Could this be the future of parenting?

NurturePod installation and photos by Stuart Candy

This experiential scenario from a not too distant future, my first "solo" art museum installation (really, all this work is highly collaborative), is now live at M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium.

Futurist/journalist Andrew Curry and I recently had a chance to chat about the project for an upcoming issue of the Association of Professional Futurists quarterly, Compass. Many thanks to Andrew and APF for sharing the transcript below (edited for clarity and length).

***

Andrew Curry: What we have here is a very small baby –– not a real baby –– in a little pod surrounded by all sorts of digital stimulus looking after her or his needs. This is a "programmable para-parenting pod", which basically removes the need for parents to get involved, as far as I can tell. It's a bargain at €789, obviously. What was the brief, Stuart?

Stuart Candy: The brief for A Temporary Futures Institute was to create some kind of a design contribution corresponding to Dator's generic images of the future; grow, collapse, discipline or transform, and I was assigned "transform". I had this quite large space and could basically do anything that fit the budget and time. To get from those broad parameters to the final installation really started from the name. There was a prior project (which appeared in Compass) called NaturePod, a hypothetical product from a handful of years away, addressed to stressed-out office workers who may need to reduce their cortisol levels and increase productivity by spending time in nature, without leaving their cubicles. That was a provocative take on what happens when you marry supposedly biophilic interior design trends to virtual reality.

AC: So this is a kind of companion piece?

SC: Right. It came about in a conversation with my longtime collaborator, Jake Dunagan –– a lot of our work is based on wordplay and being silly –– and he said, "well, when you're done with NaturePod, you should do NurturePod, ha ha ha". He was joking, but I thought it was a brilliant idea. Then this opportunity came along, and I realised that, while this might not be my idea of a transformation, it does actually correspond to a popular notion about what immersion in virtual environments means.

AC: It comes with all this very nice packaging and sales material. Clearly something about the commercialisation of it engaged you.

SC: A lot of the experiential futures work I've done is about bringing encounters with futures into an everyday context. Hence guerrilla futures projects like NaturePod; we launched it at an architecture and design trade show, so the people who came across it thought it was real. The organisers of the trade show knew what we were up to, but the thousands of others attending didn't. I was interested in trying to import the lessons and techniques from creating encounters "in the wild" into the cube of a contemporary art museum. That's why this piece is not sitting on a white box; it's sitting on the kind of table you might find in an Apple Store.

AC: The NurturePod box has all the kind of labelling detail you would expect to see in a package. Is that part of the experience as well?

SC: I think the attention to detail that makes a hypothetical resemble the real is an important part of this practice. It is intended to invite, not a suspension of disbelief exactly, but more an investment of belief, a kind of willing desire on the part of the viewer to say okay, suppose that I did come across this in a few years' time. What do I think about that? What do I feel about that? I think the details provide added dimensions of engagement so they can dive deeper, if they want to. Most people are probably going to engage with the main image; a glanceable, instagrammable baby in a pod wearing a headset. But for those who take the time, there is more detail to enjoy, or be dismayed by, according to your taste.

AC: There's a little tag, "control baby's experience with the NurturePod App", and a kind of WiFi, Bluetooth-type logo suggesting I can download it. I haven't actually tried to do that; I'm guessing that bit might not be real?

SC: That's right, it does break at a certain point because it isn't real, but it's supposed to feel like it is. All of these messaging elements are scaffolded in detail on existing products, and existing idioms that we recognise subconsciously, being citizens of the early 21st century. We’re literate in ways we don’t even realise about the semiotics of marketing, and electronics in particular. This is using that language to get something across about a seemingly imminent possibility.

AC: One more thing that strikes me about this, about the languaging, is it's not just about marketing. There are a whole lot of cues about the idea of the new, the idea of the modern, and the classic ways in which technology companies make us feel inadequate and then sell us reassurance.

SC: I suppose using those tropes could be said to invite reflection on how embedded in the tropes we are, because we know this particular thing doesn't exist. But that's a bit of an intellectual angle. I find people's emotional responses interesting, from watching them interact with it and from what they've shared in conversation.

AC: What sort of things have they said?

SC: "I'm really drawn to this, and also repulsed by it." There's this sense of being torn, and that is quite satisfying to hear, because I think creating or inviting a complex emotional response is something that we should strive for in futures work. This is why design and film and performance and games are important –– the whole repertoire of approaches to experiential futures; like the proverbial toothbrush that reaches places regular ones can't. Hopefully we are on our way to a better futures toothbrush.

