On Friday I opened and closed the Futurity Long Conversation event at Transmediale10, a 9 hour marathon conversation event, by introducing a new theory of time (‘Geek Time’) and unpicking the Transmediale theme of Futurity.
Opening the Futurity Long Conversation
With my tongue only slightly in my cheek, I started by introducing a new theory of time, ‘Geek Time’.
Geek Time is when everything imaginable is instantanly available at a single click. In Geek Time no one decides on the end of a story before putting pen to paper. They start in the middle and move backwards and forwards, editing, recombining. Now the future arrives in new releases and new versions, nothing is totally new, there is only code that is reworked and rewritten. Chatting with David Link, he pointed out that debugging is a continuous process of back fixes, and so Geek Time (aka Version Time) is a totally different way to get to the future than through grand visions and linear progress.
Technology shapes our world and sense of time, just as religion has in the past. Centuries ago, clocks in town squares created a shared sense of time and led to our sense of the ‘public’. More recently, train timetables led to standard national time and ultimately to timezones and the globalised world. Futurologists would tell us Geek Time is rewiring our world once again.
I also wanted to unpick the Transmediale theme of Futurity. Today, we are obsessed with the future, with predictions, and visions of unending and unstoppable technological progress.
It is hard to believe simple predictions of technological progress. There is a famous essay by Walter Benjamin, in which he describes the Angel of History blown along by the wind of progress, looking backwards in horror at the rubble and wreckage of history piling up behind. I gave a twist to this image, as today the Angel of History is looking towards the future, its face frozen in horror at the rubble and wreckage of the future piling up before it – mountains of waste, polluted air, melting glaciers.
The aim of FutureEverything is to ‘bring the future into the present’, we are less interested in futurology and proclamations on the future. To ‘bring the future into the present’ means to give an experience of the future. We ask artists and designers to create projects that enable people to experience today an aspect of a possible future. These are playful experiments that allow us to inhabit the future today. They are seeds, grafting possible futures onto the here and now. Walter Benjamin said that the way to brush history against the grain is to “give an experience of the past”. Similarly, we “give an experience of the future” to break us out of the continuum of the present.
An example is our Environment 2.0 project with the Met Office in 2009. This involved experiments in new participatory ways of observing the environment seeking to generate mass participation in environmental monitoring. One project involved bubble blowing games to measure air flow and the urban heat island phenomenon simultaneously across the city, giving the Met Office access to datasets they could not collect in any other way. There was a big vision, that we could collaborate together to create a global observatory of one billion eyes. But the projects themselves were more small and humble, aiming to try things out and sow a seed.
Our current project involves seeking the make Manchester the UK’s first Open Data City. In this the stakes are higher, as we are no longer only experienting and trying things out. Here we are leading policy and technology development, and have to access that there will be real outcomes and implications we cannot control, both good and bad. Bringing the present into the future is more than a game, and once the genie is out of the bottle there is not putting it back.
I ended my part of the Futurity Long Conversation with an anecdote on weather forecasting, which was an interest of my partner in the conversation, David Link. The Environment 2.0 projects were weather dependent. I had a direct line to the chief forecaster at the Met Office, and was fed regular updates from different climate models. I interpreted these and wrote regular updates on the FutureEverything website. One of the senior scientists at the Met Office had already agreed to work as an artist on the project. I asked my Met contact if I was a weather forecaster now, and he told me that yes I was. So now I have “weather forecaster” on my CV.
A weather forecaster is like a futurologist. They make predictions on the future based on information from various models. Bringing the future into the present is different. It goes to the heart of the FutureEverything ethos, which is social change.
I was master of ceremonies for Transmediale’s Futurity Long Conversation. It was a long day for me, opening the event, and then closing it 9 hours later. Overall it was a great event, and an inventive format that was new to me. It aimed to create a more open ended way of addressing the future and the challenges we face, to force us out of our slumber. Overall I am undecided how successful it was … time will tell.
The Futurity Long Conversation event at Transmediale10 was in Berlin on Friday 5 Feb 2010.