The Future Can't Wait

Photo by Matthew Abbott for the New York Times

I wrote this piece in the first week of January. It appears in the just-published Summer 2020 edition of Design Journal from the Smithsonian Design Museum, Cooper Hewitt, in New York. It’s hard to believe how long ago the start of this year feels, and how quaint my obliviousness, stuck in amber, to the string of crises that have unfolded since — the COVID-19 pandemic, oil market chaos, historic levels of unemployment, and in the past week, demonstrations across the United States. Our context has shifted again and again, but I think the argument is reinforced by all this change.

***

Eden is burning.

A small coastal town in Australia has become a household name in the past twenty-four hours, besieged by raging bushfires colouring land and sky a surreal martian red, and causing residents to flee for the ocean, the safest refuge in a world aflame.

Today, under unprecedented emergency orders from the Prime Minister, the navy arrives to help with evacuation. The fires in Eden and dozens of other places have already torn through an area the size of Switzerland.

This is all a few hundred miles northeast of where my wife and I, both Australian, are on our annual pilgrimage back from the United States. Right now our family group is standing on the deck of another navy vessel, a World War II minesweeper, long ago decommissioned and turned into a small maritime museum. Normally the backdrop would be a spectacular Melbourne skyline. Instead we see a grey curtain that looks like fog, but isn't. The smell of smoke is unmistakeable. The ongoing catastrophe is at once bodily present and utterly remote from our pleasant after-lunch walk.

A museum guide leads us to the crew quarters, pointing out a framed black-and-white photo of grinning sailors crammed into this space. I try to picture daily life during the war: dozens of servicemen eating, arguing, and playing Mahjong endlessly, spending their nights in hammocks strung from the low ceiling. The central purpose of the exhibit is of course to help visitors connect to this earlier time - but even standing here, surrounded by historical paraphernalia and listening to stories from our knowledgeable guide, one struggles to imagine the lived everyday reality of a vanished era.

As with the present-day experience of others, especially in circumstances very different or distant from our own, so too when it comes to history. Considering it from afar is one thing; really comprehending it is another.

Thinking about the future confronts this same problem, intensified. No one knows exactly what the future holds, so unlike the past or present we have no direct evidence to compare with what is in our minds.

Yet the collective task of properly engaging alternatives is among the most important we face. Fortunately we now have more effective ways to do it than ever before.



Prompted by the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, a pragmatic set of approaches for navigating large-scale change and uncertainty has arisen over the past few generations. The near-unthinkable stakes of nuclear conflict forced governments to develop big-picture "what if" scenarios, and investigate how they might influence events toward preferred futures, and away from nonpreferred ones.

In the 01970s, oil companies and other organisations started exploring the advantages of an institutional capacity to think ahead. Parallel to these developments in the corridors of power, a more grassroots and humanistic tradition of futures workshops and education was also emerging, studying the "images of the future" held by individuals and groups, and how to understand, critique, and create them.

"Future" singular became "futures" plural. A new transdisciplinary field was born, known variously as strategic foresight, futures studies, or simply "futures." Now, paying intellectual attention to possible futures is a positive step, but it does not in itself guarantee an appropriate impact on present-day decisions. The bushfires blazing in southeastern Australia are a case in point. They have captured global attention as a kind of postnatural disaster: something long foreseen, and shaped directly and indirectly by collective choices, but for years not taken seriously in a political sense. This long-fuse, seemingly far-fetched scenario, well outside of anyone's lived experience, has now burst forth and is wreaking havoc in real time.

How then can we connect to possible, probable, and preferred futures viscerally, such that they feel real enough to make a difference, now? This vital question has become a focus for a community of practice building on foresight's foundation. At conferences and festivals, in classrooms and city streets, we are learning and using whatever it takes to bring futures to life, from physical artifacts, photo illustrations, and videos to online games and simulations, street art, guerrilla interventions, immersive theatre, and live-action roleplaying. In recent years in the design world, speculative design and design fiction (an analogue to science fiction, but oriented to physical rather than literary creations) have surged to prominence.

This whole array of strategies is called experiential futures. If one wants to bring potential realities to life, and have them register with the body and make a dent in current choices, then all experiences that help achieve that are part of this design space. They can be used to explore any question or topic, bring any world to life. Here are a few examples of projects we've done on the themes at hand:

For the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies biennial strategy meetings, future artifacts dramatised a potentially changed landscape of humanitarian need. What if displaced coastal populations began to mobilise politically, across culture and language barriers, around their common plight?

For the World Bank's Climate Investment Funds, and Institute for the Future, we imagined far-reaching changes in the US federal response, creating a future advertising campaign around it. What if, in the late 02020s, climate inaction gave way to large-scale military mobilisation? Strange echoes now of the deployments just announced in Australia.

For the Hawaiian state legislature, to support public engagement with a sustainability planning process, we placed hundreds of policymakers and constituents in a quartet of parallel immersive scenarios for the islands, set in 02050. In one room, governance had been restructured around precolonial values and traditions; in another was a naturalisation ceremony for climate refugees. And so on.

These are not predictions, but "what ifs" in four dimensions, aimed at improving the quality, accessibility, and impact of futures conversation. Miscellaneous approaches are coalescing into a systematic set of ways for humans to play productively with possibilities, and ranging beyond the standard technological questions by bringing life to often neglected social, cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions.

Becoming common practice brings the opportunity for deep impact. As well as spending time in the imaginary worlds of comic book heroes, for instance, we might spend time in potential future realities. We might debate and decide less on the basis of ideology and slogans, and more on the basis of collectively explored pathways and policies designed to shape them.

The museum has emerged as an indispensable platform for helping these developments along. If you haven't already encountered a major hybrid design/futures exhibition, at an institution like the Museum of Modern Art, New York, or the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, chances are you soon will. New facilities - essentially cultural institutions of foresight - like the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, MOD in Adelaide, and the Museum of the Future under construction in Dubai, have lately been established to let visitors encounter what could come to be, as much as what has been.

