The compleat Wired future artifacts gallery 02007

An interesting by-product of blogging regularly is that you find out what you care about, by seeing what patterns emerge in what you decide to post. (As E.M. Forster put it, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?") For instance, I have discovered that my top tag to date is "art" (22 posts), followed by "futures thinking" (21), "future-shock therapy" (14) and "politics" (13). The conception, visualisation and production of engaging futures objects and images, from standpoints psychological, philosophical and political, have emerged as major preoccupations. So, my doctoral dissertation-in-progress is heavily influenced by the fact that the manifestation of alternative futures experientially (including visually and tangibly) is where my energy seems to want to go.

A regular source of inspiration and amusement for us, and certainly the most widely known source of futures visualisations along these lines during the last few years, has been Wired magazine's back-page feature, "Found: Artifacts from the future". Sometimes arresting, and frequently clever, they're always worth a look. However, oddly enough, I don't know of anywhere that these have yet been assembled into an accessible online gallery. So I'll be putting them here at t.s.f., working backwards year by year. There's some great work here -- and of course, much thought is in the details -- click any image to enlarge.

Enjoy.

[crayons] | Wired 15.01

[traffic fine] | Wired 15.02

[bathroom cabinet] | Wired 15.03

[nanobot spray] | Wired 15.04

[clone reunion] | Wired 15.05

[dog maker] | Wired 15.06

[comic book ads] | Wired 15.07

[GM fruit stand] | Wired 15.08

[birthday] | Wired 15.09

[halloween shopping] | Wired 15.10

[space waste] | Wired 15.11

[smart beer] | Wired 15.12

[Back to the 02006 collection | On to 02008...]

Gaming the end of oil

What better way to breathe life into scenarios than to place life inside them? And what better way to explore and stretch our personal and collective capacity for coping with change than through games?
[...]
The freedom to engage in social experimentation and expression is surely the single most precious, fragile, and yet unrealised element of our democratic political mythos. Gaming the future, insofar as it implies the possibility of actually doing what we have for centuries only told ourselves we do, could be revolutionary.

~the sceptical futuryst, Gaming alternative futures (anything but text), June 02006

In our early 21st century stocktake of the global problematique, the ugly twin of climate change is peak oil. The former could be seen as the natural dimension of blowback from our foresight-free experiment in rapacious energy consumption from roughly the dawn of the industrial revolution onwards; the latter as its economic counterpart.

As readers of this blog are well aware, there are disturbing arguments in the wind about the potential for chaos arising from these tremendous forces (e.g. James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency), even if their plausibility is hotly disputed by some. Questions invariably arise in the course of this debate around the extent to which businesses, governments, and ordinary people are prepared for the magnitude of social disruption that could occur. I don't find it a difficult argument to swallow that our society is unprepared for any but the most sanguine, mild, and trivial of scenarios in this vein. To the extent the environmental doomsayers prove correct, in light of our individual psychological and collective political difficulties coping with risks of this type, social disruption would seem to follow with inexorable logic.

So to me it's interesting, and for obvious reasons encouraging, to see the emergence of popular simulations of the end of (cheap, readily available) oil.

One is the forthcoming video game, Frontlines: Fuel of War. Here's the trailer:



The narrative voiceover says (posted at Energy Bulletin, 27 August 02007):

Oil was running out.
It's what we grew up in.
Post middle east,
Post peak oil,
Post everything.
What they call the long emergency.
It started slow.
Little things at first.
Lines at the pump,
that hot summer of 2008 when the blackouts started lasting weeks.

They said it would get better.
Something would save us.

Biofuels, solar power, cleaner nuke plants, maybe.

The depression hit in 2012
Africa ran out of food, then we did too.

People stopped trying to do anything about the problem and just tried to survive.

We watched them starve for 40 years and it just didn't seem real. But pretty soon the scenes we used to watch on the news were happening just down the street.

It's been happening for years. Now we're at a tipping point.

I was 16 when the Chinese and the Russians figured out they'd rather fight us than each other. We didn't waste time forming the coalition.

Now, we're staring each other down over the last wells of the Caspian.

... This is where it's going to happen, in towns too small to have a name, built in two weeks by oil contractors.

