A first look at the Caltech Time Travel Gathering

We recently ran an experiment inviting time travellers to California Institute of Technology.

Caltech physicist Spiros Michalakis and emcee Ahmed Best welcomed guests to the Time Travel Gathering. Banner: Marcia Brown, after Stephen Hawking. Photo: Heather Nusz.

Around 150 people were in attendance. Photo: Heather Nusz.

In the lead up, I shared a bit of the backstory here. But some may be curious about what happened at the event itself.

Caltech’s news office has just published its own account, which opens with an evocative snapshot:

...a crowd of about 150 people gathered in and around a colonial-style house on campus. In one corner, visitors sat captivated by an attendee who claimed to have arrived from a future where whales have gone extinct. The group huddled together around her hand-drawn book of animals that no longer graced the world. Another, who said she had come from a future in which reliance on fossil fuels had been eliminated, told a guest whose clean-energy start-up had just folded that the future still needed their work.

Inside the house, a quantum physicist fielded questions about time travel, and on the front lawn, a new guest arrived in a modified DeLorean before stepping out to ask the crowd, “What year is it?”

This was the scene at Caltech’s Time Travel Gathering, hosted by TACIT [Theater Arts] and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech (IQIM). ...

“My work is about making possible futures vivid enough that they can change what we do now, and often that means immersing people into simulations of alternative scenarios,” explains Stuart Candy, a futurist who served as artist-in-residence this year at TACIT, and who originated and led the design of the event. “Something I’ve never had the chance to do until now is invite people from various possible futures to join us in the present.”

It was a privilege to get to carry out this unusual investigation, pulling together improv artists, quantum physicists, a hypnotist, and a DeLorean all under one banner (in this case literally – “Welcome Time Travellers” – the British spelling a little hat-tip to Stephen Hawking’s 02009 precedent at Cambridge University).

And it was a joy to play together with turning the customary approach to experiential futures on its head.

There’s plenty to share about the project, its design, outcomes, and many remarkable contributors, in due course. This is just a first look for now, with much appreciation to my Caltech colleagues and collaborators.

The full article is at the Caltech website.

Thanks to reporter Whitney Clavin for the piece, as well as to my co-conspirators Kari Coleman, Spiros Michalakis, and Brian Brophy for their valuable input on the story.

Stay tuned for more!

A modified DMC-12 DeLorean pulled up on the front lawn. Photo: Kari Coleman.

Michalakis fielded quantum physics and time travel questions throughout the event. Photo: Caltech.

Part of an “entanglement group” in conversation. Photo: Kari Coleman.

A coin and invitation, dated 02026, retrieved from the gathering. Design: Michelle Constantine, David Delgado, and Stuart Candy. Photo: Spiros Michalakis/Caltech.

Related:
> Nostalgic for the Future
> Building Time Machines at California Institute of Technology
> What happens when 200 architects visit the year 02099?
> Look out, Banksy
> Library of Possibilities
> Using the Future at NASA

Nostalgic for the future

We’re throwing a time travel party at Caltech tomorrow night.

Here’s the slightly crazy story of how that came to be.

Back in October, at the very start of the academic year, I ran a weekend-long event at the university, leading a group of students, faculty, JPL folks, and community members in co-creating experiential scenarios; immersive futures set 30 years from now, to bring to life possibilities that they (the participants) would like to see come to fruition in reality.

The Immersive Futures Jam – IFjam for short – was great fun, and there seemed to be a number of ways it might be built upon later in the year, as my artist residency at Caltech Theater (TACIT) unfolded. It remained to be seen what, specifically, those next steps ought to be.

The very next weekend I was at a friend’s 50th birthday party in Pennsylvania, in a dark-sky area of the state (he’s into astronomy) a couple of hours’ drive from Pittsburgh. And after a weekend spent with a group of us looking at stars and chatting, he and I were driving back towards the city and listening to (birthday man’s choice) what else but the most recent podcast episode from astrophysicist and science communicator par excellence Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Towards the end of the episode, Tyson, answering a listener’s question, said something like, “Stephen Hawking or his people hosted a party at Caltech, and the announcement was made to all time travelers, come back in time and meet us here, and we will greet you. Nobody showed up.”

I could hardly believe my ears. I’d never listened to this podcast before; what a mad coincidence to stumble across this arcane yet eerily relevant bit of Caltech lore at that moment. And how strange that it had never come up during our forays with time machines at the university.

When I tried to look up the details of the story, I realized why. Tyson had misremembered and transposed to sunny California either or both of two events – a time travelers’ convention held at MIT in 02005, and a demonstration by Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University a few years later (an ingenious bit of scientific performance art from the late Professor Hawking which regularly, and deservingly, goes viral again).

I figured, well, evidently Caltech hasn’t done something like this... but it should. And both those earlier events, although intended to attract actual time travelers, had apparently come up empty, in terms of actual visitors from other times. So I thought, one way or another, that we might be able to go one better.

Having pitched the idea to TACIT director Brian Brophy, who was wonderfully game, I then enlisted as a co-conspirator and co-producer the LA-based improv theatre luminary Kari Coleman, who had taken part in IFjam and whose deep experience in character creation and improvisational work seemed a perfect complement to my own work in translating worlds/scenarios into 1:1 scale situations.

But at this point we were still thinking on quite a modest scale.

Then a few weeks back, the event began to take on a momentum and life of its own. A mutual friend at NASA introduced me to physicist Spiros Michalakis from Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. Among other things, Spiros is known for advising Hollywood productions with quantum and time-travel storylines like the Marvel movies Ant Man, Doctor Strange, and Avengers: Endgame.

Spiros took on the event as an opportunity to explore and promote public engagement with non-linear and quantum perspectives on time. These, it turns out, are highly intriguing and generative, but not terribly well represented in collective imagination.

