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.

Your destiny is no longer in question

Above, two videos from NEXTgencode, "the industry leader in personal genetic life enhancement" [link > About Us].

These ads, and the website to which they point, were part of a promotional campaign for sci-fi writer Michael Crichton's 02006 novel Next.

A Wall Street Journal article at that time examined the hazards of hoax-like advertising material that manifests, so to speak, fragments of the in-scenario universe.

Fake videos are part of a broader trend in marketing involving the creation of pseudo events or phony organizations aimed at sparking buzz among fans. Among big marketers to take similar steps are Volkswagen AG's Audi brand and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC TV network.
...
ABC is still studying in the impact of its fake-marketing campaign [for TV series Lost].
...
Such efforts are known as "alternate reality games." They tantalize consumers with a mysterious story line, then ask them to explore more deeply.

To gauge the success of these marketing ploys, advertisers will typically examine consumer posts on blogs and elsewhere on the Web and see if they sound positive or negative, according to David Cohen, an executive at Interpublic Group of Cos.' Universal McCann.

~Jeffrey Trachtenberg and Brian Steinberg, "Believe It or Not, Fake Biotech Firm Is Key Marketing Ploy for Crichton Novel", Wall Street Journal, 16 November 02006

Online videos may still be relatively new, but Crichton has long used material of (if I may put it this way) ambiguous facticity to prop up the conceits of his science fiction. The first novel he published under his own name (The Andromeda Strain, 01969) was garnished with plausible, yet fabricated, scientific-looking footnotes. Back in high school, the first book of his I read (Jurassic Park, 01990) strove for and, I think, achieved terrific verisimilitude in the same way; using the false document technique.

So, I read Next sometime in the last year. The characters are thin, and the plot is less than convincing; it's certainly not his best work. I do, however, really like this playful use of quasi-documentary material to draw potential readers into a story which, like much of Crichton's fiction, although set in the present day, is predicated on the idea that cutting-edge technology is considerably more potent than you realise. In other words, the promotional medium matches the message, which is, as the book's blurb puts it, "The future is closer than you think." The brief moment when one is taken in by the video(s) or website -- if it happens this way for you -- thereby entertaining the reality of the fictitious premise, may be accompanied by a minor shock that such a thing could be possible, or already here (future-shock therapy).

Now, from a foresight communication perspective, there's a tricky balance to be struck in all this, which we face in designing experiential or immersive scenarios. The depiction of a near-term future may come across as more urgent, more frightening (for example), and more likely to be mistaken for actual fact, while being less responsive to intervention (since there's less time to do something about it); whereas a further-out scenario, in terms of timeline and plausibility, may allow more scope for action (i.e., avoid or pursue), yet could be less likely to seem salient, and hence to find or engage an audience. This dilemma may be of little concern where the primary goal is to entertain, but it's important for a futurist attempting to generate present-day traction for real problems and opportunities on (or over) the horizon. Only once have I been involved in experientially manifesting a scenario that could on closer inspection still be regarded as plausibly happening at that moment, as opposed to decades into the future; it gained attention, but as much for the strategy itself as for the issues it raised [link]. I've also seen scenaric possibilities that would be far more impactful in reality being dismissed or ignored altogether, where they are understood from the beginning as "art", or a mere "exercise".

In-scenario communication elements can draw criticism for their supposed deceptive qualities, even though often, as with this particular example, the dislocation isn't meant to last, and it's not at all difficult to debunk. From the WSJ article:

HarperCollins says the approach reflects Mr. Crichton's innovative style and is intended to be provocative and mysterious. "It's not about fooling people," says Kathy Schneider, associate publisher of the HarperCollins imprint. "It's about creating a playful add-on to the book."

Well, I guess the publisher would have to say that, even if it weren't the case. Another view, from Steve Bryant of The Hollywood Reporter [original; subscription required]:

Don't call HarperCollins' plan a hoax, though. That's ascribing too much narrative depth to a transparent scheme that isn't intended to fool the doggedly curious but to coddle the easily bemused. Rather, HarperCollins' plan is more of a "faux hoax," a mystery that winks at you. Subtle enough to be interesting and transparent enough to be followed, the videos gin up interest and eventual sales.

It all depends on how it's done; but such campaigns raise questions about to what degree, or for how long, an audience is "deceived", and also what ethical (or legal) consequences may flow from this. Jake Dunagan and I maintain that, in many cases, "it makes more sense to be surprised by a simulation than blindsided by reality" [see comments]. Still, both the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome (where people become inured to false alarms), and people's justifiably adverse reactions to the sense of having someone try to fool them, are hazards of working in this space.

The tagline "Your destiny is no longer in question", at the top of this post, is a semi-sinister figment of NEXTgencode's fictitious in-scenario website. It's one of several elements about the videos and site that satirically represent the intrusion of genetic science into our lives (with what combination of serious and jocular intent, it's hard to tell). And it's arguably more interesting for these -- what are they; future? alternate-reality? however you cut it, ambiguous -- artifacts to occupy a grey zone than to profess an earnest black-or-white adherence to either ideology or comedy. Not that they're brilliant, but from a public discourse perspective they are probably more effective and interesting (though much less profitable) than the book. Bryant again:

A clever Web hoax is the kind of ancillary content that can be even more useful and engaging than the original content itself.

Indeed.

The irony here is that Crichton, a veteran of these epistemological borderlands, has publicly emphasised the importance of being able to separate the two in the midst of our info-glutted media environment. In a 02003 speech which made an impression on me when I came across it online several years ago, he says:

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

The original context has to do with certain claims of environmentalists which he characterises as ideologically driven and overblown (while others make much the same argument about his sceptical stance on climate change), but the epistemic challenge he points out remains valid and troubling.

Still, I disagree that it is the most important issue we face. Arguably its equal is the transformative power of our socio-technical process, coupled with our collective unwillingness to take responsibility for its possible outcomes. The melding of fact and fiction, the rigorous exercise of the imagination, the practise of futures studies, have much to offer here. And as alternate reality games, and massively multiplayer forecasting, continue to come into their own, I wonder if more of us will see some value in the deliberate -- not mischievous or pranksterish, but deliberate and temporary -- dimming of the too-bright border between fact and fiction. Where our "destiny" is always in question.

This is where the future lives.

[NEXTgencode videos and website]

Related posts:
> Don't break the universe
> Behold: a disturbing hole!

(Thanks for reminding me about this one, Matt.)