It's 2024, the 21st century. People ask we how we let this happen. I tell them we always knew.

The storm is coming.

A pretty grim little poem.

This story serves as backdrop (or, if you prefer, pretext) for a military game of the shoot-em-up genre -- check out the game's website, complete with bombastic soundtrack that sounds just like a Hans Zimmer effort -- in short, it seems to be a thrilling Hollywood-style slice of apocalypse as entertainment.

Which begs the question, "what's the message players walk away with?", duly asked in a CNN article published yesterday about the new game:

While Frontlines: Fuel of War is one of the first video games to capitalize on the doom-and-gloom scenario of what might happen when the world runs out of oil, it's not the only video game focusing on energy as oil prices rise, developing nations use more and more crude, and the world grapples with global warming fears.
[...]
Most oil industry analysts say peak oil production is many decades, if not hundreds of years away, and a transition to other sources will likely be more orderly than the scenario depicted in Frontline.

But a small and growing number of experts -- some well-respected -- say peak oil production is close or has happened and the transition will be much more painful than mainstream analysts predict.

Either way, [Frank DeLise, general manager of Kaos Studios, the company behind the game] said he hopes people will get more out of the game than just an adrenaline rush.

"If they play this game they will walk away thinking 'wow, energy is a problem," he said.

Experts say video games can be fun as well as educational, although the outcome largely depends on the content.

"They could in fact lead to changes in attitudes, beliefs, and ultimately, changes in behavior," said Craig Anderson, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University who studies the effects of video games on people.
[...]
But Anderson, the psychologist, is concerned about the message that violent games like Fuel of War may send to players.

"It may well change attitudes towards the use of these tactics as a political tool," he said. Players may think "of course we have to use military tactics to go take oil."

~"The end of oil is just a game", CNNMoney.com, 19 January 02008

I'm interested to know what others think about this kind of game: does it seem more likely to teach people to expect (and submit to) the worst case, or, as the general manager of Kaos claims, to recognise -- and, presumably, take actions to mitigate -- such a nightmare scenario?

There is an interesting comparison to be made here with the alternate reality game, "World Without Oil" (WWO), which ran in mid-02007 and sought to engage a broad audience in a collective simulation or scenario exercise:

It's a "what if?" game.
What if there was an oil crisis?
[...]
Because an oil crisis has deep and subtle effects, we asked everyone to help us imagine what an oil crisis would really be like. That's how people played the game - first they read the official news and what other players were saying. Then they told the story of how a shortfall of oil was affecting their own lives, and what they were doing to cope.
[...]
Over 1900 people signed up as players of World Without Oil, and submitted over 1500 stories from inside the "global oil crisis of 2007." Their work comprises a rich, complex, and eerily plausible collective imagining of such an event, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening.

For example, HRCFS's own Jake Dunagan posted this contribution to help flesh out the story for the Hawaii region.

A very effective approach, according to the organisers of WWO:

For [participants] and over 50,000 active observers, the process of collectively imagining and collaboratively chronicling the oil shock brought strong insight about oil dependency and energy policy. More than mere "raising awareness," WWO made the issues real, and this in turn led to real engagement and real change in people's lives.

I wonder in which ways the two approaches are most effective in activating political concern, and beyond that, behaviour change: on the one hand, sophisticated imagery that, although interactive, is basically constrained to a pre-defined narrative; and on the other hand, a less richly pre-imagined, but more reality-integrated simulation?

Of course I don't presume that these types are pure, let alone necessarily or intrinsically separate. Indeed, it seems to me that elements of both types of game -- immersive narratives with an escapist, entertainment objective, and collective scenario-building with a broader social goal in mind -- will shortly be integrated in pursuit of greater effectiveness in bringing scenarios to life, and life to scenarios.

Assuming, of course, that peak oil doesn't get us first.

(Thanks to Ira Rohter for the CNN link. See an introductory QuickTime video about the WWO game here.)

Good news for people who love bad news

This video, a short news clip ostensibly from an inundated New York City in 02051, has just appeared online, and is now taking off as a viral tidbit (posted just yesterday, and 5430 views already).