So now the Caltech Time Travel Gathering is happening – has already happened? – tomorrow evening, Friday May 29th. Our little experiment has been coalescing and scaling at speed over the past few weeks.

I won’t go into all the elements that are coming together, as we can talk about that later, but I will say it’s getting a bit exciting.

A piece about the project appeared today in IFLScience. I particularly love Spiros’s answer to the journalist here:

Experiential futurist Stuart Candy, actor Kari Coleman, and physicist Spiros Michalakis have approached it in a new way, thanks to insights into quantum mechanics that weren’t available two decades ago.

When I questioned them about how they plan to succeed where MIT and Hawking failed, it was clear we were going to have a great time: the answers are in a superposition of being both very silly and very serious. Which is an ethos we are 100 percent on board with!

“The weather is just better over here,” Michalakis told IFLScience. “Plus, if a time machine is ever invented, it will be at Caltech.”

That IFLScience piece includes a bit more than I have space to share here about what we’re doing, and how, and why. (In a future post I would also like to say more about the many indispensable, wondrous people who have contributed to making this thing possible – and maybe also a word about what this thing will have turned out to be).

But I should add, that article follows on the heels a highly remarkable report that appeared in the most recent edition of Caltech's campus newspaper, The California Tech – apparently from the year 02046?? – written by its editor Damian Wilson, another of last October's IFjam participants. See below.

Strange, indeed.

Now, whether the more cosmic, time- and mind-bending ambitions of the event tomorrow eventuate or not remains to be seen – for me on this timeline at least.

Here’s what we know: since yesterday, the event has been sold out. Unfortunately tickets are essential for entry and the venue can’t accommodate walk-ups (but if any last minute public spots open up, they will be found here).

And as this academic year and my artist residency at the university come to a close, the attentions, energies and imaginations of scientists and artists from across campus at Caltech and from across Los Angeles have begun to be activated, and to converge on tomorrow evening.

I would like to think of these as marking, in themselves. a kind of success that in the end might matter even more.

As Spiros says, “We want to build bridges of trust between creative minds across the sciences and the arts so that, if we ever do build a time machine to the past, we won’t need to activate it. Let’s be nostalgic for the future, instead.”

(Update August 31, 02026: A follow-up post with a first look at the event from Caltech’s own news office.)

Related:
> Building Time Machines at California Institute of Technology
> Songs from visionary futures – with Brian Eno
> Library of Possibilities – for NASA JPL
> Journalism from the future
> A Time Traveller’s Story – video
> What happens when 200 architects visit the year 02099?
> Growing imagination and worldbuilding capabilities at the BBC
> Lost futures – featuring “aiglatson”
> Imagining alternative pathways for Bristol
> Bringing futures to Stanford d.School

Apocalypse for one

Image via.

"If the world ended tomorrow, would you be happy with how you've lived your life?" 

A recent program by British hypnotist and television personality Derren Brown recently made this question the basis for an immersive experience created to convince one individual that the end of the world as we know it had arrived.

Twenty-one year-old self-confessed layabout Steven Brosnan was, unbeknownst to him, selected from among thousands of candidates, primed over several weeks for the outlandish scenario about to unfold, and then thrust into a calculatedly harrowing experience designed to teach him to really value his life. The whole thing was then broadcast on national television in the UK as a two-part special.

A consummate showman, Brown has created a number of ingenious made-for-TV experiments before. Three in particular were previously recommended to me with great enthusiasm - The Heist, The System, and Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette Live - by my friend Jane McGonigal, a designer of what (a few years ago were called) alternate reality games. ARGs are (were?) a class of interactive role-play to which the nifty transmedia narrative stunt at hand bears more than a passing resemblance.

Derren Brown: Apocalypse designs a complex experiential arc around just one person. So evidently a key challenge was identifying the right candidate; someone who, as Brown says: "...currently leads a self-centered existence, and who takes his life, his friends, his family and material comforts all for granted. I'm hoping he'll be able to learn from the meticulously crafted experience I'm going to put him through. And by taking everything away from him, I hope to make him recognise the value of what he has."

The elaborate setup involved getting his entire family to play along, hacking their smartphones and doctoring media feeds to make the signs of impending disaster increasingly frequent, and then finally transitioning the subject into a fully immersive situation which he didn't know was hypothetical. Therefore throughout, amid all the actors and family members involved, he's the only one who doesn't realise he's on camera. Think Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds radio play meets The Truman Show.

I won't describe the whole program blow by blow. If the description appeals, you'll be well entertained and should check it out yourself (video embedded below). Also, my thoughts shared after the break will contain spoilers and may not make complete sense if you haven't seen Apocalypse.

Now, futures as a field, I'd say, shares with education as a whole a common presumption at their heart that virtual experience can be as valuable as real. (Unfortunately, only a small proportion of education encounters are designed for maximum experiential impact. The same could be said of foresight.) Yet, even when carried out according to the most uninspired and dull-as-dishwater of conventions -- chalk-and-talk in the classroom; ploddingly written scenarios in the futures world -- both implicitly have an underlying faith in simulation (or for futures, simulacrum). Put another way, that article of faith is that you can learn from a situation that is constructed, that's not entirely real.

Such is Brown's basic supposition here, too, the plan being to simulate global catastrophe as "teachable moment" for Steven. The idea is that someone's life can be transformed by an encounter that, even though faked or engineered, presents as real to them, and so produces genuine revelation. And that's just what happens, or what seems to happen, in Apocalypse. We might say Brown's goal is to create an experiential learning journey (here, it's explicitly modeled on The Wizard of Oz, a classic "hero's journey" as in Joseph Campbell's mythic/archetypal Jungian framework). It's a thoroughly ingenious concept for a television narrative, and entertaining as all get out to watch. Yet I've also had a creeping sense that it's not entirely successful in the execution, and I've been trying to figure out why that is.