***

The NurturePod installation is just one part of A Temporary Futures Institute (ATFI), a boldly experimental M HKA exhibition which opened in April, curated by Anders Kreuger and Maya Van Leemput.

(M HKA was also the main venue for Design Develop Transform, where Kelly Kornet and I recently presented the Ethnographic Experiential Futures framework.)

There are some stellar artists featured in ATFI (including Michel Auder, Miriam Bäckström, Alexander Lee and Darius Žiūra), and the other futurists involved in the exhibition are Agence Future (Maya Van Leemput and Bram Goots, Belgium), The Centre for Postnormal Policy & Futures Studies (Ziauddin Sardar and John Sweeney, UK/US), and Mei Mei Song (Taiwan).

Show runs until 17 September –– so if you're within range of Antwerp, check it out!

Acknowledgements:

- Seth Keller and Kazuki Guzmán, Fabrication consultants

- Tarik El-Khateeb, Graphics consultant

- Special thanks: Maya Van Leemput and Anders Kreuger (for curating ATFI); Bram Goots (for crucial logistical help), Ceda Verbakel (for copywriting assistance); Giulia Bellinetti, Georges Uittenhout, and the rest of the team at M HKA (for essential technical support); Jake Dunagan (for inspiration); Jessica Charlesworth, Ilona Gaynor, the Toronto Uterati (for helpful conversations)

See also (last updated 16aug17):
- Features in VICE and Boing Boing
- Opinion piece in The Irish News on NurturePod and the future of parenting
- Bruce Sterling's repost of the interview above at Wired

- Article from Harpers Bazaar on what to see at A Temporary Futures Institute

- Video from ARTtube about ATFI (5 1/2 mins)
- Show summary from Belgian newspaper De Morgen (in Dutch)
- ATFI exhibition brochure (pdf)
- Two contemporary artists I greatly admire whose work has influenced this piece one way or another: Patricia Piccinini and Ron Mueck

Related:

> Impacting the Social 

> NaturePod

> Futures in the flesh 

> Ethnographic Experiential Futures
> Hawaii: The Lost Years

> Grand designs

> Foundfutures: Chinatown installation 

Travelling without moving

Time travel is basically about the way you look at things...


This talk was given in November 02012 as part of the City of Melbourne's arts initiative Going Nowhere.

It was a pleasure to be part of a great program [pdf] with the likes of climate scientist David Karoly, Greens Councillor Cathy Oke, arts prof Mick Douglas, and the brilliant musician Matt Wicking. This was my first attempt at the Pecha Kucha format (20 slides, 20 seconds each) and I really enjoyed the experience. Thanks to all the organisers, particularly Pecha Kucha Melbourne hosts Michelle James and Ammon Beyerle (with whom I collaborated on the CAPITheticAL project recently described here).

If you like the talk above, you might also enjoy this roughly PK-length excerpt from a longer presentation -- "Guerrilla Futures 101: Strategic Foresight meets Tactical Media"-- given at the Extreme Futurist Fest in Los Angeles in December 02011. It sets out an argument for engaging futures experientially. And a fuller exploration of that line of thought can be found in a lecture given at UC Berkeley earlier that year, "How to Build a World".

Related posts:
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> Grand designs
> The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable

Windows on to urban futures

All photos by Anthony Crescini
  Via arupaustralasia's Flickr stream

PARK(ing) Day is "an annual, worldwide event that invites citizens everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good."

This open source project originated with San Francisco based group Rebar in 02005, and has since spread rapidly around the world. The following year saw 47 PARKs appearing in 13 cities including New York, London, and Rio de Janeiro.  Last year, in 02011, the official tally was a remarkable 955 PARKs in 161 cities, across 35 countries on six continents.

Arup's Sydney office participated in the 02011 event, and although I couldn't be there on the day, during an earlier visit I helped project coordinator Safiah Moore and her local team craft the concept for a "Cut N Paste Future Booth". This refers to an ongoing strand of investigation by Arup's Foresight + Innovation team, Cut N Paste Cities, in which people are invited to look at the city as subject to their own process of editing or reinvention.  Our idea here was to turn an on-street parking spot into an opportunity for people to imagine desired changes to the cityscape from that vantage point, superimposing their visions over the present-day view.

With this in mind, the Arup PARK(ing) Day team planned a concertinaed array of doors, framing views of the street to be progressively overlaid with drawn and written annotations.

Sketch by Alex Symes

In this way, the installation would provide passers-by with a series of windows (literally) onto alternative futures for this part of downtown Sydney; a kind of neoanalog augmented reality app.

A short video was produced (by Sydney-based creative collective Thirteen Itches) about the finished installation, with various participants chiming in on the conversation.