The clip appears at video hosting site (and YouTube competitor) Dailymotion, marked as "official content", and (in an effort by the makers, it seems, to stay in-scenario a fraction longer) was posted in the name of the supposed news company behind the future artifact, CNC News. The video blurb reads:

A helicopter crew from CNC News captured this shocking view of Manhattan under 25 feet of water. Is this our future?

Catchy! But somehow the change of tense here, situating us one moment as witnesses to a future in progress, and the very next -- all too soon! -- plonking us back in a freshly minted 02008 talking about "our future", jars with me. A missed opportunity to extend the suspension of disbelief, I suppose. A URL comes up at the end of the clip, but that's as far as the "future news" conceit extends, because IsThisOurFuture.com redirects to an ordinary page of the National Geographic Channel website, promoting an upcoming documentary. Six Degrees Could Change the World, screening this February, will examine the potential consequences of global warming, degree by degree. The (conventional) trailer currently showing at that page (complete with a voiceover that must be Alec Baldwin, in his most dramatic role in years) promises many more alarming visualisations of the potential devastation wrought by global warming, in a high production-value narrated documentary format.

Further evidence, then, that every conceivable variation of the destruction of New York is aesthetically irresistible and bound to crop up sooner or later. But this time, in the form of a disappointingly shallow (and -- so long as I'm complaining -- unconvincingly animated) future artifact. It's not bad; but it's not really groundbreaking either.

I don't want to jump the gun here -- maybe there's a more complex puzzle from NatGeo whose other scattered pieces I just haven't come across yet -- but I'm now officially on the lookout for a diegetically multi-layered evocation of the possible future consequences, and experiences, of global warming that can't be ignored by dint of either hyperbole or dullness. I fear that, with this show, we may be looking at a trumped up documentary-by-numbers, to shelve alongside such other favourite global-warming visual genres as mindless entertainment, self-satire, and clinical data.

Meanwhile, however, this clip is sure to succeed in getting many more people to tune in. And if nothing else, that's good marketing.

(via Gothamist.com)

Climate change for fun and profit

In recent months, amid the general clamour about global warming, there have been reports (New York Times; Wall Street Journal) linking shifts in fashion and clothes manufacture to climate change. I should confess that few topics interest me less than fashion -- perhaps only the overlapping subject of celebrity lifestyles outrates it on the triviality index -- but that example illustrates how, sometimes, developments at this outer layer are interwoven with threads of change I'm motivated to follow more closely.

The above images are another example. They come from an early 02007 print advertising campaign for Italian fashion label Diesel, called "Global Warming Ready". The tensions surrounding it provide an opportunity to consider the politics of commercial futures imagery.

It isn't difficult to see why the campaign was controversial. From a Washington Post article:

These ads are tongue in cheek, but that may not be apparent to anyone but Diesel customers, who've come to expect this sort of thing. In the past, Diesel has run ads advocating the smoking of 145 cigarettes a day (for that "sexy cough") and the drinking of urine to stay young. The company has also attempted to "sponsor" happiness. The irony is of the dark, European sort, best consumed in the company of Gauloises and knowing laughter.

It's true -- not everyone enjoys this species of irony. I first came across this series via the waterlogged Rio shot (third from the top), which was noted disapprovingly in the groundbreaking "journal of the mental environment", Adbusters magazine (edition #72). Duncan's Print, a blog on print advertising, also reported some other unabashedly negative reponses:

Mel Young, at New Consumer, calls for a boycott of Diesel’s clothing line. “Diesel is appealing the worst aspect of human nature – one of greed and selfishness. Perhaps the people who own Diesel might like to watch films of children dying in floods in Bangladesh, where existing floods are being exacerbated by climate change. It might just get them to understand that making ‘funny’ little advertising campaigns out of misery really is beneath contempt.”

Paul Harrison at The Varsity Online is similarly scathing. “It is clear that Diesel is far less concerned with fomenting political activism and lifestyle change than they are with selling their brand. As far as corporate social campaigns go, this attitude is hardly surprising, but Diesel’s campaign is particularly inept, blatantly self-interested, and woefully uninformed.”