Museums have always enabled the cultures they are embedded in to remember what matters; but memory and imagination are two sides of one coin. In a volatile era, we need all the help we can get to bring both into currency. What of the past should we hold on to - but also, how might things be otherwise, in better and wiser times to come, and what role can we each play in finding our way there? The rise of experiential futures is fueled by cultural need, and though the need is different everywhere it shows up, it shows up everywhere.

An important societal transition is just getting underway. Collections of speculative future artifacts are a promising start, but wider horizons of experiential futures - immersive, generative, participatory, and large-scale - remain to be explored, growing the collective capacity for foresight through our cultural institutions.

Today, Eden is burning. As the smoke clears, this moment will pass from headlines into history, a newly minted past to learn from to the best of our ability. Already apparent among its lessons to take to heart is our urgent need to get much better at thinking and feeling through what might lie ahead, too.

The good news is: we can.

***

A full-text PDF of the article can be downloaded here. This Design Journal issue also includes contributions from climate and science writer Tatiana Schlossberg, Native Renewables executive director Wahleah Johns, and atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, and it can be found in its entirety here. My thanks to Pamela Horn for the invitation to contribute.

Update 01june20: Top image changed and introductory note added to mirror the post on Medium.

Related:
> Always Tomorrow Now, an interview with the Curator of the Museum of Tomorrow, Brazil
> Experiential futures in The Economist
> Ghosts of Futures Past
> Experiential Futures: A Brief Outline
> Integrating Foresight at the World’s Largest Humanitarian Organisation, a forthcoming piece on experiential futures at the international Red Cross/Red Crescent; this project was also discussed in a recent interview for IFTF's Foresight Talks (video)

U.S. Earth Force

Introducing the sixth branch of the American military, founded in 02029.

What happens when the world's richest and most powerful country puts its full weight behind efforts to address climate disruption?

Earth Force is neither a prediction nor a preference, but a possibility, a way of asking how climate action might look if addressed seriously at a federal level.

A belated response to the crisis, when it comes, could be all the more pronounced; making up for lost time.

To date the United States has waged war on various things including poverty, drugs, and terror. A range of responses and a mix of feelings may arise about the idea of adding global warming to the list.

Making space to sort through these responses, and their implications, is a reason to consider such possibilities in advance.

Grand as some of our collective challenges and actions might be, they will also play out in the most ordinary of contexts.

If this really happened, it would show up in all sorts of encounters in everyday life: at airports, sporting events, shopping malls, and school campuses. It would leave visible and tangible traces across all media, from cinemas to recruitment stations, news reports, and social feeds.

The medium of billboard advertising may be mundane, but the kinds of questions it can pose are momentous.

With well over half a trillion dollars spent each year on American military capability, what is the possible scope and impact of climate action at such a scale?

How might the militarisation of governance proceed once systemic issues like this start to be approached seriously on a whole-of-society basis?

When and in what ways will military culture adapt to engage with an unprecedentedly diverse and globally-minded wave of younger citizens, the “March for Our Lives” values of Generation Z?

I took all these photos of billboard sites within minutes by foot or bicycle of our house in Pittsburgh.

The idea was to explore some potential macro-changes of historic significance by crafting a number of local, micro-glimpses of what that reality might entail on the ground.

I also wanted to look at some of the tensions between national-scale and planetary-scale affinities, logics, and symbols.

The project speaks to the notion of duty in at least two different registers.

Our duty to the future is to rectify the catastrophic, systematic errors that we have known for some time are causing global warming.

Our duty to ourselves is to widen the horizons of imagination, debate, and action today.

***

A word of background: this experiential scenario was supported by Institute for the Future (IFTF) and the World Bank's Climate Investment Funds (CIF), as part of a project also involving a number of other commissioned artists working in various media, called Artists Imagining the Future of Climate Action. At IFTF's invitation, I pitched the concept in April 02018.

This story is about activating and amplifying the latent and hugely significant potential of a wildly well-resourced aspect of American governance and infrastructure. In our scenario, the U.S. Earth Force is established in the mid 2020s (alongside the existing Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard), with a view to gradually reducing and supplanting the need for conflict-based military forces by prioritizing global climate security. In terms of the RFP, this experiential scenario tells a ‘White Mirror’ story. It is a story about owning up to the most inconvenient of truths, and starting to turn the ship around.

As my research and thought process went along, the specific media, future artifacts and communications strategy for extruding the scenario morphed a bit, and the diegetic timeline pushed out to after the 02028 election. The central concept stayed the same. (Incidentally, a couple of months after getting the green light from IFTF, I began hearing about President Trump's plan to create a Space Force. Not that it matters particularly, but this project was not conceived or intended as a response to that idea.)

The resulting set of billboard images of the U.S. Earth Force recruitment campaign was completed in September 02018. A few weeks later, the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C was released, decisively shifting the public conversation and ushering in over the following year a new phase of the climate movement that made Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion household names. More recently, the covid-19 pandemic has of course altered the footing for climate action yet again.

This project was initially under wraps, to give its sponsors a chance to share the commissioned artworks first.

As the world marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, I'm sharing U.S. Earth Force with some hope that it may help in a modest way to enrich our collective capacity to imagine and initiate vital climate action in this decade.

***

Many thanks to branding consultant Devika Khowala and compositing consultant Matthew McGehee. For help with field visits and early design explorations, thanks to research assistants Helen Hu and Cathryn Ploehn from CMU Situation Lab. Special thanks for scenario and research advice to Michael Dila, Rosemarie Forsythe, Nils Gilman, Karen Grattan and Alex Steffen. Finally, gratitude to all at IFTF and World Bank CIF for vital support in the creation of this project.

This post was also published on Medium.

Related:
> Foresight is a right
> Ghosts of futures past
> A climate of regret
> Politicians discussing global warming
> Participatory cli-fi
> Mapping c-change
> Critical activism

Politicians discussing global warming

This is a small-scale sculpture in Berlin created by artist Isaac Cordal that has gone viral in the past few days, under the caption 'Politicians discussing global warming'.

