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.
