The People Who Vanished

Update 01aug17: The journal article excerpted below, 'Designing an Experiential Scenario', has been named a 02017 Most Significant Futures Work at the annual Association of Professional Futurists (APF) Awards, in the Advancing Methods and Practice category. We are grateful to the APF and jury for this honour.

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The People Who Vanished is a transmedia narrative project dealing with the prehistory of the Phoenix area, staged at the inaugural Emerge Festival hosted by Arizona State University in March 02012. Jake Dunagan and I designed and led a two-day workshop in which we produced an experiential scenario with 20 festival participants.

Although we had been doing Design Fiction and Experiential Futures for five or six years already by that time, we were excited about the challenges of co-creatively involving a group this size, and especially of the compressed production timeline, both highlighting the need for a shared mental model and clear framework for collaboration.

What follows in this post is a written snapshot of that design process. It's an excerpt from an article we recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Futures.† (File under: better late than never.) The article, or this lightly edited bit reproduced below, can certainly be read alone, although for a sense of the originally intended effect watch this video first; the tale as revealed to a live audience at Emerge (18 min).

† S. Candy, J. Dunagan, Designing an experiential scenario: The People Who Vanished, Futures (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2016.05.006.

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The name Phoenix invokes the bird of Greek myth which would periodically burn up and rise again from its own ashes. It is a striking but little known fact that the city was so named precisely because it was built atop the ruins of a lost civilisation.

Beneath the streets and sidewalks of today’s Phoenix of four million inhabitants lie the remnants of the Hohokam, a society which flourished from around 0CE to 1400CE; “from Christ to Columbus”.

The Hohokam were expert canal engineers and irrigation agriculturalists. They built a thriving civilization in the desert lasting almost one and a half millennia. They farmed the land and channeled water through massive canals without any of the modern tools and equipment we have today. However, about a century before the arrival of Europeans in North America, they suddenly disappeared, for reasons that are unknown, and that are still debated by archaeologists.

The name Hohokam is an O’odham word meaning “the people who vanished”. Being an oral culture, it is unknown what they called themselves.

A question which we hoped to evoke for participants at Emerge became: “could the people of today’s Phoenix be the next to vanish from the valley?”

In order to push the boundaries of experiential futures, to do justice to the scope of the historical (and future) questions at hand, and to create a unique and fun learning experience for our workshop participants, we were drawn to the idea of executing a project at a monumental scale. We wanted to create something big; something that demanded attention; something that would appear suddenly and without warning — and that could carry deep meaning for the attendees. In our practice we and others often create hypothetical “artifacts from the future”, but in this case thought it could be interesting to create a fictional artifact from the past, in order to enable a reperception of present and future.

Throughout history, there have been breakthrough moments when we humans have been forced to confront our own ignorance and reimagine our collective story about who we are and where we came from. The unearthing of dinosaur fossils revealed a strange and diverse lifeworld on Earth long before human existence, overturning earlier thinking about natural history. Similarly disruptive were cultural discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Rosetta Stone, the city of Pompeii, and ancient technologies such as the Antikythera machine. The rediscovery of ancient philosophy, architecture, or artifacts from time to time has not simply added to a trove of curiosities from the past; but has heralded revolutionary change in society’s self-understanding. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and other epochal transitions have been initiated or accelerated by such archaeological moments.

There are always bound to be, this line of thinking suggests, possibility grenades beneath our feet, primed to explode our fragile certainties and platitudes about the story of our world. As U.S. President Harry Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” 

What could this “new” and transformative –– if hypothetical –– slice of history be for Phoenix?

Examining the map pieced together by 20th century archaeologists of the extensive network of ancient canals spanning the area... yielded what turned out to be an essential insight: in addition to their obvious practical uses, the Hohokam canals could have had some previously unsuspected symbolic functions.

An idea emerged: towards the end of their tenure, the Hohokam may somehow have manifested a distinctive symbol in the archaeological record – one also appearing in the pre-collapse periods of other cultures. … Now we could recount the fortuitous “discovery” of a transcultural, transhistorical symbol of impending civilisational collapse. It would not be necessary (and in the circumstances would also not be desirable) to try to explain the precise means by which this harbinger of disappearance had cropped up around the world throughout history; the sheer “fact” of apparently concrete evidence of the mystery itself could provide the desired archaeological moment.

