What Does the Future Hold ?

ps: By David Shrigley, from his new book ‘What the Hell Are You Doing?‘

Transient Landscapes

Transient Landscapes, a simple but amazingly beautiful installation, by Lindsey Housden and Yoko Seyama, at the STRP festival. We couldn’t pull the boy out of the room, so playful and engaging it was.

ps: The slice of this experience also went to my aman_geld.

Blue Light Cat

I wrote earlier how kids played with this installation, but didn’t tell what this installation was about. It was in fact a giant Cat made out of the beams of light and floating in the air (I guess, the Cheshire Cat was somewhat an inspiration, but heavily mixed with the Blue Caterpillar). And yes, it was meowing like the Alice’s pig.

Glow’10

I just realized that I hardly posted about the Glow festival that was held in Eindhoven; shame on me, it was, in fact, quite a remarkable event, and we enjoyed both the art-works and the general atmosphere.

Perhaps the only exception was this unbelievably pompous, Persian-style huge installation on one of the streets. But that’s ok, one piece can be off. And funny enough, I realized that I more often write about the things I don’t like than about those ones I do. Oh, well.

Living in the Cloud conference at the STRP Festival

The Most Massive Star in the Universe

Mystery Speech to Trick the Tricksters

In my previous posting about the Ideefiks seminar I wrote that ‘design does not exist’ (as if it is a common knowledge), and only then realized that I used this phrase in the presentation that I didn’t describe here – yet. In my own mind the sentence is almost a cliche by now, yet it’s not even present in this ‘blogging space’; a typical case of the ‘futures not evenly distributed’. Time to catch up with the mind’s futurescapes.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to speak at a mini-conference titled Blow Up the Cover Up, which itself was a ‘back cover’ of a week-long program Tricksters Tricked in the Vanabbe Museum in Eindhoven. Speaking broadly, the program was about different strategies of identity (de)construction, and included a range of art installations, performances and interventions.

For the last event of the program Hadas Zemer and Freek Lomme, its co-curators, invited Michel de Boer, identity designers from Rotterdam and Jonas Staal, a Dutch artist-activist (who also participated in the art program with his new project Art/Property of Politics). In some sense, they couldn’t select two more polar presenters: Michel represented a classical design approach to identity creation (he created a large number of designs for both businesses and governmental organizations alike; every person in the Netherlands knows at least one of his creations, identity design of the country’s police cars). Lately he’s been also involved in numerous design projects abroad, for example, he helps to design ‘identity’ for an entire country of South Korea.

Jonas makes his art to mix, re-mix, confuse and eventually blow up existing identity structures. In his presentation he told about his most recent project, Post Propaganda (pdf 1, pdf 2), where he explores art potential of political posters, and political power of art provocation.

The conference’s program also announced a third participant, described as a ‘mystery speaker’. Well, as I have suddenly discovered just a few days before the conference, it was me. I was supposed to present something that would “elevate the discussion to another dimension” (phew!) /me is always ready to elevate something to another dimension, as a matter of fact.

But the guys invited me (perhaps deliberately) so shortly before the talk that I hardly had any time to prepare anything thoughtful. Plus, I was actually very busy with preparing our own game about Cities of Happiness), so I was almost forced to be spontaneous and improvise full-steam. The slides were inevitably prepared in a rush, and the story is very raw, so I treat it as a stub, and plan to work it out further later.

I decided not to tell a grand story, with a predefined meaning and ‘morale’, but instead play a mini-game, to show a few (visual) pieces, out of which the audience could assemble their own ‘puzzle’. Since the theme of the conference was about identity and its (mis)(re)presentations, I also decided to make my story a bit auto-biographical and self-referential. In case of my readers’ interest, the slides can be now seen on SlideShare (click the picture below); I added a few notes to otherwise entirely pictorial presentation.

NB: I was later told that my story is way too complex to tell in 20 or so min I was given, and that it should be split into 6-7 different stories, each of 20-30 slides. But I tend to think that it was not so bad, especially for the stub executed in a mystery speech genre. Next time better (or rather more mysterious).

Ideefiks Seminar in U Twente

Last Friday I went to the Ideefiks Lustrum seminar held by the Center for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science (CEPTES) of the University of Twente. I learned about the event via my recent Facebook ‘friendship’ with Peter-Paul Verbeek, the Center’s director (and it was a pleasure to meet and thank him in person at the event). I didn’t know all the background behind the gathering, but as I discovered it was a celebration of the Center’s 25th anniversary, and quite a memory-able event, with a lot of alumni members of the center in the audience.

Despite the importance and Big Number date, the seminar’s atmosphere was quite homey, almost intimate. I guess, the majority of the people there knew each other, and most likely for years – which also meant that the debates and discussions may go bit deeper than at an average conference of that kind. The first presentation was by Søren Riis, Danish philosopher currently affiliated with Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. His talk was about Martin Heidegger, and how his ideas can help us to better understand the future of… biotechnology (!) (the ‘ultimate technology’ of the future, as believed by Søren.

It was a very thoughtful talk, the one that requires more serious thinking than the average powerpoint slideshow implies. I can’t agree with some of the Søren’s arguments, to discuss some others I would need to (re-)read both Heidegger’s work and some other texts, but in general it was a very thought-provoking presentation. I took the pictures of almost all of his slides, and in case of interest the readers of this blog can find them in my set on Flickr (Ideefix Seminar) .

The second presentation was by Peter-Paul Verbeek; he wasn’t supposed to talk, and had to replace Arie Rip at the last moment.

But I personally think it was excellent a replacement! (Don’t want to say anything bad about Arie, I am sure his story would be great too, but I found the P-P V’s take most appropriate for such an event.) It was an excellent overview of the evolution of approaches (‘turns’, as he called them) in the philosophy of technology during last 25 or so years. A very informative story, also concluded by his views of ‘what’s next’. According to the speaker, the next turn after the ‘ethical’ one will be ‘anthropological’, with a focus on ‘accompanying technology’ rather than ‘assessing’ it. I was in particular delighted with the request to reflect on the role of design in this whole process (and of course I couldn’t resist to share my ‘insider information’ about design, the fact that in fact ‘design doesn’t exist’ . Which lead to an interesting – albeit short – discussion about the role of philosophy for the discipline of future studies.

The last presentation, by Hedwig te Molder from the Wageningen University was, well, interesting, yes, but not so refreshing for me; I just knew quite well the subject she was talking, discourse analysis (of the communities, in her case). For me that was a daily life for many years in the past, moreover, I also saw the problems (or rather ‘issues’) with this approach when applied in real-life business situations. But it was good story anyway, and nicely complementing the other two.

All in all, a great afternoon, and a lot of food for thought. We also discuss with P-P V that I may come one day, and present one of my own stories, for example, about exploring possible futures by design, in a form of guest lecture.

Childish Playing with Light

Kids, as usual, went into all these lighting installations (part of Glow Festival) without any fears and concerns, inventing own mini-games on a fly.

Adults were standing aside, appropriately exclaiming ‘nice’ and ‘wow’ from time to time, but without any intentions to engage or interact, as usual too.

City Walking Games

We saw this large city map in the Ludwig Forum in the German city Aachen, where we went to look at the West Arch exhibition. It was amazing to observe how readily people start playing with this map, looking for their own houses, or places of where they work, how they tracked their usual routes in the city on this map.