Arup Sydney has participated in PARK(ing) Day several times before; in 02010, 02009, and 02008. But to put this annual project into a wider context -- alongside popup cafes, guerrilla gardening, street fairs, and more -- early last year a useful overview document called Tactical Urbanism was produced by the Street Plans Collaborative and the Next Generation for New Urbanism (a.k.a. Nextgen). It provides an illustrated typology of urban interventions, which opportunistically create "a laboratory for experimentation" with urban possibilities, using the streets themselves.

The increasing popularity of these sorts of events reflects not only a technological facilitation process thanks to layers of hardware (ever-cheaper smartphones and cameras) and software (social media and content-sharing services), but also, perhaps more importantly, a human or cultural layer coming into resonance with those. There is a virtuous cycle of awareness, motivation, action and capacity on the part of city dwellers, who are fast adopting a more active role in shaping their surroundings, whether officially sanctioned or not.

As to the underlying intentions of this specific project, Safiah says, quite poetically:

We want to get to a point where;

Everyday we are injecting activity into the urban landscape,

Everyday we are imagining the possibilities for our city,

Everyday we are engaging with the city and having conversations about what we want to see in our city,

Everyday we are providing a taste for what is possible.

This hands-on conversational catalyst, aimed at getting citizens to think about and discuss the futures of their immediate surroundings, offered a modest yet meaningful step towards that vision, by using the street itself as a platform for visualising its reinvention.

This year's PARK(ing) Day is on Friday, 21 September. You can join in the fun through the project website.

Related posts:
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> McChinatown
> Future-jamming 101
> Four future news clips from MIT

On the money

Image via [pdf].

Today, while browsing one of Melbourne's excellent bookstores -- which are still surprisingly abundant, despite global publishing industry turmoil -- I came across this striking image on the cover of an Australian literary quarterly, Meanjin.

It's from a 02008 photograph series called Oz Omnium Rex et Regina (King and Queen of All Oz) by Darren Siwes, an artist of indigenous Australian and Dutch descent.

A bit of context for international readers:

[The photograph] depicts a recognizably Australian gold coin, close-up. The words "Mary I, Australia 2041" are emblazoned onto its shiny surface. The future reigning monarch bears a distinct resemblance to a local, high-profile Aboriginal woman, leading viewers not only to question Australia’s current (and to many, anachronistic) constitutional monarchy, but also its legal legitimacy. In terms of natural justice, the obvious question arising is, "Why not an Indigenous monarch, or at least, an Indigenous head of state?"

~Christine Nicholls, "A Festival Of The Spirit" [pdf; essay reviewing the 02009 South Australian Living Artists Festival, in which this work also appeared]

Below is the obverse of the one dollar coin now in use, which, like all Australian coins, bears the image of Queen Elizabeth II. Who lives in, um, England.

Image via. [Note that the version of the Queen's head struck in Australian coins
does change periodically, loosely tracking the ageing process.]

Now, as some readers may guess from this blog's usual focus on experiential and performative scenarios, regarding the choice of medium, I personally resonate less with series of gold and silver painted-busker-statue type photos, appearing mainly in art galleries or literary reviews, than I would with an alternative execution of the same idea, in which the coins were physically produced, a tangible and diegetic (in-story) artifact, manifested, integrated and discoverable in everyday contexts, today.

Image via.

In any case, the proposition offered here remains challenging and culturally relevant, and currency proves an especially potent symbolic vector in which to embed it. Like other future artifacts from the same "family" -- e.g. the Amero, or the Aung San Suu Kyi kyat -- this embodies the hypothesis of an epoch-making change of governance in the near future, and it invites us to spend time with the idea for real.

Image via.

"Culture is something that is done to us. Art is something we do to culture."
~Carl Andre *

Related posts:
> The currency of Burmese dissent
> The value of hypothetical currency
> The act of imagination

* Quoted in Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World.

The act of imagination

Artwork: Imaginary Foundation [source]

The imagination can create the future only if its products are brought over into the real. The bestowal of the work completes the act of imagination. ... [W]hen we refuse what has been offered to the empty heart, when possible futures are given and not acted upon, then the imagination recedes. And without the imagination we can do no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present; we will never be led into new life because we can work only from the known. ... The artist completes the act of imagination by accepting the gift and laboring to give it to the real (at which point the distinction between "imaginary" and "real" dissolves).

~Lewis Hyde, The Gift

An outstanding book, by the way. As is Hyde's follow-up, Trickster Makes This World.