The reason I'm writing about this is because, as a designer of experiential scenarios, I'm keen to learn from these rare examples how to construct better immersions into hypothetical narrative situations, in order to make the practice more effective. What makes experiential scenarios tick, and how might they be improved? (To be clear, then; anything that seems critical about what I say here is part of an attempt to work with these thoughts as a practitioner, rather than gratuitous sniping from the safety of my armchair.)

I found parts of the show, especially the first half, very moving. The setup with the gradual introduction of ersatz news feeds into Steven's bubble, and the staging of a segue into apocalyptic territory is brilliant. For me, one of the best moments comes when the program makers reproduce during a bus ride their (clearly Orson Welles-inspired) radio-based dislocation into catastrophe, and then it ups the experiential ante magnificently.

However, after the apocalyptic bit of the story kicks in, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe. You might find it all terrifyingly realistic; I wanted to, but simply didn't. You might object that it's not our (as audience) credulity that matters. Yet it does, I think. When a hypothetical strains belief, it simultaneously becomes harder to believe that anyone else could buy it, either. The specifics of the apocalyptic narrative and experience that Steven is expected and appears to buy into get exceptionally silly. Without going into detail, having already warned about spoilers, one word really makes the point: zombies. An inspired Truman Show-esque first half morphs into a less convincing knockoff of 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that some controversy arose in the UK over the central character of Steve, who was accused of being an actor complicit in the whole deal. These are claims that Brown has denied and debunked, but doubts may remain; based neither on Steve's half-finished acting website profile, nor on his amusing physical resemblance to an actor from a noodle commercial -- but rather on the internal merits and coherence of the program itself.

I won't go into the performances of the questionable actors by whom Steven is surrounded, or some of his reactions which, at times, even if real, felt even less credible. (Perhaps I'm just not a very experienced viewer of reality TV -- and if I watched more of it I'd realise that real people in reality actually behave like the way I consider bad actors act.) As it happens, I'm less interested in establishing the truth here as such than I am in understanding what's at stake for the program in its believability. You see, for the viewer of Apocalypse, its emotional and intellectual impact rely on an authentic deception. We are invited to empathise with Steve, for whom life as he knew it is ostensibly over. If it turned out that Steve were just another actor, there would cease to be anything truly novel or worthwhile about watching him go through this exercise: we've already seen our share of (more highly produced and impressive) end-of-the-world diversions. So the interest here turns entirely on Steven's being unwittingly drawn into a simulated catastrophe, which means it is significant only to the extent that he experiences as real something which is not.

Brown knows this, and makes that very point in his own defence: pretending to all this with an actor at the centre of it would be pointless. Well, yes and no. There's room for a cogent sceptical view here that a sufficiently cynical TV producer could benefit greatly from persuading an audience of millions that they were really putting an unwitting man on the street through armageddon's onset, while in fact orchestrating the whole thing with an insider-actor. This, the sceptic might argue, would obviate the investment risk should a carefully selected actual dupe clue into the subterfuge and suddenly ruin a presumably expensive and logistically elaborate end-of-the-world simulation-for-one. So the question comes to rest on Brown's insistence on his own integrity as an artist.

But here we come to a problem for the audience's experience of the show, one which is built-in, and unavoidable: Derren Brown, the "man behind the curtain", is fundamentally questionable. By no means am I saying I don't like him, or that his work isn't vastly entertaining, thought-provoking and insightful. I do. It is. I'm simply pointing out that a large part of the show's very premise, and part of the basis for our interest in watching it, consists in his charismatic persona and cultivated talent for understanding people and creating situations that play on their foibles. He's a master persuader, hypnotist and manipulator. No pejorative connotation intended; that's his schtick, and it's why we watch. But if Brown is being straight with us, the audience, then he is indeed deceiving Steven monumentally. On the other hand, if Steven's colluding with him (as I - and apparently others - had occasion to suspect), then Brown is deceiving us, his audience. Either way, there's a tangled web, and our charming host is right in the middle of it. Such ambiguity is at the very heart of his profession as an illusionist and mentalist, and shows up in all the situations that he creates. Little wonder, then, that some people question his veracity.

To continue the line of thought above for a moment more: if he were discovered to have been pretending, Derren Brown could still have a workable artistic alibi -- that the joke was deliberately, all along, on all of us, the audience. Maybe there's a meta-point in the offing here around our own susceptibility, but there's a trust we place in him, despite his own "untrustworthiness" which is the premise of our interest -- and if it were betrayed it would be a real pity. Especially amid all the fakery, the grain of truth still matters. 

All of this reminded me of another exquisitely ambiguous viewing experience, Exit Through the Gift Shop, the outstanding film about street art genius Banksy. It presents as documentary but leaves you (or at any rate, left me) wondering whether the central character, Mister Brainwash, was fabricated. He's such an outrageous character, and his commercial success as depicted in the doco such damning evidence of the cynical commercialisation of art, that it all seems too perfectly perverse to be true. A couple of years after watching it, I still find myself on the fence about Exit Through the Gift Shop's documentary status. And that's actually something I absolutely love about it -- and in some ways perhaps I'd prefer not to know the truth -- because it so effectively acts out one of the key questions it raises, regarding the importance of authenticity or truth as a value in the art world.

Now, as irritatingly and gleefully postmodern as some might like to get here, rejoicing - or wallowing - in the unknowability of the truth of it all, let me prepare to draw a conclusion: Exit succeeds because of its ambiguity, where Apocalypse falters. Let's be fair: if the show succeeds, it's despite any doubts about Derren Brown's and his subject Steven's veracity, not because of them. Audience doubt about Brown's truthfulness puts a dent in Apocalypse as an experiential scenario. To the extent that people doubt the authenticity of the deception, so to speak, to that extent the exercise is not quite working.