A bit of research reveals that this installation actually took place in 02011 and that the work is part of a series called Follow the Leaders, which has been exhibited in various forms and locations including Milan (below), Brussels, and London (below, lower).

Blogger Jon Worth has commented today on 'the power of a title to make a picture go viral': it seems the original title of the Berlin piece was 'electoral campaign', so there was no apparent intention on Cordal's part to reference climate change or rising seas in particular. Intriguing how one audience member recontextualising the artist's work with an alternative title (whether accidentally or deliberately doesn't really matter) gives that work startling potency and a new lease of life.

Although Cordal seems to have had no part in these developments, they fit neatly with his interests. Looking into his work brought me to a couple of installations themed and framed explicitly along similar lines; Waiting for climate change, from the Triennial of Contemporary Art by the Sea in De Panne, Belgium (02012).

And this more recent piece of the same name at the Château des Ducs de Bretagne in Nantes, France (02013).

[Top image via Sierra Club and William Kramer, HRCFS; others from the artist's website.]

Related:
> Participatory Cli-Fi
> It's a small world, after all
> Mapping c-change
> Ignore global warming
> Not drowning, thriving
> A climate of regret
> Footwear for a warmer world
> Climate change for fun and profit

A climate of regret

An older, sadder Barack Obama looks back on the Copenhagen climate conference

Today marks the beginning of the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, COP 15. As delegates and media converge on the Danish capital, they are being greeted at the airport by a strange sight: environmental advocacy groups Greenpeace and TckTckTck have created a series of billboards depicting various world leaders ruefully looking back from the year 02020, having not seized their opportunity in 02009 to commit to decisive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Old, sad French President Nicolas Sarkozy

Sad and old German Chancellor Angela Merkel

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Only older. And sadder.

Each is emblazoned with the same message. "I'm sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change. We didn't."

In case you haven't been following the news (say, you're writing a doctoral dissertation or something), Planet Green has posted a helpful, brief overview of what's at stake in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, Greenpeace Climate Rescue Weblog explains this last-minute campaign to engage the emotions of decision-makers:

We're hoping these ads predict the wrong future -- the one where world leaders look back with a "coulda, shoulda, woulda" attitude at a Copenhagen climate summit which failed. There's still time to change the future. Our recipe for world leader regret-avoidance is simple: agree a fair, ambitious, and legally binding deal to save the climate.

(Er, save the climate?)

Anyway. While it is not clear to me whether the busy itineraries of all or any of the high-profile individuals concerned will afford them a glimpse of their future selves -- which would make this really interesting -- over 15,000 people are expected to attend (source: CNN), and no doubt many of those will be passing through Copenhagen Airport.

So it's an ingenious and valiant attempt to make the climate message personal; here's hoping it makes some difference.


[[All images from Greenpeace, via Osocio; see also COP 15 set at Greenpeace's Flickr photostream. Sad, old versions of the leaders of Russia, Poland, Brazil, Spain, and Canada are also part of the set.]]

Related posts:
> Ignore global warming (an acerbic climate-themed campaign by the World Wildlife Fund)
> Future shock hits San Francisco (an outdoor site-specific billboard that gave Market Street an earthquake makeover)
> Climate change for fun and profit (Diesel's commerce-friendly take on rising seas)
> Facing future (evidence that artificial aging is hit and miss)
> Future news-flash: your vote counts (pre-'08 election videos activating anticipatory remorse for U.S. non-voters)

(Thanks, Dad.)

TH.2058: a dystopian pastiche

TH.2058 (02008) installation at the Tate Modern art museum, London
by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster | Image via Rob Brennan's Flickr photostream

It has been raining for years now, not a day, not an hour without rain. This continual watering has had a strange effect on urban sculptures. They have started to grow like giant tropical plants, and become even more monumental. To stop this growth it has been decided to store them inside, among the hundreds of bunk beds which, night and day, receive refugees from the rain. [link]

This is the premise for French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's installation, which just opened on 14 October 02008 at London's Tate Modern: TH.2058. Why that title? Apart from the sly pun on the title of George Lucas's first feature, the work is located in the Tate's gigantic lobby, the Turbine Hall (T.H.), and is set in the year 02058. Voilà.

The deluge scenario -- and especially the idea of reworking the Turbine Hall itself as the setting for a future refuge, lined with bunk beds, and complete with ambient audio of endless rain -- seems to me a fine starting point. But it runs swiftly downhill from there.

[Important: I'm not in London right now, and haven't seen this installation first hand. What I have to say below is aimed at the conceptual level and therefore should hold good regardless -- but it's conceivable that as an experience it's something else altogether. Anyway, before reading on, do check out this video, and accompanying articles.]

Says one review of the artist's work, "She has plunged us into the future by 50 years and into an immersive scenario on to which visitors can project their own fears and fantasies." Their own fears and fantasies? I find that hard to believe. With a background screening of what she calls The Last Film, a jumble of apocalyptic movie footage (Marker, Watkins, Roeg); the canon of paperback dystopias sprinkled across refugees' brightly coloured bunk beds (Bradbury, Ballard, Wells); and dotted with reworked sculptures (by artists whose names I confess are only vaguely familiar to me); the work is dominated by the derivative, diluted ingredients of others' imaginaries. "Used futures", an evocative term coined by futurist Sohail Inayatullah, suggests itself irresistibly here. The piece has the air of an unfocused pastiche. Guardian art critic Adrian Searle explains, "This is an extended joke about the purpose of art and art galleries..." Really? A cynical exercise in repackaging the insights of tragically prescient artists who came before? Some joke.

Atop the basically unobjectionable climate-havoc premise, perhaps it's the trivial surrealism of the twist that bothers me -- overwatered sculptures growing out of control. (Actually, as a 13 year-old kid in Brisbane, Surrealism was the first art movement I ever cared about.) It's also possible that my own work as a designer of experiential futures leads me to insist too much on the coherence of a scenario's premise. In any case, I admit to being disappointed to learn that this large-scale, influential gallery's commissioned installation actually set a half-century into the future -- the first that I know of -- has fallen prey to that debilitating disease, equally afflicting po-mo art and theory, of frenzied referentiality. I don't doubt the value of thoughtfully adapting, remixing, and commenting upon extant images of the future in our culture. Still, a chance to do something much more provocative and important than that -- to render experientially available any one of countless conceivable futures, on its own terms -- has not been merely overlooked here, but flouted.