Posthuman cities

...unevenly distributed.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, following an unknown event, mankind disappears from the planet. Nature gradually regains its rights over urban areas, giving birth to a new landscape.
...
At a time when we have become aware of the fragility of nature, and are increasingly concerned about ecology, global warming, and the future of the planet, I wondered how all these man-made super-structures would evolve in time. Angkor is sublimely poetic, overgrown by the forces of nature and evoking a long lost human civilisation….why not Dubai, Shanghai, New York, Rome, Paris next?… What will become of these urban landscapes, these megacities, this civilisation of ours, now possibly at the height of its strength, but one day vowed to disappear, as did the Mayans or the Khmers?

This is by no means a pessimistic end-of-the-world type vision. On the contrary, it is the vision of a world that is quite idyllic, a new-found Garden of Eden, full of life, colours, shapes and poetry, where the freedom and unpredictability of nature has supplanted the hierarchy of angles and organized spaces.

The quote comes from an artist statement by French photographer Chris Morin, introducing his collection of posthuman cityscapes entitled "Once upon a time… tomorrow", which opens next week in a Paris gallery.

This strain of colourful post-collapse imagery (clearly located well after the last-human-gasp sepia of The Road or Children of Men, but with a dash of 12 Monkeys whimsy thanks to the displaced zoo animals) has a soothing, explicitly Edenic quality that by now feels familiar (see Related Posts below).

But I'm never quite sure what to make of it. Is an emerging interest in the delightfulness of posthuman landscapes better read as a sign of adaptation, or one of resignation? Or, perhaps the significance is more in the spectacle of its stabilisation and recuperation as yet another aesthetic genre being bundled off to market. (In case you're tempted, these images, ten of each in giant prints of 1m x 1.5m, are selling at €3000 apiece.)

This ideational territory has seen a fair bit of traffic in recent years, since Alan Weisman's 02007 non-fiction [sic] bestseller The World Without Us, and shortly before that, Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's not clear to me if M. Morin realises that this ground has been covered before -- a google search for the artist's name together with the Weisman book title (in English, and also in its French edition, Homo Disparitus) currently yields zero hits. However, it's curious to see this meme making the rounds, and although most of the international images in this set (such as those below) to me veer well into a sort of new age, post-collapse kitsch, Morin's Parisian visions (see above) seem to have more to say.

Then again, it may be that I'm responding less to a difference of content than to a difference of tactic, the very localisation of images of the future. Certainly I think that, as with imagining impacts of climate change, place- and community-specific appropriation, exploration and concretisation of otherwise abstract futures propositions circulating globally is a key part of what these conversations need in order to move forward.

[Via Rue89. All images and the quote above from Chris Morin's website.]

Related posts:
> Posthuman New York
> Post-apocalypse Tokyo
> The Afterlife of Buildings
> London after the rain
> Not drowning, thriving
> Second Nature
> Climate change for fun and profit
> Mapping c-change
> Oil and water

Reperceiving Detroit

A city in suspended animation
Photo by Jerry Paffendorf | Backstory

In late January I was honoured to speak at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, as part of their spring lecture series in Critical Studies. In the arts world the Academy is apparently regarded as "the cradle of American modernism", associated with art and design luminaries (who seem to come in pairs) including father and son Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Ray and Charles Eames, and more recently, Mike and Katherine McCoy. Cranbrook's beautiful and historic campus lends itself particularly well to being strolled or driven around on crisp snowy evenings, but its toney neighbourhood lies just 15 miles from downtown Detroit -- currently an American byword for urban blight -- making it an especially interesting vantage point from which to contemplate alternative futures. Which is what we did in the lecture.

Called "Fragments of Possible Worlds: The Art and Design of Experiential Scenarios", my presentation encouraged the audience, mostly Cranbrook students and faculty, to consider the resemblance between the role of the artist and that of the futurist. What the two have in common, as I see it, is the vocation of enabling new perceptions. Compared to the artist, whose self-understanding frequently seems to include a studied refusal of the constraints to which many other kinds of work are subject (viz. "artistic licence"), the futurist's role may be somewhat more circumscribed, especially in a consulting setting, by the client's needs. But the general role is fundamentally similar. And, while there is a conscious turn towards public and political engagement in my recent work, compared to the more narrowly targeted, strategic use of foresight as used in organisational settings, this common ground shared by art and futures is well captured by the elegant phrase of Royal Dutch/Shell scenario planning pioneer Pierre Wack: "the gentle art of reperceiving".