Now, I'm no Diesel customer, and following this encounter, I'm no more interested in buying overpriced clothing than I was before. Also, I'm a subscriber to Adbusters, whose anti-authoritarian sensibility and culture-jamming aesthetic I greatly appreciate.

But.

I have to say, part of me welcomes this humorous -- even cavalier, I suppose -- treatment of global warming, an issue frequently treated with an earnestness and gravity amounting to pretension (the feature which, ironically, most turns me off about fashion). Subversive play on a weighty matter of public concern was, not surprisingly, precisely the intention. The Post again:

People have become used to learning about global warming in a serious and science-heavy fashion, says [the company's creative director]. Spoofing the issue provides a "bigger shock," he says, possibly provoking consumers to think more.

Possibly. The funny thing about the "Global Warming Ready" campaign is that Diesel gets to have it both ways. Its arch attitude represents the triumph of cleverness over meaning, of sarcasm over what's sacred. It speaks to a culture of parody, in which the meta-news is invoked before the actual news is digested. [...] The photographic landscapes of Diesel's print campaign are surreal, but certain conventions of the fashion world are secure: The models are still svelte, and stylishness still triumphs over all. You can't be too well-dressed for the apocalypse.

The point is well taken: these photo-illustrations, despite ostensibly supporting a cause -- climate change awareness -- maintain an expensively-dressed arm's length from its more serious implications.

But how offended ought we to be? After all, the "culture of parody" is only part of our culture.

This usage of future imagery contains several dimensions, and might be evaluated differently in view of each. Here are some that spring to mind:

As playful comment on global warming, it's not vastly different from the scuba-like footwear we saw not too long ago.

As ingeniously conceived and smoothly executed "future" artwork, it's comparable to the (similarly themed, post-sea level rise) Mattingly images I enjoyed so much and blogged here recently.

As a piece of shameless future-colonising, it's comparable to product placement in feature films with future settings -- but more forthright, and to that extent less insidious.

And, as a ultimately profit-motivated contribution to the welter of images of the future out there, well, I side with the Adbusters set in wishing companies weren't so single-minded in turning everything to the pursuit of profit. (The fact that they are is a systemic problem we'd more wisely blame on corporate structures and capitalist economics than on this particular company.)

It's culture-jamming the culture-jammers... which is fine, to my mind, even if I happen to disagree -- because in the war of memes, there's always another move to be made. How would the images speak differently if, instead of being labelled with the brand that commissioned them, they were generically rebranded "The Fashion Industry" -- global-warming ready? (Really -- how ready is anyone?) Its naivete laid bare; the absurd shallowness of its engagement with a massive issue betrayed.

That's one response.

Another would be to recognise, and even abhor, the vacuity and moral bankruptcy of the motives, while cracking a smile at the execution. Can no one join me in chuckling at the additional irony of all this from a brand named after a fossil fuel?

Or perhaps the prospect of global warming should be considered taboo, a topic to be handled with circumspection and care, and not invoked in satirical -- or commercial -- contexts. In contrast to the hypersensitivity of responses along these lines (here's another case in point), it seems to me more useful to regard climate change (in whatever form, and with whatever causes) as a reality we'll have to learn to live with -- which includes understanding that it will be coopted, distorted and refracted through the full panoply of political agendas.

One last point: Dator recently (26/11/07) commented as follows, in an email exchange about the relatively sudden appearance of mainstream awareness of environmental issues that many futurists and ecologists have tirelessly pointed out for decades:

The chorus is indeed swelling -- from total denial of any problems to near hysteria. All the more reason for us to put the effort in to helping people surf the tsunamis, and not just cry in despair or denial -- or rage.

It may be that "surfing the tsunamis of change" -- the metaphor he has long used for describing the invention and pursuit of the best scenarios we can, given the forces of change to which we are subject (example) -- is too glib for some tastes. For my part, it's the most apposite of the many metaphors for living with change that I've heard: we do, I think, need to learn to surf, not rage against the waves (or in this case bemoan the narrowness of corporate priorities, or the entirely unsurprising superficiality of the fashion industry). We must find ways to turn the considerable momentum of the prevailing cultural tides to our own ends, and to enjoy ourselves in the process.