Searle again:

We are meant to ruminate on catastrophe and laugh amongst the ruins of art and civilisation. But you don't need to wait till 2058 to do any of that. The end is now.

It saddens me to say that if this is the best that a world-class art institution can muster by way of an "immersive" exploration of our next half-century, he mightn't be far wrong.

Related posts:
> London after the rain
> Immaculate extinction
> Not drowning, thriving
> Second Nature
> Experiential scenarios on video

(Thanks again, Bryan.)

Wanted: 25,000 miles of crime scene tape

Wanted poster, International Criminal Court: Future Generations Division
FoundFutures artifact produced for "Hawaii 2050" kickoff (Silver Room)
Layout and logo by Steve Kiyabu, August 02006

Distinguished climate scientist James Hansen has called for the chief executives of fossil fuel companies to be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

Hansen appeared before U.S. Congress on 23 June 02008, the 20th anniversary of his historic speech in the same forum expressing 99% certainty on evidence of the greenhouse gas effect. This time, he urged swift and far-reaching action by the next American president and Congress to bring the level of CO2 in the atmosphere down from the current 385 parts per million (and rising 2ppm annually) to 350ppm.

The Real News Network, an emerging user-funded news and documentary service I hadn't heard of before, released this report:

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Hansen added: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the [sic] primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime." (Ed Pilkington, "Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist", The Guardian, 23 June 02008 [print edition: "Sue fuel firm CEOs, urges climate change pioneer", p. 10]. A written statement by Hansen to accompany the speech is available at the Huffington Post and The Guardian.)

This is a bold call to arms on Hansen's part. Leaving aside whether or not you agree with it (which is bound to depend on how bought in you are on the risks associated with climate change), let's note a couple of points.

First, naturally he has been greeted with a mixed reception, variously pleased or disgusted with his sentiments. No surprise there. What does surprise me is that it appears to have been left mainly to the blogosphere to respond. As I write, more than two weeks after the event, a google search ["James Hansen" crimes] returns the Guardian piece (top hit) and a Telegraph article, both quality British newspapers, in the top ten. The top 100 hits, all relating to this story, are dominated by blogs, environmentally or politically themed sites, and news aggregators. American newspapers are barely represented -- exceptions being a critical editorial in the Washington Times, a Washington Post blog post on the story, and a NY Times blog addressing the speech and the coal industry's retort. To some extent, this reflects the shift afoot in how news breaks and circulates, away from traditional newspapers: witness this recently adjudicated Long Bet. Still, I find this curious -- it sounds like silence, from mainstream U.S. media -- given the prominence of both the audience (the House Select Committee On Energy Independence And Global Warming) and the speaker (among other things, he heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, and serves as Al Gore's science advisor).

Second, the idea of trying corporate CEOs for serious crimes, regardless of whether we like it or not, is an intriguing meme. For the state legislature's Hawaii 2050 kickoff, we at HRCFS staged four immersive scenarios to get attendees thinking more deeply about the variety of alternative futures which could eventuate over that period. One of them, the Silver Room (a "collapse" scenario, in contrast to continuation, discipline, and transformation scenarios) posited an energy crisis, followed by the military taking over to ration resources and maintain order [video]. The poster above was one decor item we installed as a clue to the mentality of this post-collapse society: in the wake of a crisis, prosperity is rewritten as prologue to disaster. Let the blame games begin!

Meanwhile, punitive responses to corporate behaviour are already sought in some circles. I came across this picture today at the Rainforest Action Network, documenting an activist intervention in Washington D.C. last November to highlight the notion of global warming as a crime scene.

Image from Understory: The Official Blog of RAN

So, Hansen's call is provocative, there is no doubt about that. But it's an idea that is unlikely to go away, I think, due to broad trends around (a) increasing comprehension of the way systemic risks and harms are distributed across space and time, and (b) increasing focus on corporate social responsibility.

We may not get a "Future Generations Division" of the International Criminal Court (as suggested by our poster) just yet, but people do seem to be awakening to the incremental, emergent consequences of habitual behaviours -- like smoking tobacco, which has recently been outlawed in many public buildings in Europe, North America and Australia. (There's an interesting analogy between tobacco and fossil fuel industries. Hansen: "Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link.") If the worst happens, and some of the more dire forecasts of climate change materialise, the environmental, economic, humanitarian and security consequences (distributed harms par excellence) could well see corporations, and their main representatives, called to account in ways that apparently seem ridiculous to many at the moment.

Not drowning, thriving

Flood (dir. Tony Mitchell, 02007); image captured from DVD ch. 13

Yesterday, almost a year after my spies in London spotted a BBC News report about its forthcoming release, I got around to watching Flood, a British disaster flick about the inundation of the capital. Not even the usually sterling efforts of star Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting; 28 Weeks Later) could keep this determinedly mediocre movie afloat. (Sample the reviews; and join me in sympathy with whoever kept his name off the list of players at the DVD's Amazon UK listing.)

Arguably the best thing about it, as a film, is the nifty shot of Westminster awash (see above).

However, as a contribution to public discourse on flood risk, the film has possibly done a bit better. Its timeliness in confronting/exploiting one of the bogeymen of climate change has been noted, and its likelihood evaluated (The Times; BBC News Magazine). It also earned an audience of 7.2 million when reincarnated as a TV miniseries two months ago (Brand Republic). A film need not be an artistic masterwork in order to offer a useful contribution to our mental environment. I'm not qualified to do this, but it could be interesting to see an evaluation of how money spent on a movie production compares to expenditure on more orthodox means of bringing issues to public attention (public service announcements, government reports, and the like).