In the lecture, I outlined the development of experiential futures work I've been doing since 02006 or so, and provided an argument for collectively making our thinking about futures more affective, immersive, and experiential. (I relish exploring this topic with artists and designers because they tend to understand it, and are able to use it in their work, immediately.) Actually, the recent histories of two American cities were sufficient to get the point across: in 02005, New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing consequences of failing to internalise and act upon the entirely predictable (indeed, predicted) disaster. The other example was Detroit itself, which, notoriously, has endured a slower but no less grotesque disembowelment with the failure of the expected (US automobile industry-driven) future, and of the city to reinvent its dream accordingly. More on that in a moment.

While at Cranbrook I also held an introductory futures workshop for the 3D Design department, which is run by Scott Klinker, with whose work I had become familiar through Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things -- a visionary and gratifyingly short manifesto about spimes, in which he acknowledges Scott's formative influence on the design ideas therein. (Note that in 02007, they did an intriguing talk together at Google about "The Internet of Things: What Is a Spime and Why Is It Useful?", video of which can be found here.) At the start of the workshop, I had the 3D Design students generate a list of design activities, products and industries to which they expect or hope to contribute during their careers. Then I invited them to spend some time in four alternative futures for the US and the world, around 30 years from now, and to begin considering how those various products or industries could be affected in each scenario.

Despite significant structural similarities between design and futures thinking, as usual it was clear that the participants' expectations for their professional lives were firmly rooted in present assumptions, rather than in awareness of various ways in which these might be comprehensively overturned during the next three decades of change. (I don't mean to pick on anybody here; among people who have not been exposed to futures studies -- that is, almost everyone -- presentism and monofuturism are pretty much ubiquitous.) For instance, what would the role of a designer be in a post-collapse economy? How about in a world where Open Source designs can be selected online, then fabricated on the spot by a black box in the corner? The students seemed fully engaged, and asked great questions, and I'm looking forward to seeing how these ideas may begin to find their way into the work. As is often the case, my only complaint was that our time together was so short.

Overall, I found Cranbrook, the sole graduate-only art school in the United States, to be an extremely interesting place. It educates aspiring artists from around the country and the world in any of ten disciplines, from metalsmithing to architecture, each one of which has a small cohort of around 15 students, making for a total of just 150. Each department is overseen by an Artist-in-Residence, who, given the intimate scale of the programs, can exercise great latitude in running his or her own show. There are no conventional syllabi and no compulsory classes. Students are minimally scheduled, but enjoy the close attention and tutelage of their department's artist-in-residence, as well as the social and creative comradeship of their peer group. So the role of guest lecturers, Academy Director Reed Kroloff told me, can be significant insofar as they provide an opportunity for to develop a conversation around themes transcending the differences across the departments.

Here's where the fact of my visit and the topic of my talk intersect. The kind of academic and artistic freedom with which Cranbrook is blessed is a precious, Arcadian rarity. It is just far enough from the woes of Motor City that the temptation to remain safely cloistered must be great, yet being so close affords an important opportunity -- some would say responsibility -- to use its privilege and status to help lead a much-needed conversation about reinventing the region beyond its postindustrial malaise. During my own short stay, the city impressed on me a sense of suspended animation, a place holding its breath, poised between energetic reinvention and the terrifying momentum of continued decline. However things go next, Detroit's predicament as a semi-abandoned, deindustrialising city appears to strike observers as resonant, even prophetic, for the United States at large. Much has been written about the city's socio-economic downward spiral and the paradoxical potential this brings with it for renewal. Articles from just the last couple of weeks include The Guardian and Fast Company, joining earlier pieces in Time, Fortune and the Financial Times. I haven't yet found an adequate treatment of the failure of foresight in Detroit's unravelling, but that aspect surely warrants investigation -- and beyond that, active forward-looking intervention, for those able to offer it. Detroit is not, in the first instance, merely fodder for journalistic curiosity. Like any other community, it is a human work in progress, and an important role of futures for a community fallen on hard times -- like the role of art -- is to enable new perceptions and potentials, helping the next chapter to unfold along a different, more hopeful path. In particular, when futures and arts unite, to create and distribute "fragments of possible worlds", it seems to me that their joint resources hold out the promise of an unprecedentedly vigorous, vivid public discourse of possibility.

In line with the above, I couldn't leave the city without checking in on fellow futurist Jerry Paffendorf, who is putting his entrepreneurial zeal to good use in a fascinating and playful project called Loveland, in which Detroit real estate is sold online by the square inch, serving as the basis for a mixed-reality social network. Since my whirlwind visit, he has been profiled on NPR (that's National Public Radio, USA): excellent news!