Because, as far as anyone can see, not only is the water rising -- the waves are getting bigger.


(Images via I Believe in Advertising blog. Also, for the very keen: this not particularly good video from the same campaign, which is rather less eloquent than the stills alone.)

The future of driving, today. Not.

A conversation with a client this afternoon about driverless cars reminded me of a striking, full-page BMW advertisement I'd seen back in 02005, in a British broadsheet newspaper. I managed to track it down online (click for enlargement)...

Image: BMW Education Programme

Bear in mind that the Brits drive on the left side of the road, continental Europeans on the right. The text begins:

By the end of 2007 you will not be allowed to use a right-hand drive car on the roads of mainland Europe.

It's a ruling BMW has vigorously opposed but our lawyers were eventually routed and it was left to our engineers to fight a rearguard action.

Their riposte was one of startling élan: hands-free steering.

It uses a combination of sensors and VAT (Voice Activated Technology) and does away with the steering wheel altogether.

All the dials and controls are mounted in the centre of the dash on a pivoting section which can be angled towards either of the front seats.

I remember, at first, being taken in by the ad, which on closer inspection turned out to be an April Fool's Day prank. What I didn't realise until today is that this spoof ad was part of an annual tradition at BMW (in the UK, anyway). Says the company website:

Each year WCRS (BMW's advertising agency) produces a tactical April Fool's day advert which appears in the broadsheet press on April 1st only.

The April Fool's day concepts are designed to teeter on the verge of credibility, therefore taking in scores of slightly less vigilant readers. The concepts tend to focus on a new and revolutionary piece of technology from BMW, yet push the idea just beyond the plausible.

The tongue-in-cheek adverts take exactly the same format as all non-spoof BMW adverts, hence it is down to the reader to notice the difference between the plausible and the non-plausible.

April Fool's day adverts have become a BMW tradition primarily aimed at BMW drivers as a once-a-year opportunity for them to drop their guard and have a laugh at themselves. They have all the wit generic to many of BMW's brand adverts and allow the intelligent owner to feel part of the BMW tradition.

The ideas in the past have covered a range of themes and ideas to test the credulous and humour the knowing:

• The new in-cabin Klimatabeiter Climate Control System (KCCS), which - supposedly - can recreate any of the world's 23 registered climates inside your BMW and comes as standard in BMW 7 Series models.


• The 'Toot and Calm Horn' (T.C.H.) system, which creates a noise that manages to calm, rather than aggravate the other driver so reducing the risk of road rage.


• Other ideas have included remote control gadgets worthy of James Bond, with windscreen wipers on the esteemed BMW badge and insect-repellent windscreens!

Some of the concepts are more self-evidently whimsical prank material than others. I realise, on reflection, that steering-wheel free cars and driverless cars aren't at all the same thing. But this ad's concept, the former, neatly plays into the long-anticipated science fiction image of the latter.

An encounter with an ad such as this, in a credible context (British broadsheets, on days other than April 1, are pretty stern) can pull off the trick of having a presumably possible future technology take you by surprise. It thereby achieves a response we like to aim for with some of our future artifacts: a minor hoax, or simulation, of a possible future insinuated into the present; a sense of the future arriving early. The subject matter of this example is a little too benign to qualify as future-shock therapy, but it's a nice, playful bit of future-forward design (and self-parody) nonetheless.

I do very much like the ad company's concept brief for this series, which "tend[s] to focus on a new and revolutionary piece of technology ... yet push[ing] the idea just beyond the plausible." (I'm also highly amused by idea of pretentious BMW-driving jerks enjoying a "once-a-year opportunity ... to drop their guard and have a laugh at themselves".)

My favourites from among the other mock ads:

Image: BMW Education Programme

Image: BMW Education Programme

Image: BMW Education Programme

I also learned today that Spanish car manufacturer SEAT announced "the ultimate in 21st Century motor racing – the driverless touring car" -- on 1 April 02007 (report at Autoblog). Another hoax, it turns out, but one that strikes me more as a witless publicity ploy than a revealing and amusing play on future expectations (sure, I'll cut a clever publicity ploy a lot more slack).

