(Provo) The story of the Transhuman House goes back a number of years. Starting with the Foundation looking at a location in Seattle. This location was a good quarter acre with about 2500 square foot 4 bedroom house with a two-car garage. This didn’t initially pan out due to the cost overhead and not getting enough individual renters in the 2-month window the Foundation had to populate the property.
A couple of years later and eventually in Provo Utah another opportunity came up with a smaller home came up as available for the creation of something like the Transhuman House and we had enough residents to make it work. About 6 months after the opening of the Transhuman House 1.0 we had the opportunity to move from the small 800 square foot 2 bedroom house to a 3 bedroom 1800 square foot condo that was much newer and being able to open the Transhuman House 2.0. This turned out to be the golden age of the Transhuman House so far with transhumanists being in residents for more than 2 years. From growing the Foundation library, to experiments like PlantSat 1 and the AGI Lab work the Transhuman House was a great catalyst for numerous projects.
However, the past 6 months have been a struggle financially with the resident transhumanists moving on to appointments at new roles far away and needed to study at other universities not local to the transhuman house and we were not able to find the new residents needed to keep the doors open. We had set a deadline for profitability and were not able to make the deadline so as of Sunday, December 8th, 2019 we shut the Transhuman House down and loaded the art, the books, the instrument collection and all the other parts of the Transhuman House collection into storage.
It was a bit surreal to travel back and pack things up. There were four of us and it took a couple of days to get it all into storage and it was a bit sad. We ended up having to give up the touch wall and some of the other equipment as we didn’t have the ability to move it but the most important art, displays, and books all made it into storage. I’m in the middle of creating a VR display for the project #IAmTranshuman covering the Transhuman House but sadly, for the time being, the collection is not available to the public anymore and creating the VR environment fills like a memorial in away.
That said, we have not given up and hope to open a new Transhuman House within a year. A version 3.0 but we will see…