We would tell the following story: In puzzling out the fate of the Hohokam, our group had spotted this curious anomaly on the map, and had then been inspired by the thought of a symbolic, and not merely functional, role for the canals. One of our number then had the idea to do a google image search for this pattern and see what turned up (still true –– sort of). Shockingly, this search showed up a range of other instances of the same ‘glyph’ in diverse archaeological records elsewhere: the Harappan of the Indus Valley, the Anasazi, the Nazca, the Polynesian peoples of Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island. All this part was of course completely simulated; photoshopped into found photographs from these places. We would also be able to show how the glyph had turned up subtly but unmistakeably, inscribed in the patterns on Hohokam pottery too. And the kicker: the sole common characteristic discernible across all these disparate cultures, from wildly different eras and geographies, was that they had all disappeared. They were all collapsed civilisations.

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Bruce Sterling in Wired: "When one walked outside the auditorium afterward, there was a huge mystic glyph installed on the side of a local mountain."

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Project Credits:

- The People Who Vanished were: Carlo Altamirano, Michael Baran, Rachel Bowditch, Chris Danowski, Tyler Eglen, Erik Fisher, Paul Higgins, Gordon Knox, Oscar Lopez, Blakely McConnell, Julie Rada, Matt Ragan, Reed Riner, Joya Scott, D.A. Therrien, Trish Yasolsky and Bobby Zokaites

- Special thanks: David Abbott, Tain Barzo, Joel Garreau, Jerry Howard (Arizona Museum of Natural History), and Cynthia Selin

See also:
- Aisling Kelliher and Daragh Byrne (Carnegie Mellon University) in Futures journal
- Cynthia Selin (Arizona State University), one of the organisers, situating this work in Futures
- A trove of documentation (still images and timelapse video) from our workshop, via Carnegie Mellon
- Post about the Emerge exhibition featuring The People Who Vanished and other projects at ASU Art Museum
- A terrific design fiction video created by a group led by Near Future Laboratory's Julian Bleecker and Nick Foster in another workshop taking place at the same time

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The paper excerpted above goes on to describe a framework that we devised during the workshop and have kept developing and using since as a conceptual model for scaffolding experiential scenarios and design fiction; the Experiential Futures Ladder. Implications for the foresight field of this multi-scalar mode of thought, as well as of the experiential turn more broadly (towards design, media, games and performance) are outlined.

The full text of the article in press, "Designing an Experiential Scenario", can be found in pdf here.

The journal permalink is here.

Related:
> The Experiential Turn
> On the eve of Emerge
> Dreaming together
> A History of Experiential Futures 2006-2031

> The Futures of Everyday Life

> Experiential scenarios on video

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

Bad reviews of future news

Since the post at this blog in mid-January about a viral video set in the future of an inundated New York City, two more supposedly viral videos have joined it online to promote National Geographic Channel's upcoming program, Six Degrees Could Change the World.

The first clip suggests a dust storm in Dallas in 02034. Like the New York underwater clip, there are no people in sight -- it doesn't carry the visceral impact it was clearly after. (And, sorry to say, but again with the shoddy CG animation!)

The second clip is a bit more interesting, from my point of view. Eschewing the (aesthetically unsuccessful) imitation of big-budget establishing shots, it provides a far more subtle, and in a sense relatable (is that really a word?) scenario; a water crisis in Southern California. The footage shows water trickling from a tap, and guys moving around boxes of water-bottles -- exactly the type of mundane stuff a news report would use to represent a story of this kind. So this, as a way of communicating the water crisis scenario, is a metonymic strategy not unlike the present-day still shots I put online this week suggesting a world without oil.

It's unfortunate that they opted for plodding consistency in framing this set of viral videos, foregoing the chance to say anything interesting about how the world -- including news reportage -- might change over the period described (beyond the focal issue of climate). The news screens are shown as interlaced video, which is beginning to look old-fashioned even now, in early 02008, as HD-TV becomes standard. Worse, the hypothetical "CNC News", for some odd reason, uses exactly the same visual style and format (logos, bugs, the headline crawl) in 02026, 02034, and 02051. Was this important to their message? I don't see how, considering the teasers all conclude by sending the viewer, a little didactically, to the same non-diegetic website, which breaks the scenarios' universe right away.

Call me critical (or better yet, sceptical), but I'm disappointed by the wasted potential here.

Could this have anything to do with the slow response of cyberspace? The dust storm was uploaded on 18 January and is showing, as I write, only 83 views. The water shortage clip was posted 25 January and has been viewed 23 times.

(Thanks to John Maus for pointing me to the water clip.)