So much for questions of plausibility, ambiguity and fakery. Now I want to come at this from another angle.

Here's what Brown says about the motivation for staging an apocalypse for his victim. "In an effort to help Steven realise the value of the things he has, like his family, home and friends, I took them all away from him by creating the end of the world, through a deadly meteor strike."

But of course, there's a simpler way to end the world.

By sheer coincidence, just hours after viewing Apocalypse and then having a big group of friends over for dinner, I was revisiting the 1999 classic Fight Club, a testosterone- and irony-fuelled film essentially about living to the full. I hadn't watched it for maybe ten years. (If you haven't seen it, please do; but there are no spoilers below.)

A sequence about halfway through exemplifies the perversely life-affirming spirit of the movie, when the two lead actors, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, conduct what they call a "human sacrifice", whereby the life of a Korean convenience-store owner is threatened, as an existential goodwill intervention. At gunpoint, the hapless shopkeeper is told, "Raymond, you're going to die". He's asked what he wanted to be in life before settling for quik-e-mart drudgery. The answer: a vet. Holding a gun to the poor man's head, Pitt takes his drivers' licence away, telling him, "I know where you live. If you're not on your way to becoming a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead." They let him go.  What was the point of that, demands an exasperated Norton. Replies Pitt: "Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted."

Here again, almost word for word, is the question behind Apocalypse (quoted at the top). There's a climactic confrontation later on between the two leads, when Pitt's trickster says to Norton's sceptic: "If you were to die right now, how would you feel about your life?"

My point is simply this -- and thanks, Fight Club, for the reminder: the whole planet need not be jeopardised in order for a person to experience a revelation about their life. If a single moment of staring into the abyss can be used to reactivate a sense of purpose and direction, there's more than one way to get at it.

I'm not for a moment suggesting (however compelling a TV show it might have made) that Derren Brown could or should have made a program based on directly threatening the life of a subject. But from an experience design standpoint, there's a curious quality of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut in Apocalypse. Of course the grandiosity of the simulated experience is all by itself a large part of the point, in terms of televisual entertainment.

But in fact, what I think Brown and his team are doing most effectively here, with this complex exercise in forcing suspension of disbelief, is to dramatise vividly the fact and extent of the constructedness of mediated reality, or  -- if this makes it any clearer -- the mediatedness of our experience of wider systemic realities. Few of us are in a position to register first-hand most big-picture world news stuff, be it economic crisis or volcanic eruption or political upheaval. Almost all comes to us second-hand, through a handful of vectors (devices, sources, individuals) cross-cutting our sensorium. No, this isn't a new thought. But the show is a kind of masterclass in the partiality and manipulability of the tiny straw through which we get to receive only a fraction of a far bigger reality. 

And recognition of the excessiveness inherent in making widespread crisis, rather than personal mortality, the focal point for a "revaluing life" experiment also led to something else I'd sensed was missing from the show. The serendipitous encounter with Fight Club's counterexample helped clarify for me what that something was. 

Brown apparently went to the trouble of spending a couple of months convincing a listless but suggestible young man that his world could end, then went ahead and made that subjective experience "happen". Apart from Brown's skill and showmanship, the other reason to watch this specific program is this: apocalyptic anxiety is a real phenomenon. Not only is there a mounting array of planetary threats - climate change, loss of biodiversity, the ascent of superbugs, the ever-present nuclear spectre, etc - at the time this show was broadcast, the Mayan calendar transition was looming just weeks away at the end of 02012. (It passed by without incident the week before I caught the show on YouTube.)

In the same way that the potency of Orson Welles's radio show, a year before World War II began, channeled and amplified a generalised anxiety in the zeitgeist, Derren Brown: Apocalypse attracted record numbers of viewers because, I think, there was (is) actual and, at some level, valid worry about apocalyptic scenarios. Such power as it had, then, both at the audience (TV-viewership-of-millions) level and at the subject (sucking-Steven-into-the-story) level, draws on real, existential issues and concerns animating our culture at the moment. However, this potent cultural energy is skilfully marshaled only to be squandered; it's used to augment the Oz-like mastermind/puppeteer persona of Brown, but as an engagement with actual and worthwhile issues, either for the audience or for the one-man eye of the storm, it's hard to think of how it could possibly have been more superficial. (In case you've forgotten: zombies.)

So there's a sadly missed opportunity to address a worthy value, a counterpart at the wider social scale to the value of an individual life fully lived. If it were just a matter of making someone appreciate their parents more, or go back to school to become a veterinarian, then a bit of clear and present danger -- say, a few seconds at gunpoint, or even just a good talking to -- may be all that's needed.

By the way, I suspect the two problems I've tried to puzzle out above are related; the implausibility of the scenario in watching it, and its failure to engage in the real issues that bring resonance to apocalypse. They seem to be two sides of the same coin. 

Maybe I'm overthinking a work of pure entertainment. But then I think about the fact that entertainers have a capacity - and to that extent at least a potential obligation - to inform and enlighten, just as those who primarily inform and enlighten ought also to find ways to entertain and engage while they're at it. The mutual exclusivity of those modes is stupid.

There's an unfortunately missed opportunity here, is all.

