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Thank you, Jessica.
It's great to be here.
As this is a sermon of the future, I thought I should
start with an image of an angel--
more on her later.
I'm going to do two things.
I'm going to give a meditation on the future and time, and
I'm also going to explore so various different methods and
approaches for doing the future.
I'm going to look at a number of things from design fiction
to a number of different approaches, and I'm going to
explore how spaces like this can be places where we can
experience and experiment in the future.
But I first have to confess.
I personally have a slightly troubled
relationship to the future.
I've spent most of my professional life working
towards a bottom-up people's renaissance.
But our future was stolen.
What we got instead was Lehmans Brothers and the NSA.
But actually, we get both of these
futures at the same time.
The future is Janus-faced.
And what that tells us is that we really need to rethink what
the future is and how we understand the future.
The future itself is a cultural artefacts.
A lot of our images on the future were actually formed in
the Cold War.
They were part of the battle for minds and
ideas in the Cold War.
And some of the big ideas through which we make sense of
the future we now question.
Progress, for example, is questioned.
We understand that capitalism needs to open up new spaces of
meaning for it to serve its endless need for new markets.
And the future's very much a part of that.
The apocalypse.
We could say that the climate apocalypse has already
arrived, and what do we get?
Adaptation, managerialism, more of the same.
And then those two twin classic ways of understanding
the future or facing the future--
utopia and dystopia.
And what fascinates me is that quite often we get those at
exactly the same time.
So the future's not what it used to be.
Progress led nowhere.
The avant-garde is over.
After the apocalypse came adaptation, and utopia and
dystopia are different experiences of the same thing.
So we need new ways to think about, imagine,
and create the future.
For me, one of the most powerful images about history
comes from Walter Benjamin.
And he posed the idea or the image of the angel of history
gazing over its shoulder aghast at the wreckage of the
past piling up behind it.
And the metaphor was supposed to convey that we're frozen
into inaction by the wreckage of the past.
Well, you could say that today we're frozen into inaction by
the wreckage of the future piling up in front of us.
We look at aghast at predictions of climate change.
And what do we do?
We're frozen to inaction.
So who might be the angels of futurity?
This is Chelsea Manning, formally
known as Bradley Manning.
I would say she and people like Edward Snowden, they're
the true agents of the future today.
To understand the future, we have to understand how our
sense of time has changed.
It was with the emergence of clocks in public squares the
we first developed a shared sense of time.
It was the development of railways and railway
timetables that we had standardisation of time.
And this really underpinned the emergence
of the modern age.
Now time has changed again.
All of recorded history is available to us
instantaneously.
We see a collapse of past and future into the present.
Nothing is truly new anymore.
So what does the future look like?
It might look something like this.
Perhaps it looks something like this.
This is an image of how communities and projects
emerge in the GitHub open source sharing environment.
And what we see there is that the future emerges not in a
linear way, but through a series of back-fixes and many
iterations.
So where does that leave us?
To me, the fundamental shift in how we orient ourselves
towards the future is a strategic one.
For me what I'm interested in is less predictions of the
future but the sense that the future is all around us, and
the future is what we make.
These two quotes, perhaps more than anything, have influenced
my thinking of the future.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." "The
future is already here--
it's not evenly distributed."
So what are these statements?
How do we interpret them?
Well, we could interpret them as design principles--
design principles for critical future-making.
And there's many others.
I particularly like this from Jamais Cascio, who's looked at
how we've changed our view of history.
We used to view history in terms of the
deeds of great men.
Now we understand we have to look at
the history of everybody.
And he asks, what might a people's history of
the future look like?
Another idea comes from Scott Smith--
the idea we have to contest what he
calls flat pack futures--
the kind of futures you might find in the marketing brochure
of a corporation.
There's other ideas, as well-- the idea of participatory
futures, of questioning, imagining, making futures
together, and the idea that the future might
be a cultural practise.
So what about methods?
This brings me on to festivals.
I'm on a festival.
And in that festival, it's conceived as a laboratory--
a laboratory for testing,
experimenting, imagining futures.
But why festivals?
Festivals are spaces we come together to
experience new things.
Festivals bring together communities of artists,
passionate amateurs.
They're places where the exceptional is every day.
They're safe places to experiment and
safe places to fail.
So we use the festival as a space to experiment, and we
develop methodologies.
We've got a Festival As Lab toolkit.
We publish these.
We collaborate with universities.
We learn from them.
We share our insights.
And there's a number of methods that we draw on.
We join a number of different approaches to prototyping,
whether that's from critical design, tactical urbanism.
There's a lot of different disciplines that use rapid
prototyping, artworks, media sketches to read and design
the future.
Now, some of the approaches there are fairly conventional.
It's about developing scenarios.
And it's about using ethnography to see how people
inhabit those.
But there's also distinctive aspects of it.
There's distinctive methods we're bringing in, such as a
Wizard of Oz approach to computing, which is a way to
prototype fictional future technologies.
We also draw on design fiction.