Ventures like Jerry's are part of efforts, here and there, to rekindle the city's collective self-imagination; a tremendous challenge, but a worthy one, and it would be marvellous to see Cranbrook assume a leading role in broadening the conversation. (On that note, the extent to which artists and craftspersons can or should remain detached from the fate of their communities could make an excellent topic for another lecture in the Critical Studies series.) For the time being, though, I want to say it was a real pleasure to introduce futures thinking to this attentive and thoughtful audience, and I trust this will not be the Academy's last official foray into futures.

My thanks to Cranbrook's Sarah Turner and Sid Deaghlin for handling the logistics of my visit, to Jerry Paffendorf for his kind hospitality during a whirlwind city tour.

Related posts:
> Killer imps
> The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable
> Future-jamming 101

Future-framing images

"Grey goo — a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all matter on Earth while building more of themselves"




The sculptures pictured above are by U.S. artist Roxy Paine, and these images come to us via a beautiful online gallery of sorts: but does it float. I went there looking for something else and found this.

However, what I love here doesn't reside exactly in the art itself, but in the dimension added to it through the associative caption about nanotech, copied in at the top of this post. This seems to be a contribution of site co-curator Folkert Gorter (whose name I've just recognised; he's the designer of the Space Collective website, previously blogged here). At a stroke, his imaginative label recasts the misshapen products of Paine's SCUMAK (Auto Sculpture Maker) as artifacts from a nanotech future. Instead of (or in addition to) seeing what may originally have been a comment on the automation of art, we're invited to see fragments of some kind of lab experiment in self-replicating machines gone horribly wrong.

This seems a sort of inversion of the perceptual shift from ostensible reality to sculpture which we saw here a few days ago.

Now, since attempting a full-scale experiential realisation of a future world is not only impossible, but also unnecessary (recalling the Borgesian map that's the same size as the territory), from the point of view of a futures experience designer aspiring to manifest more with less is a good rule of thumb. I have said a word or two before about the iceberg principle that my collaborators and I use in crafting future artifacts: if there's another way, why make the whole iceberg? "The more effective-yet-cheap a prototype can be, the more efficient and pared-down a model it is for the scenario in question." In other words, the trick is to discover, then create, the most revealing possible evidence of the future world you are trying to convey.

Among future-artifact design desiderata, cheap and easy is, if not best in any absolute sense, probably better than expensive and difficult. (As usual, Cascio nails the point, in a post about artifact production on the cheap over at Open the Future: "do not underestimate the memetic power of good photo editing skills and a quality color printer". Some examples.) What more elegant solution in this vein than simply to relabel, recontextualise and thus reorient perceptions around some extant element of the mediascape? The still images captures something of the world, and a new caption may recapture it to a different end.

A term I want to suggest as apt here, borrowing a little from Lakoff's linguistics, is reframing the image. With a well-wrought future-frame around it, an old image may be put to work anew, in our minds and discourse, serving as a makeshift theory object for our collective contemplation. We've seen this strategy at work before in the World without oil photo essay.

But a different angle on it comes from an observation David Byrne made several years ago [my emphasis]:

In thinking about graphic design, industrial design, and what might really be the cutting-edge of design, I realized it would have to be genetic engineering. Dolly (God rest her soul) represents the latest in design, but it is, in her case, design we cannot see. Dolly looks like any other sheep, which is precisely the point. The dogma of some graphic designers is that their work be invisible. This perfection has been achieved with Dolly.

Notwithstanding the fact that Dolly has already passed into history, the cloned sheep image helps illustrate the type of creative operation I have in mind: Consider a picture of a regular sheep (yes, any sheep will do). Now imagine that it's a clone; add that label to it in your mind. The label -- or maybe what I really mean is the narrative for which it stands in -- recontextualises the image, futurising it, transforming it, semiotically, and thus experientially, into something else. Byrne's idea of "design we cannot see" invites a different way of looking. However, rather than scanning for invisible "facts" that we might suppose are "really there", we could instead scan for invisible potentials, future-frames, hidden stories, with a view to excavating them. What possible narratives might be read and infused into the images we find around us?

The juxtaposition of a future-framing narrative with a present-day image seamlessly retrofits the image as a glimpse of a scenario yet to come. The limitation is that it confines us to extant imagery, and there's surely much more to be imagined and created that doesn't have a ready precursor or analogue among ingredients presently available. Still, as a genre of futures exercise -- practice in a certain way of seeing -- it strikes me as interesting; and with this, I'm forced to wonder whether the cheapest and most elegant future artifacts aren't perhaps these ones that, so to speak, already exist. Since the reperception consists in a minimalist linguistic-imaginal feat, rather than in the creation of novel sensory percepts, this is perhaps the apogee of the iceberg principle (less is more).