When I mulled over this stuff around the ethics of deception in experiential scenarios for my PhD a few years ago, I wrote (p. 270), "when it comes to human intentions and perceptions, paradoxically, there are some issues you may not be able to get a clear look at without an element of deliberate, carefully engineered misdirection." After looking into it I ended up saying (p. 286):

[T]he value of enabling someone genuinely to contemplate a compelling alternative future universe -- if perhaps only for a moment or two -- may be profound. Everyone can recount instances in their own life where sudden, contingent insights have led to momentous changes in direction. The value of these interventions and futures perspectives should not necessarily be sought in their enabling a particular or permanent future orientation (although those are conceivable outcomes). Even small glimpses of other worlds may make the effort worthwhile. It is not usually necessary to go to the lengths suggested here, but ontologically pointed strategies are available, and are sometimes needed. As Whitehead reminds us, it is the business of the future to be dangerous -- which makes it our business to be able, at certain times, to conjure with that danger in order to navigate it more wisely.

The point was (and I still believe this) that deception can be a useful tool in enabling certain types of  experiential learning that may be hard or even impossible to get at in other ways. But it's to be used judiciously; downsides and upsides weighed against one another. Serious learning can come from a comparatively minor deception, but a trivial lesson from a major shock (or risk) isn't defensible.

Consider that audience outrage would surely have been universal had the show been about simply threatening Steven's own life personally to cause him to value it more highly (although that's presumably a worthy cause), and yet by contrast the excess of appearing to end the world just for him probably seems okay, even though the selected narrative mechanisms (meteors and zombies) studiously avoid saying anything about the terrifyingly genuine and varied prospects of anthropogenic apocalypse.

Intriguing ethical calculus.

Don't get me wrong. Derren Brown: Apocalypse is a hell of a show, and it plays on ontologically and ethically unstable ground that's often a hallmark of truly interesting art. In his recent (fantastic, highly recommended) book on art forgery, Jonathon Keats writes:

The far side of legitimacy is not necessarily illicit. To act on our anxieties, art must break mores. In some cases, those mores may be enforced by law, yet the full range of human behavior is beyond the imagination of legislators and judges, whose work is essentially reactive. Artists can experiment with possibilities outside our current reality.

Keats is writing on forged artwork, but the parallel's instructive: Brown's experiment with a simulated truth is in principle precisely what makes possible the expansion of layabout Steve's reality. Perhaps, zombies aside, this is the kind of experiential wakeup call that could benefit a great many more of us.

Related posts:

> Refugee Run

> If you want to live you will obey

> Death of a President

> Posthuman New York

This is not a game

The Coral Coral website yesterday (27 April 02009)

I haven't been posting lately due to intensive work on Coral Cross (described in the previous post). Also, the last week has been one of the strangest of my life. A little background...

Back in October 02007, Jake Dunagan and I ran a project called FoundFutures: Chinatown, wherein we created a series of alternative futures for this historic Honolulu neighbourhood, and with a little help from our friends, manifested these possible future Chinatowns in tangible form during a multi-part 'exstallation' in the area. One of the stories concerned a flu epidemic that took place in (a version of) the year 02016, and this caught the attention of some folks in the Communications department of the State Department of Health (DOH).

Wearing our Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies hats, we started talking about doing some kind of project for DOH using this distinctive "experiential futures" approach, and they applied for a federal U.S. grant to pursue the idea. That was early in 02008.

By September that year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that Hawaii's grant application for a demonstration public engagement project about influenza preparedness had been successful. We at HRCFS then pitched an alternate reality game (ARG) that would build both on our experiential scenarios for FoundFutures and Hawaii 2050, as well as on the success of 'serious ARGs' such as World Without Oil (02007) and Superstruct (then soon to launch) in addressing near-future challenges.

A particular aim was to help people provide input for the state about who ought to be vaccinated first, once a vaccine were to become available, a life-and-death question laden with ethical, political, and cultural implications. To answer it, however, required enabling folks to grasp some important, and frequently misunderstood, background facts: pandemic flu is different from seasonal flu; vaccine is different from antivirals; and vaccine specific to a pandemic flu strain -- since by definition such strains are immunologically unfamiliar -- would take months to formulate, produce and distribute.

We considered that an accessible, immersive storytelling effort should help people to take the premise seriously -- a challenging proposition since the last pandemic was in 01968, and out of sight generally means out of mind. For months, then, the HRCFS team has been working intensively on creating the architecture and content for an experience that would enable people to project themselves undergoing the experience of a flu pandemic. The scenario was set in 02012, partly to avoid a War of the Worlds-esque confusion on the part of our audience. In order to tell the story authoritatively from within the 'alternate reality' scenario, but without pretending to the mantle of a real organisation like DOH or CDC, we created an entity called the Coral Cross. This was a grassroots network, a product of Obama-era public service and web savvy, which in our story emerged in September 02011 after a category 5 Hurricane Cyrus devastated the island of Oahu.

However, after months of design and research, and just a few weeks prior to the scheduled launch, an extraordinary coincidence has occurred. Just before the world's first pandemic flu-themed alternate reality game was to begin -- and following pregame media coverage by ARG websites and local news -- an actual outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, quickly spreading to other locations, has made the fictional premise redundant.

The flu crisis is now real.

And now, so is Coral Cross; transforming, seemingly with its own alternate-reality momentum, as our design team works at full speed to adapt an 'alternate reality game' to a 'reality game' supporting real-time futures exploration as this story unfolds.

As I said, the last week has been one of the strangest of my life.

For me, the swine flu news, which at first I found curious but in no way alarming, came via the CDCemergency twitter feed -- which, bizarrely, I happened to start following last Wednesday (22 April) before any of this was in the headlines, and the most recent message was the first hint of a story soon to erupt:



It has been truly eerie to see this once-in-a-blue-moon scenario occurring just on the verge of hypothetically staging just such a scenario. Last Thursday afternoon, as I was setting up to shoot a Coral Cross press conference set in 02012 -- announcing the onset of a pandemic -- as part of our pre-launch storytelling effort, our lead designer Matt Jensen sent this email:

Subject: Oink

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N23355101.htm

Do we have a contingency plan if a pandemic strikes before our game launches?