We heard from [INAUDIBLE]
[? Jane ?], who's certainly a, if not the leading
practitioner in that space.
And in design fiction, the future becomes a tool to
critically interrogate the present.
Very powerful.
Also the idea of living labs, the idea of taking research
out of the laboratories doing it in the wild.
Well, why not in the space of a festival?
Again, an inspirational quote to me--
the idea that somewhere, something incredible is
waiting to be known.
So festivals are in constructed spaces where we
can create experiments and see how they invoke.
They are spaces where serendipity can emerge and the
unexpected can emerge.
And then also we see how, as an aspiration, we see how art
practice is changed.
Increasingly artists don't just make artworks, they build
tools that they use and that other people use--
open source tools on which they collaborate.
Well, for people interested in the future, isn't that what we
should be doing too--
building tools, open source tools, for other people to
create and invent with?
So festivals.
OK.
So they're very interesting methods, but why a festival?
Why do that in a festival?
As I say, festivals bring together interesting people.
They bring together communities who want to create
and experiment and explore.
But why a festival?
Well, it's one to that question, we can go back in
time-- back in history.
The Russian critic Bakhtin looked at mediaeval
carnivals--
for example, the Feast of Fools.
And in these carnivals what would happen is that social
norms would be turned on their head for a day.
So a King would be a pauper, a pauper would be a king.
But Bakhtin argued that these are actually powerfully
creative events, when alternate
worlds were made real.
Well, what if we could turn that into a design method?
So the canivalesque.
It's a temporary space and moment using humour and chaos
to subvert social norms and liberate new ideas.
But still, festivals, today at least,
they're about lost weekends.
They're about having fun.
Well, Heidegger argued that something similar was actually
fundamental to who we are as human beings, as standing out
at the surface of life's contingencies to allow
contemplation of being.
Well, maybe festivity is something similar, something
where we can come together to have a shared experience of
what it is to be human but also to
explore possible futures.
So to give you some examples of the kind of
projects we've done--
so the one we're working on right now is a pop-up future
city in Manchester.
But just to run through some past ones.
We've recently been collaborating with the BBC on
a very ambitious project, which can only be described as
a possible future.
We're certainly not there yet.
The idea of the digital public space is a vision that all of
recorded human heritage and culture can be made freely
available for everyone to access, explore, remix, and
create with.
So I'm thinking about the archives of
broadcasters of museums--
everything that's been captured and produced by a
human that can be captured and made available online.
So the Space was a prototype for digital public space.
And we worked on that project and we worked with the artists
group Blast Theory in a festival where we experimented
with prototype interfaces, user interfaces to a digital
public space.
We had performers in the streets of
Manchester and online.
We were streaming live.
And we were experimenting in how a digital public space
could be made real through artwork involving artists and
participants.
Now, that's was the kind of project
that fits in a festival.
Other things we've done might not.
We've also done a lot of work around open data.
So we've used the space of a festival to bring a community
together to lead to change in policy.
It led to the formation of the Greater Manchester Datastore,
and an open data community.
So the festival is a space where we come together, we
experiment, we look at prototypes.
But then coming out of that can be new policy, new
infrastructure.
And then a recent project we did was about surveillance.
And in this project, we recorded the private
conversations of people in the conference, people like you.
And we transcribed them and we published
them indelibly online.
And this was a prototype looking at
a near future scenario.
Again, this one's certainly a dystopia.
The idea that--
I mean, we're familiar with Google Street View and how
that captures incidental happenings on the street and
publishes them.
And now we've got Google Glass coming downstream.
So how far is it away from our private conversations being
captured and published indelibly online?
And we thought one way to experiment, to question that
possible future, is to prototype it.
So we had an artwork, and our audience, our festival
audience who've been coming for 18 years now and trust us
to be lab rats in our experiments, signed up for
this experiment and had their private conversations
transcribed forever online.
And the interaction around that was like the kind of
interaction you get when you sign up for an online service.
So people signing up to this experiment got access to an
exclusive lounge.
That's exactly how online services work.
If you want to access this service, you have to give away
your private data.
And then with those participants, we explored that
potential future, that possible future.
And one quote from a participant was, this is like
kissing while being watched.
Now, Walter Benjamin argued that if we want to wrest the
future from the present, we have to blast apart empty,
homogeneous time.
The last artwork I'll show you is a transparency grenade by
Julian Oliver that sought to do just that.
This is an artwork, but also a real functioning device.
And this is a device intended to increased transparency in
corporate boardrooms.
This is a device you can take into a boardroom, a meeting,
in your suitcase, and if you hear of something that you
feel the public should know about, you can pull the pin,
and it instantly publishes the contents of every screen of
every laptop on the local network.
[LAUGHS]
So that's an example of blasting a past homogeneous
empty time, but I want to leave the last word for our
angel of futurity.
So Chelsea Manning and others like her have
really led by example.
And they show us that the future is what we make.
But they also teach us that the future is Janus-faced.
Thank you very much.