Still, just this week, automotive giant GM announced -- apparently serious -- plans to develop a driverless car (report at The Australian).

Funny the way the line between absurd, science-fiction fantasy and prototype is constantly in motion. Dator's second law strikes again.

Posthuman New York

"If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish."
~Jonas Salk (attrib. by Sir Ken Robinson, TED, Monterey, February 02006)

2 days: New York City subway system floods
Timeline: Scientific American Image: Mondolithic

2-4 years: Weed covered streets cave in
Timeline: Scientific American Image: Mondolithic

300 years: New York's suspension bridges have fallen
Timeline: Scientific American Image: Mondolithic

Image: Mondolithic

Wending its way to me through the US Postal Service as I type is Alan Weisman's 02007 book The World Without Us, described by Bill McKibben (quoted in a spooky animated intro to the book's website) as "one of the grandest thought experiments of our time" -- in principle, right up the proverbial alley of the sceptical futuryst.

The book imagines "what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished [...] a sort of pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house" (from a New Yorker review extracted at Amazon). When I first heard about it, I assumed for some reason that it was a picture book, which turns out not to be the case. But these days a compelling bit of apocalyptic fantasy doesn't seem to be confined to text for long, and in July 02007, an interview with Weisman appeared in Scientific American accompanied by a series of illustrations envisaging the gradual decay of New York City. These were produced by Mondolithic Studios, an illustration and design firm in Vancouver with a strong record in futuristic and science fiction imagery.

On the basis of this work, report the artists, an additional image along the same lines was commissioned by Expresso magazine in Lisbon, Portugal, depicting the city's 25 de Abril Bridge, to lend local flavour to their coverage (see below). It was incorporated into a slideshow at the magazine's website posted 26 October 02007 (and featuring the theme from Blade Runner as background music!)

Lisboa e a ponte 25 de Abril vistas de Almada, 300 anos depois
Image: Mondolithic

I'm fascinated to learn that a feature film adaptation of The World Without Us is in the works, slated for release in 02009 (there's a pdf prospectus at the book's website). It's being scripted by Michel Fessler (March of the Penguins) and directed by Jacques Malaterre, who made a three-part documentary series called A Species' Odyssey (review) about the evolution of humanity.

I'll reserve judgment on all this until I actually get a chance to read the book, but I want to say I find The World Without Us phenomenon interesting for two reasons.

The first is the fact that this "thought experiment", though initiated in text, simply begs to be manifested visually. Regular readers of t.s.f. will be thoroughly unsurprised that I see here an example of my usual contention; that good quality futures thinking wants to be more visual and visceral than it has been hitherto. This is the way to get through to people. I hope, of course, that the film version manages to deliver on the tantalising promise suggested by these eerily beautiful images dreamed up by the artists at Mondolithic. What impact the film might have, if any, I can't really say anything meaningful about for now.

The second point I want to make -- as much a bookmark for my own future reference as anything -- is that, while addressing what may seem a rather morbid theme, its popularity suggests a resonance with what I see as our contemporary mood of pop existentialism, associated with big-picture threats such as climate change. (The book has spent several months on the NY Times best seller list, and is currently #25.) I can't do justice to this line of thought here, but in short (and contrary to the pejorative reading it may invite -- "we're narcissistically obsessed with our own demise"), I wonder if this couldn't more helpfully be regarded as positive evidence of a sort of coming of age. There may be, it seems to me, a long delayed and long denied -- especially in callow Western culture -- collective realisation of our species' mortality, akin to the experience each of us has in our childhood or youth of awakening to the prospect of our own death, out there on the horizon. It's the same thing I think about when I consider Jared Diamond's bestselling book Collapse -- that these kinds of salutary thoughts are gaining currency might be seen as signs of emerging maturity.

Maybe.



(From the movie outline:)

Given the rapidly increasing human population and the phenomenal reach of our technologies, humankind has been become a real force of nature. Human activities have shaped our planet for better or for worse. We are involuntarily changing the climate; alerting, polluting and eradicating ecosystems; and driving evolution as other organisms struggle to adapt to a new human-made world. So, what if humankind suddenly vanished?