Meanwhile, the flooding of London as a long-term prospect, as opposed to popcorn cataclysm, appears to be trickling into the collective mind. Over at Open the Future, Jamais Cascio has posted on a series of photoshopped visualisations called Flooded London 2090, produced by Squint/Opera, a film and media production studio based in the city. (Thanks to Jake for the tip.)

"St Pauls -- A late afternoon plunge from the Whispering Gallery"
Image: Squint/Opera, Flooded London 2090
via www.jamesshaw.co.nz (->Visualisation->Flooded London)

"St Mary Woolnath -- Rich Pickings from Bank"
Image: Squint/Opera, Flooded London 2090
via www.jamesshaw.co.nz (->Visualisation->Flooded London)

"Honor Oak -- Suburban Bucolia"
Image: Squint/Opera, Flooded London 2090
via www.jamesshaw.co.nz (->Visualisation->Flooded London)

The strikingly attractive images above (disappointingly, there are just five in the set) are now being exhibited as part of the London Festival of Architecture, and so, being nearby, I made my way to the venue this afternoon to take a look.

Medcalf gallery, 38 Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell
Photo: the sceptical futuryst

(The details and background of the artwork are, of course, much better appreciated when mounted in large prints on lightboxes than onscreen.)

Outside, it's a sunny 02008; inside, an après-déluge 02090
Photo: the sceptical futuryst

From the project description:

The general scenario is set 80 or so years into the future, long after the sea levels have risen. The catastrophe side of the sea coming in has long since past [sic] and the five images are snapshots of people going about their lives, long since having adapted to the worlds [sic] new circumstance. The five scenes shown through lightboxes present London as a tranquil utopia with the architecture of the distant rat race suspended below the water.

It's good to see here what I've previously suggested, following Jim Dator, we need more of; namely, images of futures in which people are adapting responsibly and pleasantly to climate changes which we no longer have the lead-time to avoid; "promoting a range of viable responses -- various different scenarios which all assume global warming, and some of which show us thriving anyway".

Also, it strikes me that this approach could make a marvellous basis for a much larger exhibition, in London or elsewhere -- imagining alternative futures for a whole variety of urban settings, in a sort of Worth1000 challenge for professional artists. Better yet, include original photos of the current locations alongside each set of alternative visual forecasts.

Disaster scenarios are dramatically exciting, and conceptually vital to risk management; but I suspect that without a sense of their (comparatively mundane) non- or post-disaster counterparts, our best intentions will be found dead in the water.

London's burning

Last week, here in London, I went for a rather remarkable walk.

And While London Burns is an "operatic audio tour" in three acts, a self-guided, immersive audio experience of The City, a.k.a. The Square Mile, London's financial district. The story it tells is woven around the area's extravagant fossil fuel consumption; past, present and (other things being equal) future. It's told mainly through the anguished persona of a young investment manager, who starts out by showing you his place of work, and who, as you listen, quits his job in a wave of self-disgust and wanders the streets ruminating aloud on his, and our, ugly predicament. It deals with two layers; one schematic, the tangled "carbon web" wrapped around the city; and the other personal, the woman who left him, along with her own parallel career in high finance, for a remote off-the-grid commune.

The tour is a project of political art collective Platform, which "works across disciplines for social and ecological justice... combin[ing] the transformatory power of art with the tangible goals of campaigning, the rigour of in-depth research with the vision to promote alternative futures." An impressive, and resonant, undertaking. At the project website, you can download the audio files for free (thanks to Arts Council England, which puts public money to work "to get more art to more people in more places"). Then, you put them on a portable music player (iPod or similar) and make your way to the Starbucks adjacent to the underground railway station at Bank, where the journey begins.

This wasn't the first time I had taken the walk. It was on a brief stopover here in February 02007, on a quiet Sunday morning, that I did it the first time. En route to the airport, I wheeled my heavy suitcase through deserted streets and alleys, and the grim eschatological tone of the tour and its melancholy score was underlined by the emptiness of the buildings and thoroughfares along the way. The tour is generally intended to be taken during business hours, however, because at one stage you're guided indoors through the Royal Exchange Building (formerly the London Stock Exchange), now a luxury shopping centre. The other time, the building had been closed; but on this occasion, a lunchtime crowd of snappily dressed financiers sat round tables in the vaulted atrium, surrounded by top-end stores like De Beers and Cartier. Generally I found the backdrop of the teeming, oblivious hive of The City just as effective as its sombre, emptied-out weekend version. The latter condition, however, does make the tour a little bit easier to hear.

The audio walk -- which, regrettably, by its nature can't really be appreciated or grasped by an audient not on the spot -- emphasises how much things change on the surface, and how little they change underneath. There's a world-weariness about this view that's not shallow cynicism, but burdened by a deep awareness of history. I think the great achievement of the project is that the walker comes to appreciate this depth, and accompanying entanglements, much better. Along the way, you cross the line of the Great Fire of London (01666), as well as the possible future shoreline of a risen River Thames. One of the practical consequences of the constant change is disruption of the tour's route as time goes on: both a pedestrian overpass leading away from Tower 42, and the Monument which concludes the walk, are currently closed for renovations. Obviously the times for walking certain sequences do vary, and the directions were sparse enough that I accidentally strayed from the path once or twice the first go around, but I was able to hit pause and get my bearings. Another potential frustration that can pull you from the story is if your batteries run out. That happened to me ten minutes in, this time -- a charming little irony for an audio walk about unsustainable energy consumption, ha ha. I had to recharge and come back the next day.

Still, I find this rapidly developing medium, the immersive audio walk, a fantastic way to experience a place. You get a new, mind-expanding vision of the City that is afforded only by inhabiting it differently (a bit like the Situationists' dérive, but carefully constructed to place you in another man's shoes). The cocooning of the listener in her private aural environment, which might in other contexts be regretted for disconnecting people from their fellows and surroundings (armies of commuters spend their journeys either shouting into cellphones or retreating into iPod solitude), in this setting provides instead a cinematic soundtrack-to-life, an unpredictable (the first time, at least) meandering path to which you can surrender, and a thrilling sense of insider's initiation. Sensory synchronicities, both planned and unplanned, make the experience exciting, and somehow grounding. The voiceover mentions a layer of fine black dust on all the buildings about -- the accretion of miniscule particles of fossil fuel exhaust -- so you touch a finger to the handrail, and it gets coated in grime. On two occasions, during the choral refrain admonishing the audio-walker to "look up at the sky", I raised my eyes in time to catch, at precisely that moment, a jet passing overhead.