We did complete the shoot, incidentally, but in view of events since then, won't be using the footage anytime soon.

Part of me of course finds it hard to say goodbye to the carefully crafted alternate reality premise and extensive in-world storytelling we had undertaken. It is weird -- a mixture of vindication, disappointment, and deep concern -- to see scenaric details, carefully imagined and crafted by our team, being supplanted by reports in the same newspapers and press conferences whose style and conventions we'd been drawing on to tell our story. But the strangest thing is seeing our advocacy for preparation and forethought so swiftly outrun by the flux of events themselves. I can't help but relish the irony that we have spent months strategising the incursion of a hypothetical future into the present, when in a matter of days, we’ve seen instead the incursion of reality into our hypothetical future.

"Any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous."
~Jim Dator

Embracing that change as best we can is, ultimately, the only option that makes sense. Will the 'swine flu' develop into a full-blown pandemic, or prove to be a false alarm; or rather, something between those extremes? No one can say. But the only sensible way to complete the project we have begun, while accommodating the genuine and pervasive uncertainty that attends these unfolding events, is to make that very uncertainty the subject of our exploration. This is the option that we recommended over the weekend to the Department of Health, and that, as of last night, they confirmed.

The core design team on Coral Cross consists of visual designer Matthew Jensen, interaction designer Nathan Verrill, creative consultant Jake Dunagan, and me as the project lead. I consider myself highly fortunate to be working with such adaptive and ingenious people that we can even consider spontaneously turning a simulation into a real-time futures exploration. But that's what's needed. And we applaud the Hawaii's DOH for recognising and acting so swiftly on the need to (as we've half-jokingly been saying internally) 'turn the Titanic'.

All this raises some big questions which are still only dimly defined in my mind (and which I don't have time to articulate and address properly right now) about the usefulness of emergency preparation, and the relationship between such preparations and the realities to which they ostensibly refer. (Emergency: an interesting word.) But I trust there will be time enough for all that in due course. For now, we're trying to rapidly reinvent the game to support real-life contingencies, exploration and decision-making; an interesting and difficult but necessary -- and perhaps unprecedented -- task.

Our sincere hope is that this event will prove not to be the pandemic that, at this moment in time, it could yet become. Still, whatever happens, Coral Cross will be there to help. All interested are encouraged to register at coralcross.org.

"History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again."
~Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick

The Coral Cross website today (28 April 02009)

Coral Cross is coming

By the end of May, the world will be six months into a deadly influenza pandemic that will take the lives of millions, wreak havoc with economies, and strain the social fabric, irrevocably transforming life as we know it.

Perhaps I should clarify that.

In May, web users everywhere will have an opportunity to take part in a bold experiment, an immersive and participatory "playable scenario" that tells the story of a hypothetical near future in which a flu pandemic takes place.

The project Coral Cross is named for a network of volunteers established in 02011 on the Hawaiian island of Oahu; a grass-roots organisation which in this scenario steps forward to aid islanders as they prepare to weather the crisis.

Coral Cross is being produced by the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, for the state Department of Health, and I'm leading the game development team, an incredibly talented lineup of designers and futures thinkers.

A Honolulu Advertiser article last weekend announced the state's federally-funded pandemic preparedness project, of which Coral Cross is just one part, but we're now able to share a bit more about this piece of the effort. Michael Andersen of ARGNet (Alternate Reality Gaming Network) recently contacted me about the project to ask a few questions. The resulting report, which drew on the responses provided, appeared yesterday, but for the interest of other futurists, game designers, and pandemic flu watchers who may wish to know more, our email Q&A is reproduced in full below:

Michael Andersen: What made you and your team consider using ARGs to facilitate discussion?

SC: "Coral Cross" is a playable scenario about the first six months of a global flu pandemic, but with the focus on Hawaii.

The ARG-inspired format for this project grew out of two things.

First, for several years, the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies has been innovating in the design of objects and experiences that help people consider alternative future scenarios in a deeper way. We call this area of practice "experiential futures". In 02006, my colleague Jake Dunagan (until recently at HRCFS, now at Institute for the Future) and I staged a set of immersive scenarios to kick off a statewide project called "Hawaii 2050". Hundreds of people experienced four different versions of the year 02050 that we had created for them, to provide a wider context for discussing long-term sustainability in the islands. This approach worked so well that we independently founded a collaborative, public art collective, called "FoundFutures", dedicated to making futures experientially available to people in the midst of their everyday lives. Through FoundFutures we have produced several projects, most notably a series of guerrilla futures "exstallations" for Honolulu's Chinatown -- artifacts and images embodying alternative futures, strategically placed in public spaces. This unique futures-infused form of public art and provocation is an ongoing strand of work.

The second factor is that back when "World Without Oil" launched, we were becoming increasingly aware of the potential benefits of situating these future experiences in a gamelike structure. Subsequent discussions with WWO designers Ken Eklund and Jane McGonigal confirmed that our efforts to date had independently led us to many of the same conclusions as ARG designers about what makes for effective engagement with a scenario. Then, last year, as a Game Master on IFTF's "massively multiplayer forecasting game", Superstruct, I had an opportunity to consider more closely the similarities and differences between what we had been attempting to do as futurists, on the one hand, and what certain publicly-oriented ARGs aimed to do, on the other. Due in part to the example of FoundFutures Chinatown, an opportunity arose for us to create an experiential scenario about pandemic flu for the Hawaii Department of Health. At that point, the two strands clicked, and we knew we'd be doing something more explicitly ARGlike than we had tried before.

MA: What kinds of audiences are you hoping to attract with this game?

