Present utopias / Ordinary futures
Why has the present happened the way it has? What decisions were taken to develop one technology over the other? What happened to the technological and architectural utopias of the late 1960s? Fred Turner has convincingly shown that California’s information technology culture was built on a sort of mutually sustaining joined venture between idealism and libertarian politics. Where else in the past have been choices that might have lead to alternative presents and how might they be different?
The Present as Utopia:
This will be an experiment in, instead of extrapolating the present into the future, looking at the past and imagining slightly twisted presents that resulted from them. Initially looking at tiny changes, small narratives will find systems, objects, and behaviors that are different but live in a today. They might reflect on the way that things are right now, maybe showing working alternatives and point at the political implications of technology, that things go the way they go because someone decides so.
Starting points: Think about the scale that is to be looked at (read Mike Davis’ City of Quartz since Los Angeles is such a good example), maybe make timelines, look at developments to tweak, create narratives and prototypes and bring them alive.
The Ordinary Future:
Forget about flying cars and five-assed monkeys. The future will feel as normal as the present does. There will be a dash of excitement here and there, but genetic modification and many associated things will not even be noticed anymore. Re-interpreting Arthur C. Clarke on the use of biotechnology: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic nature.’ If the engineering-style approach of synthetic biology becomes a reality, it might be a re-run of the last 40 years of computing. Abstraction layers will allow ever greater interaction and importance for what today is the domain of specialists.
Starting points: What applications might arise from the technology and how would they shape things? How do synthetic systems relate to evolutionarily developed ones? What does that say about time and scale of engineered biology (Julian Bleecker’s worry about the different speeds of technology and evolution)? Create sketches and visualize them before the backdrop of ordinary life.
…
It’s two subjects to look at, but they share the technique of using the present, one looking back and one looking forward. Is that a good thing? There’s currently some overlapping parts, but I’m confident that they are different enough that the outcomes will be far apart by June. Ideas?
(Both images by Superstudio, who have a criminally short Wikipedia entry.)