I love the contradiction that it's substantially the same experience, and yet unique in each detail, every time it is taken. The audio walk is a designed experience, the script pre-recorded, but the motion performed by you, with the improvised assistance of the location and thousands of unwitting extras. It's more unpredictable than a film, feels more labile than most live theatre, and is certainly more personal, by dint of participation, than either.

The essence of the experience is not the walk per se, but the detailed choreographing of attention in the midst of a genuinely chaotic environment. Directing the attention, cognitive and sensory, in a real place in motion, seems to make it eminently suitable for futures, which is ultimately about perceiving the present differently. This is the only audio walk I've encountered which really succeeds in heightening appreciation of the fragility, ephemerality and contingency of the present, although I see this medium as ideally suited to engendering that reflective frame of mind.*

In any case, I'd recommend this to anyone within reach of London who's interested in the forces behind climate change, or even in just the possibilities of this immersive medium. Platform is to be applauded for a daringly critical piece of public art that asks, and enables, us to survey and move through our dazzlingly, dizzyingly busy surroundings with a more inquiring gaze; it invites us not to be overwhelmed by all the things that appear to change, but to be more sensitive to the things which stubbornly do not.

On that point; yesterday, while getting updated on Platform's current work, I watched their recent home-brewed documentary Burning Capital, which is about BP (formerly British, now ostensibly "beyond", Petroleum; one of the largest energy companies in the world, headquartered in London). It's quite a technical investigation -- not in an engineering sense, but a political one -- so may not enthrall all comers, but it does explicitly ask one question implicitly posed by And While London Burns: "How long is it before government, forced by rising public pressure, changes the theoretical cost of carbon into an actual cost, and the company is forced to carry the real economic impact of climate change?" (Burning Capital, Act 3.1)

How long, indeed.


* Colleague Jake Dunagan (HRCFS) and I did a bit of research towards a possible futures-themed audio walk in Chinatown, Honolulu. As funding for the (surprisingly expensive) studio production bit proved elusive, that project morphed into a more immediately viable, but very different, multi-part FoundFutures intervention late last year. Still, with my appetite whetted thanks to that development process, the series of audio walks or tours I've taken in the past year and a half is surprising even to me: Chinatown Manhattan; the 9/11 Sonic Memorial; Wall Street; Belleville, Paris; the disappointingly dull Da Vinci Code tour at The Louvre; the eye-opening driving tour Invisible-5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I've also taken more standard key-in-a-number tours of Pearl Harbor, Stonehenge, Tate Modern (a multimedia guide on a handheld computer), and a couple of urban walks of the cheap talking-head variety that gives audio tours a bad name. The one that first alerted me to the potential of the medium, which I first took in 01998 and revisited last year, was the Alcatraz prison audio tour in San Francisco. The most fully realised urban experiences were the Soundwalk tours (Chinatown, Wall St, and Belleville), along with And While London Burns.

Ignore global warming

...and the WWF might kick your ass.


On the last trip I took from Hawaii to the mainland U.S., at the end of February, I took the above snapshot of an ad in the inflight magazine -- airline passengers being a worthy target audience indeed for awareness-raising around the underappreciated risks of fossil fuel consumption. The WWF (World Wildlife Fund, Canada) here uses heavily ironic images to make the point that (as their slogan has it) "Ignoring global warming won't make it go away."

Upon investigation, it turns out there are three images in the print campaign, each based on a photo set in a disastrously disruptive, climate-chaos future where people are carrying on business as usual -- sporting upper lips of almost British levels of stiffness -- regardless:




(These compare interestingly with the Diesel "Global Warming Ready" fashion ads seen here not long ago.)

There's also a TV spot along the same lines (via glossy):



Insight into the purpose of the campaign -- launched back in late 02006, although my own encounter with a current print ad was just a couple of months ago -- comes from a Canadian marketing and advertising industry magazine:

WWF posted the spot on YouTube with a call-to-action to participate in a Toronto-area event last month. The post attracted dozens of comments from interested users, and at least 5,000 people showed up to the demo. At press time, the YouTube posting was averaging 1,000 views a day.

The campaign, which also includes OOH, print, radio and a microsite, www.saveourclimate.ca, aims to broaden the WWF's image from simply an animal rights group to that of a "world security guard" of sorts, says [copywriter Chris] Taciuk. It's running across English-speaking Canada in donated media space.

~Annette Bourdeau, "WWF goes beyond wildlife to take on broader remit", Strategy Magazine (Canada), December 02006.

It's enlightening to find that the goal here is not simply to promote issue awareness, but also to signal the Swiss-founded WWF's interest in ecological concerns beyond just wildlife (since 01986, outside North America, WWF's official name has been the less issue-specific World Wide Fund for Nature). Layers.

I also find myself pondering this use of grim futures imagery in pursuit of the duties of a "world security guard", for two reasons. First, that's an intriguing and somewhat unsettling phrase -- though perhaps not officially a label the organisation itself would use? Second, as regular readers may have anticipated, I'm curious about the substantive strategy here, which entails questions about what kind of impact on people's thinking and behaviour are sought or anticipated by WWF, as a result of such an intervention. There's a copy of the same clip on YouTube -- although note that the "glossy" version posted above has better audio -- with 1,068 views, but only one comment, from user "rhode74", which from an eco-activist standpoint seems almost too good to be true:

I saw this commercial the other night while I was using my hair dryer.

I couldn't understand what was going on at first since I couldn't hear it. But after seeing the hurricane; then the firestorm; I shut off my hair dryer and heard Mr.Rogers' song, "Please won't you be my neighbor".

Then I saw, "Ignoring Global Warming won't make it go away"

That had an impact on me.

I will now try to recycle what I have.