I'd love to hear from anyone who happens to find, or create, other examples of this principle in action.

Related posts:
> World without oil photo essay
> Signs o' the times
> Introducing Space Collective
> Cheap prototypes, valuable insights
> Evidence
> Object-oriented futuring
> More found futures

Futures in the flesh

Patricia Piccinini, The Young Family, 02002-03
silicone, acrylic, human hair, leather, timber
Image via Brooklyn Museum

Readers, stumblers, netizens: I have been up to my eyeballs in dissertation research and general end-of-year craziness, but the sceptical futuryst is still, let me assure you, a going concern. Having defended my PhD proposal on Monday this week, I'm now back and hope to share a few more thoughts with you before the final encroachment of silly season.

This post is a bookmark to my favourite recent finding in the futures/design/art space, which came via a book, translated from German and published this year by MIT Press, called Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future. It's the work of Helga Nowotny, a scholar in social studies of science and technology. I don't intend to review it here, but it's one of those alternately heartening and frustrating works that, apparently oblivious to the existence of the futures field, tries to reinvent it.

p. 2: The future is. Its content, its shape, and its fullness -- the images we construct of it -- always have significance only in the here and now.

p. 4: This ability to claim the future for oneself is a cultural resource and should be made available also to those who currently do not have it, like the poor in the developing countries.

p. 7: Conceiving the future -- conceiving it differently -- demands that we escape the polarities of utopias and dystopias and replace them with other images that are neither taken directly from science fiction nor fueled by media-staged apocalyptic or superhuman fantasies. ... Conceiving the future means examining the assumptions on which it supposedly rests.

p. 110: Today, speech about the future is in the subjunctive mode. The term future rightly ought to be used in the plural, even if our language resists.

See what I mean? Anyway, in Chapter 2, "Paths of Curiosity", Nowotny says (pp. 63-64):

Patricia Piccinini's artful figures consciously cross the boundaries between humans and animal species. She creates monsters whose familiar human characteristics disturb and speak to us even while they appear in an alienated form. She arouses the viewers' curiosity, a curiosity that follows two separate paths at the same time. One path leads to the created object, which is alien and familiar to us at the same time. The other path leads back to ourselves, for looking at the object nourishes our suspicion that science's conscious and intentional manipulations could one way also make us humans take on such an alienated form, just as the artist has done with her mutated form produced from silicon, acrylic, human hair, and leather.

The footnote to that paragraph cites Piccinini's 02003 exhibition We Are Family, Australia's contribution to the 50th Venice Biennale. We Are Family included "The Young Family" (see photo at the top of this post), among other works by the artist. From Linda Michael's catalogue essay [pdf] for the exhibition (p. 5, emphasis added in bold):

Over the last few years, Piccinini has nurtured a new animal, the Siren Mole or SO2 (named after the scientifically produced 'Synthetic Organism 1', or SO1).
...
After talking with zoologists and ecologists about her beast in its various forms, Piccinini was keen to create a new improved version – one capable of reproducing itself. The next stage in its evolution is SO3, the theoretical 'scientific' name for Piccinini's creatures in her sculpture The Young Family.

The mother of this family lies on her side like a big sow with a litter of suckling pups, her humane face the subject of one stray pup's wide-eyed attention. Despite her status as a new mother, she is old.
...
The sculpture's verisimilitude, and the fact that today science fiction becomes fact so rapidly, makes it conceivable that this creature exists in the world. In it the differing physical attributes of youth and age are portrayed with commanding realism. Yet though its form is realistic, its content is improbable. It is a highly defined representation or surrogate of something. But of what?

Detail from The Young Family
Featured in We Are Family, Venice Biennale 02003
Image via Australian Journal of Emerging Technology and Society

Reverse shot of The Young Family
Featured in We Are Family, Venice Biennale 02003
Image via Giant Ginkgo's Flickr photostream

Patricia Piccinini, Game Boys Advanced, 02002
silicone, polyurethane, clothing, human hair
Featured in We Are Family, Venice Biennale 02003
Image via Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Patricia Piccinini, Still Life With Stem Cells, 02002
silicone, polyurethane, clothing, human hair
Featured in We Are Family, Venice Biennale 02003
Image via Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Michael continues (pp. 7-8):

What the tableaux within this exhibition offer us are visions that encapsulate contemporary dramas, with all their contradictions. This is no less than a model of reality or truth: 'In my work I am primarily interested in creating real experiences for people, experiences that touch people ... bodily but both intellectually and emotionally. No matter how artificial or unreal the stuff that constructs these environments is, these spaces always constitute a reality and evoke real experiences'.*

Piccinini's work engages us because it does not take sides, though it draws from the conflicting emotions that underpin our fascination with genetic engineering. Her works give imaginative life to a potentially scary future, while also asserting the redemptive power of social values and relationships. Our horror of humans combining with other species, for example, is considerably softened or sidetracked by the image of Piccinini's profoundly weary and patient trans-species mother suckling her young.

