks whether empathy for the future could become the catalyst for change that data and projections have never quite managed to be.

The object is disarmingly familiar. A common household artefact, present in society for over a hundred years, recast as a speculative storytelling device. Using agentic AI to draw from real climate data, the Transmitter generates realistic depictions of life from tomorrow, giving voice to the breadth of futures waiting for us depending on the choices we make today. The difference between 2 and 5 degrees, spread across time from 2030 to 2100, creates impossibly different auditory experiences. Fictional narrative and scientific projection combined to make the future something you can actually hear.

The project exists within StudioCone’s speculative 2030, where humanity failed to meet the 1.5°C target and ANIMA, an autonomous planetary intelligence combining artificial and biological systems, emerges to guide planetary stability through technologies inspired by symbiosis. If you were mandated a product that let you hear the future being created for us, would it be the catalyst for change we need, or would we simply become numb to it?

Inspired by commensalist relationships in nature, StudioCone asks whether that same dynamic can be attained between humanity and the planet, and if we were able to peer into the future and truly empathise with our future ancestors, what that could do for our planetary futures.

The piece is ultimately symbolic of our inability to engage with abstract data until it is already too late. If we had the ability to peer into the future, would we change our ways?

Symbiotic Systems is a collaboration between Conner Eastwood and Ewan McIntosh, with sound design and original score by George Davies.

To read more about the Symbiotic Systems project, visit @studiocone_