Call me sceptical, but to me it's a safe bet that meanwhile, others saw the clip, noted that was a WWF joint, thought to themselves "hippie fuckers", and went back to clubbing baby seals with renewed vigour -- buoyed by a fresh wave of contempt for what they might (were they to pause momentarily, exchange club for pen, and commit an opinion to writing) describe as the outlandish fantasies of conservationist ideologues.

Some people dismiss An Inconvenient Truth because they don't like Al Gore.

However much good faith is brought to one's position, single-minded advocacy in the face of uncertainty (a tendency closely related to monofuturism) is all too easily caricatured and ignored. The habit of thinking in alternative futures cultivates simultaneous consideration of divergent lines of scenaric logic side by side.

I'm not arguing for considering "alternative" futures in which global warming doesn't hit. Quite the opposite. I'm suggesting that this style of advertising -- parodying denial -- may not win over many new converts. Instead, promoting a range of viable responses -- various different scenarios which all assume global warming, and some of which show us thriving anyway -- may now be a more powerful strategy.

Oil and water

"The opinion that art should not be political is itself a political opinion."
~George Orwell

Some people find the combination of art and politics somehow distasteful or inappropriate. Like oil and water, the sentiment seems to be, they don't mix.

Along with Orwell -- one of my favourite writers -- I am not among those who hold this view.

Last Tuesday, I had the (mostly first-year undergraduate) students in my Introduction to Politics class break into six small groups, with about three people in each, to develop and perform their own future scenarios. The task was:
a) to select within each group a domain of interest; they came up with carbon, recycling, education, oil, Mars colonisation, and medicine.
b) to generate and describe in just a few sentences four divergent scenarios for their chosen domain, out to the year 02038, based on Dator's four generic images of the future (continuation, collapse, discipline, transformation).
c) to select the most interesting or surprising of the four, and design a way for the group to communicate it to the whole class in the most impactful way possible, during a presentation window of five minutes or so. (It was a low stakes, low constraints, short exercise -- they had about fifteen minutes at the end of one class, and twenty at the start of the next, plus whatever outside time they chose to allow, for preparation.)

These "experiments in futures theatre" yielded results ranging from fairly standard classroom presentations through to immersive improv. For example, one group presented in character as the partners of Starlight Corporation, a waste management enterprise celebrating its 100th successful launch of trash into space, and they provided an Associated Press news clipping from 02055 to illustrate the company's talk.

For Thursday, to build on this first sketchy foray into experiential scenarios, I assigned the students randomly into four groups, giving each a half-page text scenario describing a different version of Hawaii in the 02030s, again based on the four generic images. By providing pre-developed, cohesive scenarios (albeit very brief ones) I hoped and expected that the groups would be able to dedicate more attention to their communicative strategies.

And so it turned out. You can see what they said about the two exercises in the daily "minute papers" at our class blog.

A major goal of this course is to sensitise students to the political dimensions of perception, and to invite them to participate in recreating their own perceptions, as well as those of others, by manifesting alternative futures in various media.

With that in mind, the Orwell quote above, which I don't recall seeing before today, is right to suggest that art and politics are intertwined. (I firmly believe there's no such thing as "apolitical" -- though there are plenty of examples of apathy or acquiescence, delusively pretending to lofty detachment.) The quote comes from the website of Watermark, one of the examples of what we've been calling "blue line" projects in several U.S. coastal cities, as outlined in my most recent post here at t.s.f. The blue line cuts right through this intersection of art and politics, inviting consideration of sea level rise by manifesting various forecasts in today's environment. Watermark is a particularly interesting example, from my point of view, and warrants a closer look than I was able to give it last time.

It's a collaborative art effort initiated by three artists based in in Seattle, Washington: Nicole Kistler, Sarah Kavage, and Vaughn Bell. Each member of the trio brings an interesting perspective and training to their collaboration. The following paragraphs are excerpted from the artists' bios:

NICOLE KISTLER is a public artist who focuses on engaging people in a deeper understanding of the living world. She prefers to work in places and in media that are accessible to everyone. Nicole feels she has created something successful when her work takes on a life of its own. Whether that’s providing a springboard for the ideas, experiments and energy of others or allowing a natural process to run its course. Through her narratives, Nicole exposes the folly of issues for what they are and introduces alternative viewpoints and possibilities through humor. As a project manager in traditional public involvement projects, she is interested in exploring the creative process of art making and temporary art projects as a means of public participation, as a process instead of a product. While often drawing from her background in Landscape Architecture, she has found that art allows people to engage in discussion while suspending tightly held beliefs – to be amazed, surprised, and inspired.

SARAH KAVAGE is a multidisciplinary artist and urban planner. Her varied experience in project management, education and community outreach in collaborative and multidisciplinary settings has lead her to develop a number of public and installation based art projects in parallel to a body of two-dimensional work. She uses a variety of media to explore the themes with which she is most interested – communication and the transmission of information, the intersection between the manmade and the natural, and all permutations of urban environments. Her work is infused with social commentary, with a goal of participation and genuine engagement with viewers.

VAUGHN BELL is an artist and educator. Her work encompasses installations and performances involving living plants, multi-media video installation works, and public interventions.

A landscape architect, an urban planner, and an educator, all working in public art. Interesting mix!

Now, the focus in my last post was their version of the "blue line" project, which entailed walking along and demarcating Seattle's "new waterfront" (based on a 20-foot ocean rise) with soil, seeds, and water. One element highlighted by Watermark's work, which I neglected to address before, was the medium of performance -- the act of tracing the line with one's body, while leaving seeds, and water. This may at first glance seem to be the most fragile or ephemeral approach of those noted so far, in terms of the visual markings left behind, but it might also represent one of the most experientially effective interventions, for those who take part. I don't think we can assume that the degree of external permanence of the line (e.g., the painted lightblueline of Santa Barbara) corresponds proportionally to social or political impact. Invisible memory also leaves palpable traces; flowing into our perceptions and behaviours. Watermark's take on that strand of the project:

As we walked a kind of meditation took place, we could hear the seeds hitting against the sidewalk, reflect on the state of affairs, and on each small action affecting the whole world. Designated participants talked with passersby and distributed cards explaining the project. On Earth Day 2007, we walked the line again giving a tour of the Watermark, and each person was astonished at what 20 feet looks like.