We are thus confronted with an expanded idea of the real – with alluring and original creations where truth has primacy over appearance. Though they may be in some way failed or mutant creations, her figures have a kind of innocence that makes it easy to see beauty in the grotesque. We are free to imagine new futures that are unconstrained by outworn social philosophies. Piccinini always does this in a way that makes such futures understandable in terms of what we encounter in everyday life.

Patricia Piccinini, Not Quite Animal (Transgenic skull for the Young Family), 02008
bronze | Image via artist's website

Patricia Piccinini, The Long Awaited, 02008
silicone, fibreglass, human hair, leather, plywood, clothing
Image via artist's website

Patricia Piccinini, The Embrace, 02005 (Nature's Little Helpers series)
silicone, fibreglass, human hair, plywood, leather, clothing
Image via artist's website

While gathering images for this post I came across an intriguing case of "The Young Family" being "debunked" at urban legends website Snopes, one person or several evidently having seized the opportunity to fabricate tabloidlike trans-species scandal stories based on photos of the sculpture.

The fact that it lends itself to such misinterpretation is a clue to the power of Piccinini's work, which for me comes very close to realising an emerging ideal for future artifact creation; the epistemically ambiguous dramatisation of scenaric potential.  That is, we may be entirely aware of their artifice (no deception required; they do appear in art galleries after all), and yet it seems that the "real experiences" of encountering her hypothetical creatures can provoke genuine insights in relation to configurations of the future landscape of -- in this case, biological or genetic -- possibility.  Life is pretty damn weird anyway, truth be told, so whatever's deemed natural about it is a function of taste, and especially that to which we're most accustomed. These sculptures seem to embody the ethical complexity (and the threat of simplicity) inherent in genetics research-driven technosocial change, far more effectively than thought experimentation or arguments from principle can. To my mind, transgenic "monsters" -- shadow-puppets projected with the false illumination of baseless moralising -- vanish in the light cast by imagining specific futures; and these strange Others start to be recognisable, with the rest of us odd creatures, as life.

In closing, three quick associations: first, the extraordinary work of Australian hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck; second, Canadian sculptor slash programmer Adam Brandejs, notably the Genpets project (which I'd intended to blog ages ago); and third, the biology and genetics-themed work of several students at the Royal College of Art's (London) Design Interactions program.

Ron Mueck, A Girl, 02006 | Image via Zimbio

Screenshot of Genpets website by Adam Brandejs

Image from Nanotopia (02006) by Michael Burton, RCA Design Interactions

Related posts:
> Your destiny is no longer in question
> How future-shock therapy works

(Thanks Rosa!)

* Patricia Piccinini, interview with Paul Greenaway, Heterosis: Digital Art from Australia, exhibition catalogue, Madrid: Conde Duque, pp. 46-49; p. 48.

The compleat Wired future artifacts gallery 02008

[augmented reality windscreen] | Wired 16.01 (January)

[bioluminescent tattoo] | Wired 16.02 (February)

[vat-grown meat infomercial] | Wired 16.03 (March)

[Risk boardgame] | Wired 16.04 (April)

[Smithsonian exhibit] | Wired 16.05 (May)

[wine spectrometer] | Wired 16.06 (June)

[the last "Found"] | Wired 16.07 (July)

The feature disappeared for two editions -- 16.08 (August) and 16.09 (September), before making a comeback, with a slightly different format involving more moving parts. Each published "Found" is now constructed as a scene incorporating multiple future "fragments", rather than as a single idea (usually a hypothetical product) like before. Below, then, are the remainder of the 02008 features, with corresponding details under each one. (These detail images can be accessed in a slideshow, via the Wired URL provided for the main image, but they're perhaps a bit easier to access and appreciate in the scrolling layout used here.)

[bumper stickers] | Wired 16.10* (October)
Details below...

[fridge] | Wired 16.11 (November)
Details below...

[Wall St] | Wired 16.12 (December)
Details below...

Since the relaunch of Found, there has also been a monthly "Found Photoshop Contest", which we'll look at in a future post.

Related posts:
> Found 02007 | 02006 | 02005 | 02004 | 02003 | 02002

*NB: This edition is mistakenly labelled 16.09 on the Wired website.