SC: Although we have approached the design in such a way that people can participate from anywhere, we will judge our own success mainly by the degree of engagement we can achieve in Hawaii, and especially on Oahu, the most populated island. In other words, anyone can play, but our core audience is here. A key limitation comes from the fact that fewer than one million people live here, because unlike national or international games, we're not drawing our core player base from a distributed pool of many millions of possible players. However, it also has two upsides. First, we can make use of the limited geography -- a captive audience, if you like -- by using more real-life elements to augment the storytelling. Second, as a member of our design team observed, the fact that we're tackling a global topic, pandemic flu, with a local tilt, not only gives it an interesting flavour, but it also helps focus the scenario. Instead of trying to evoke every last thing about how the world could transform as a result of a deadly disease sweeping across it, the island acts is a sort of microcosm in which, no matter where they're from, people will be able to see what's at stake more clearly and concretely, in how particular lives and communities are affected.

To render an abstract possible future concrete, and to have people participate in and be affected by this future, is perhaps the key principle behind "experiential futures". The last several years of work have been a very rich period of work in this area, and we're excited to see what Coral Cross can add.

MA: Can you give any hints as to what media you will be utilizing and how you will elicit interaction out of the participants?

SC: It is a cross-media effort, and I can't say too much more at this point, but the golden thread of the experience will be online, so anyone interested should go to coralcross.org and sign up.

MA: What is the timeline for the game? Approximately when can we expect to see a launch, and how long do you anticipate it to run?

SC: Coral Cross will run in the second half of May, an "event" which happens on a specific, shared timeline -- like pandemic flu itself. The story we're telling is on a scale of months, but the experience in real time will be short, on a scale of a week or two: one month per day. Once we're underway, it's really important for players to check back every day. Changes will happen very quickly!

MA: How do you see this project fitting in with your work at HRCFS?

This project is part of our effort to make foresight relevant and actionable to the public. Our mission is to inform and prepare the leaders and citizens of the State, the region, and the world, for possible changes on the horizon, such that better decisions will guide us away from negative outcomes, and toward preferred futures. ARGs are becoming a key tool in public futures practice and communication, and we need to experiment with this tool and learn how best to use it.

Let me know if I can clarify or elaborate on anything for you.

MA: Thank you for your time, and good luck on the project. Please let me know when it goes live, as I'm very interested in following the game's progress.

SC: Anyone can now submit their email at coralcross.org and they will be notified in May when things start to happen.

Folks, our next big experiential futures project is underway -- and you're invited to participate.

Many thanks to Michael Andersen and ARGNet for taking an interest in this effort.

Related posts:
> "Hawaii 2050" kicks off
> Experiential scenarios on video
> FoundFutures (series of posts)
> Humans have 23 years to go
> Gaming the end of oil

Whenever you are, we're already then

Image via The Daily Monster

Image via The Daily Monster

Last week, Dan Lockton (who maintains the excellent blog Design with Intent) tipped me off to an announcement about the imminent opening of something marvellous; a time travel-themed convenience store in Los Angeles. His email from the UK reached me in Hawaii on the morning of 15 December, but linked to a blog post by Stefan G. Bucher (the LA-based writer and illustrator who designed the store) dated 16 December -- which hadn't even started in England yet, let alone on the west coast of the U.S. However, being a bit preoccupied with defending my dissertation proposal that morning, I didn't quite register this apparent instance of actual time travel occurring in my inbox. Today, however, I read the full text of Bucher's report on the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, in which he excitedly looks forward to "the full opening on January 15th, 2008" -- almost a year ago . At first I took this to be a time-travel joke. But no, in fact it had been my mistake all along. He had posted on 16 December 02007.

The Internet collapses other times into the present with such astonishing effectiveness (and sometimes disorienting results) that a boutique of heterotopian, hypothetical products would seem destined for a comfortable niche online; a website selling novelty goodies fresh from the distant past or future, a sort of plutonium-powered CafePress. And indeed, Echo Park's one stop shop for intertemporal knick-knacks does have a counterpart in cyberspace. But really, physicality is the thing. Its reality-warping presence in meatspace, at 1714 West Sunset Boulevard, is what makes this attractive to me. (And it gives me one more reason to go back to that weirdest of cities, Los Angeles, reluctant though I may have been in the past.) See, one expects to find weird crap online, regular as clockwork; but there's simply no question that tinned Woolly Mammoth Chunks, robot emotion-upgrades and Time Freezy Hyper Slush drink substitutes would be infinitely more wonderful to behold (and certainly more interesting to taste) in person than onscreen. It's just one of those things: to date, at least for me, actual presence musters much more experiential oomph. Hence I'm always impressed when unusual, mould-breaking designed real-life experiences (or even attempted experiences, whether or not they fire on all proverbial cylinders) come my way.

From a futures point of view the Time Travel Mart does seem a bit heavy on Futurama-style space-and-robot gags, thus perhaps missing the chance to do something a bit more interesting with the concept (without losing any of the playfulness) -- but make no mistake: it's still profoundly cool.

826LA poster (part of a set) by Amy Kate Martin
via her Flickr photostream

Image via The Daily Monster

Image via wallofhair's Flickr photostream

Image via The Daily Monster

Image via The Daily Monster

So who, or what, accounts for the temporally ambiguous arrival of this particularly curious take on that all-American institution, the Mart; this time machine toystore -- not a store with toys so much as one that toys with stores -- worthy of Matt Groening, if not H.G. Wells? To my surprise, and great delight, it turns out to be 826LA, the local office of 826 National, a nonprofit tutoring, writing and publishing organisation with a focus on teaching creative writing to kids, cofounded by the splendid novelist Dave Eggers. It has seven locations in the U.S. to date, with space for running workshops and the like, but most of them also feature some sort of unusual retail shopfront, to help "raise funds, inspire creativity, and advertise our programs to the local community". Along with the Time Travel Mart, these include a superhero supply shop in Brooklyn, a robot-themed outlet in Ann Arbor, and the fabulous Pirate Store in San Francisco (this last of which provided the backdrop for a fine afternoon's mischief in summer 02007, thanks to my good, if slightly unbalanced, pirate-impersonating friends Simone and Dave).