Another thing that impresses me about the Watermark project is its multifaceted, multimedia conception. They go on to explain:

In August [02007], we were included in the Groundtruthing show where we showed a video of the first walk at SOIL Gallery in Seattle, distributed postcards, and led tours of the imaginary "new" waterfront. We used humor here, as we donned snorkel gear and swimsuits for an "underwater" tour, and carted along a giant block of ice to "water the urban desert."

Sarah (L) and Nicole (R) giving the Seattle Underwater Tour Watermark website

As some of my students intuited after their own futures theatre interventions in class last week, the use of humour can be very significant in making this kind of thing work. Humour provides a package within which uncomfortable or unusual possibilities may be raised, as well as often being more enjoyable than an entirely earnest call to political awareness.

One of my favourite standup comics, the late Bill Hicks, master of subject matter simultaneously sacred and profane, used to describe himself as follows:

I, like all artists in Western cultures, am a shaman. (That's somewhere between prophet and crackpot, by the way . . . though much closer to prophet.) [...] I am a Shaman come in the guise of a comic, in order to heal perception by using stories and "jokes," and always, always, always the Voice of Reason, that people may have Hope and Peace, by healing their misperceptions.

~Bill Hicks, Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, 02004, p. 221-222 [emphasis in original].

I believe the role of the futurist, properly understood, is quite similar. She fearlessly mixes art and politics because she realises that fundamentally the two are inseparable. So too, with comedy and matters of ultimate concern. My mentor Jim Dator, unofficially Hawaii's chief futurist-in-residence, tells me he has described his own role as as that of the "state Weird", and, in reference to his extensive work with judiciaries, the "court Jester" (I'll add references when I find them). Dator's second law of the future, "any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous", rears its head again in a slightly different form. (Truth be told, Jim is one of the funniest people I know.) Humour is key. And laughter lets many truths, both harmless and profound, slip through the staid defences of conventional discourse.

Illustrating that spirit -- where art and politics, tragedy and comedy, playful and earnest meet -- here's the postcard that Watermark distributed as part of its campaign, based on what the artists call a photo simulation of downtown Seattle underwater...

Image: Watermark

It can be compared to other postcards from the future -- artifacts dancing on imagination's cutting edge, where plausibility and absurdity become indistinguishable...

"Shown in the exhibition 'Visualisations of the 21st century' at the RIBA, [architect Paul] Ruff envisages the decidedly inland and not especially touristy Essex town of Basildon as a rather jolly seaside resort with its own pier. Bring on global warming, I say."

~Building.co.uk, Issue 06, 02006

Stanford-le-Hope is a small town in Essex, in the Thames estuary some 25 miles from London, with a working-class commuter population and an enormous nearby oil refinery. The self-sufficient, eco-friendly scenario pictured in the postcard is ironic by design.
Images: Paul Ruff From a report by RIBA/Building Futures [UK]
Living With Water: Visions of a Flooded Future, June 02007, p. 20
(Report blogged by Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond, 15 August 02007)

Image: FoundFutures Postcard artwork: Aaron Rosa & Yumi Vong
Also see other cards from the FoundFutures campaign, May 02007 picture, blog post

(See also the Sierra Nevada deforestation card [picture, blog post] and Hawaii's introduced species postcard [picture, blog post].)

Now, one final thing I wanted to mention about Watermark is that the other artwork of its originators includes some really cool stuff. In particular, I have in mind Nicole Kistler's "Tour from the Future" (part of Seattle's GrassRoutes Environmental Arts Festival in 02006), which she describes thus:

Come Visit the Historic Ruins of Highway 520

The Tour from the Future was part of a larger group arts festival aimed at bringing public attention to development threats facing the Washington Park Arboretum. For the project I created 14 installations and acted as a as tour guide from the future guiding tours of the "historic ruins of Highway 520" and the 520 bridge. Inspired by visits to many archaeological ruins including Tikal, Rome and Ankor Wat whose societies collapsed, I decided to parody that experience for this project hoping to illustrate the dangerous behaviors that our society has engaged and how those eerily parallel other great societies. I posted interpretive signage throughout the three-mile trail loop connecting events at MOHAI, Foster Island and the Arboretum. In addition, I created photo-simulation binoculars and telescopes for viewing the ruins and allowing visitors to see the currently proposed bridge. Photographer John Bacon acted as tour group photographer. The tour visited all the other performances and art installations along the way providing some "glue" for the entire event.

Tour Advertisement

Visit the historic ruins of Highway 520 and what archaeologists believe to have been part of an enormous transportation network throughout the former United States. See one of the best-preserved collections of petroleum-operated vehicles. View the bridge ruins with one of the world’s most insightful tour guides, and take advantage of special viewpoints and telescopes only available through this tour. This tour also includes special opportunities to experience new installations that allow participants to "drive" their own single occupancy vehicle, and see traditional performances by people from the same era who warned their society about the dangers of oil dependency. Our tour photographer will capture each special moment for you. This is the most complete tour of the entire "520 site" and one that will create lasting memories for you and your family. Write a postcard home! Not to be missed!!

Map of the Tour from the Future Nicole Kistler

I'm very happy to learn that the Chinatown futures audio tour, which Jake and I have had on the backburner for a while, can count this among its predecessors.

Car parts totem pole Nicole Kistler

Simulated image of State 520 noise wall design Nicole Kistler

There is a distinct sense, I think, that futures is a domain in which apparent polar opposites come together.

So there's poetry and irony in the fact that two of the most common political themes during my last couple of months of posts about future artifacts and interventions at this blog turn out to be oil ... and water.

Related posts:
> It's even hotter under the collar
> Bad reviews of future news
> A thin blue line (3 parts)
> World without oil photo essay (3 parts)
> Gaming the end of oil
> Good news for people who love bad news
> Climate change for fun and profit