future, fiction and cultural design
TRANSCRIPT
a Media laboratory at MIT
Future(s), Fiction and Cultural Design
Outline of this talk
A. Imagining the future(s)
B. Are these futures yet to come ?
C. Experimental media and other
modern forms of storytelling
A. Imagining the future
Interdisciplinary, multicultural teams, brainstorming with artists, designers, creative people from industry, academia, engineering, media to create
unseen representation of technology
extreme and radically new scenarios of technology
sometimes a debate around its implication for society, culture
A. Creating an unbounded vision
Compared to traditional MIT research, few boundaries in terms of topics, assessment...
Exploring scenarios is more important than doing real development or products.
Importance of demos, physical objects or social experience that transport the audience into an hypothetical context and frame the narrative.
Case Study 1 - Display of the future
Case Study 2 - Car of the future
Case Study 3 - Clock of the future
Case Study 4 - Brain of the future
Case Study 5 - Robot of the future
B. Are these futures yet to come ?
A central question for futurologists since their production is fictive therefore contingent (fictum - pure creation - from the verb fingo meaning to touch, form, create, contrive.)
Nick Negroponte TED talk in 1984
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc8Ks6KOySg&feature=channel
Persuasion, retorics vs Plausible deniability.
Usually the future is better, augmented, with some sort of meliorative contribution that makes it different from the past.
A Media Laboratory, like a Think-Tank or any Institute or organization that predicts (tell in advance pre-dictum) or invent (pro-grammare create the rules in advance) is in a situation similar to an author, a storyteller, but with the difference that its discourse should be new and believable.
B. Maybe they already happened ?
Memex, Vannevar Bush, 1945
Atlantic Monthly article and illustration as a medium
Memex is the vision of the Augmented Web ( web 4.0 )
Itself an illustration of the research of Paul Otlet, Emmanuel Goldberg and others
From Sensorama, Myron Krueger, SHRDLU to Put-That-There, G-Speak, Sixth Sense
Gestural Interaction Paradigm
Intuitive interfaces such as touch, pen, actually standard before the mouse (cf Sage lightgun, RAND pen tablet, Sutherland Sketchpad).
Augmented Reality
Ivan Sutherland vs Steve Mann
Doug Engelbart and the ARC ( Augmentation Research Center) in the 60s
19452009
1974
20002010
1968
2008
B. Maybe some are not linked with reality
Engineering, Mass Production might be impossible, does it matter ?
Prototyping scenarios closer to design fiction, sometimes sci-fi, can create fertile debate and controversies around ideas.
Exemples
Holography, Rapid Solidification (from TED 1984 to today)
CNC machines to Food Printers, Organ Printers, Universal Fabricators
Biomechatronics and the augmented body
C. Contemporary Storytelling
Evolution of Public Opinion Crafting, Shaping (Cultural Design)
E. Bernays vs H.G.Wells (unconscious vs dystopian)
Spin-Pharmacist vs Spin-Doctors (predicting vs explaining)
Grassroots vs Astroturfing (natural sciences vs artificial sciences)
Ethics, responsability of media makers and relays vs charm, fascination for fiction, especially when narratives and stories are intriguing, charming, and better than this, plausible.
C. Anthropological Narratives
Like play or creativity, storytelling is constitutive of human culture (Huinzinga, Caillois, Bateson).
Stories are vehicles to gather attention and allow collective goals to be achieved using rhetoric, persuasive techniques and now technologies:
Network effect: from word of mouth to memes
Top-down Cosmogony, myths vs Bottom-up complex narratives
Control/Creation of story systems determine the discourse (for instance in the techno-social sphere, Mondo2000, Wired, Edge, OReilly Media and now Seeds for transhumanist dissemination) and also establishes social order.
C. Collective Response Abilities
Memetic machines
Amplification of story-bits and other high-impact sentences
Economy of attention, Aesthetics of these fictive bits
Necessity of awareness of media construction
Celebrating the importance of stories and critical thinking
Transformation machines
Deconstruction, Parody, Re-composition (Latour) and Re-mix
Open Forum (forae), public discussions, perspective taking
Beyond open-source towards Free Culture (Lessig, Hill) and Free Media
Appendix: Inventing the Present
Open-Source or Public Domain Projects that are released now. Inspiring people to do by giving tools for creation, debate or learning.
Many domains from citizen participation to education to new multitouch interfaces.
Community making and participation is as encouraged than discourse making
participation is a currency
emphasis on adapting to different cultures and communities
tension usually between integrity of the project and forking, diverging
Grassroots Mapping
Fablabs, How to make (almost) anything
Appendix: Scratch
Trackmate
Center for Future Civic Media