This "news" may be fully one year out of date (but is a time travel store literally capable of being news? Slogan: "Whenever you are, we're already then"), but I'm so very happy to learn of a nonprofit organisation using genuine ingenuity to promote its worthy cause -- creative expression -- by actually embodying it.

Holiday card designed for Echo Park Time Travel Mart by Amy Kate Martin
via her Flickr photostream

Image via Orrin's Flickr photostream

Related posts:
> Visit Venice, see Baghdad
> Mars Products
> A Simpsons simulacrum

(Thanks Dan!)

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.)

Where futures meets experience design

Six dimensions of experience design
Diagram: Nathan Shedroff | via Pantopicon

Over at A Thousand Tomorrows, Antwerp-based futurist Nik Baerten has published the transcript of a recent interview with experience designer Nathan Shedroff, about the intersection of futures and experience design. Below, some [abridged] highlights...

NB: We have learnt that both as a means to inspire future thinking and to communicate and discuss alternative futures, experiences add significant value to the process of participatory futures exploration and envisioning. [...] How do you look at using experiences as tools, as a means to an end (e.g. gaining insight, anticipating & preparing for change)?

NS: Everything we perceive is an experience so, fundamentally, it’s impossible not to create an experience. The difference between what you're suggesting and much of futures work is done is simply about considering more of the dimensions of experience in the delivery. For example, reading a white paper or watching a video are still experiences. They're just not as immersive as immersing audiences in scenes or environments in realtime. All have their place, however.
...
Many people in the business world have trouble truly visualizing opportunities or even any sense of an alternate future. To help transform their perspectives, it's important to immerse them in an appropriate way -- sometimes widely and sometimes deeply. Usually, the more that the experience models how people live and work in their present lives, the easier it is for them to accept changes that transform their perspectives. This is why immersive experiences like environments and even workshops can be so much more powerful than reading a report.

NB: The fields of foresight, visioning, scenario planning etc. are not unknown to you. You have dealt with future scenarios a few times as well. Could you tell us something about your own experiences?

NS: Scenario Planning is an incredible tool. [...] However, it can be tricky in business because, often, executives "get" the new vision but they're still left with no way to implement it and alternate scenarios are often purposefully provocative extremes. Taking these visions and weaving them back into present strategy is often too confusing or difficult for managers and leaders to do.
...
Artifacts from the future that relate directly to an organization's business (whether part of the original future studies or completed in a second phase) can help support courage and commitment to innovation since the tangible attributes of prototypes helps leaders "see" examples of offerings and not merely imagine details between the organization’s current and potential strategies. It's extra work but usually well worth it.

NB: In my personal humble opinion design and futures studies are intimately linked. Both basically deal with the yet-non-existent, both look for creative solutions to challenges, both are about changes of perspective, both are about thinking in terms of alternatives.

NS: You're absolutely right. Whether the design process is being applied to future studies or current offerings doesn't really matter. It's still, mostly, the same process. That's a powerful situation because it means that the same development teams that produce an organization's solutions can usually turn to future studies with little change to their process (thought they could always use a chance to change their own expectations to the new context) and vice versa. The same teams that work on future artifacts can turn their same skills to integrating what they've learned to real products and services. Of course, they need to be given permission to actually do this, something that takes a special kind of management.

NB: One could say that an experience is always co-designed, in the sense that it emerges from the interplay between creation and beholder. [...] Co-creation, co-design, participatory design … how do you connect those to the design of experiences?

NS: There is no one, right way to design or develop anything. To a large degree, it needs to reflect the culture -- especially the innovation culture -- of a company. [...] Future scenarios are often used as a way of confronting an organization's leadership, purposely jarring their thinking. That works for some organizations and not for others.
...
You're absolutely correct that design and development is a co-creative process. It's best when there are multi-disciplinary teams that represent al of the key areas of development, production, distribution, messaging, and service. These teams can be difficult to manage because there may be so many people and many may not be comfortable suspending their disbelief in order to explore new options.

NB: Do you see a certain evolution in the types of experiences we expose ourselves to and why? Where do you see it going?

NS: We definitely hunger of meaning in our lives. That's the most important aspect of any experience. [...] I don’t think we're accelerating the pace or strength of experiences in any way, other than to recognize them and build them more deeply and more thoughtfully. In terms of storytelling, entertainment, and information, we are getting back to more interactive forms of experience than we have in the recent past simply because interactive media have become so prevalent in our lives.
...
In terms of business, however, we still have a long way to go toward making truly compelling experiences part of the way we learn within organizations, collaborate, share understanding, and build strategies.

NB: [H]ow do you look at design aimed at transforming society instead of companies (and their product/services)? Where do you see similarities and differences?

NS: A product, service, event, or environment can all be transforming -– or not at all. There's nothing exclusive within the categories.
...
Everything an organization does has a social impact, whether intended or not. Creating people social impacts, as well as better environmental ones, is simply a matter of addressing and valuing these issues at the strategic level of the organization as well as the tactical level of product and service development and implementation.

A strange conversion is taking place in the business and NGO worlds. Not only are business people learning that they can address social and environmental issues through their work -- profitably -- but, also, leaders of NGOs are waking-up to the fact that just because they have a social mission to their organization doesn't mean they can't learn to be a more successfully managed group using leadership and management techniques from the corporate world.

Cheers to Nik and Nathan for sharing their ideas! [Link]

Related posts:
> Cheap prototypes, valuable insights
> Reality prototyping
> Findability features FoundFutures

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.)