Some plans and questions
So now that I am finished with RCA Design Interactions, now what? First of all, I’ve had a fairly good experience at the Royal College. The first year was alright but it was especially the second year, building on the research I did in California in between the two years, which I enjoyed. I feel that with my second year projects, The Golden Institute and Growth Assembly (with Daisy Ginsberg), I’ve been able to enter a completely new field for me, which is looking less at current technologies and what’s possible in terms of media art installations etc, but rather at the general reasons motivations for which technologies do exist in the first place. As Julian Bleecker so perfectly put yesterday, the fact “that there are no inevitabilities and that the future is made from will and imagination” is what interests me and what I want to continue exploring. I’ve been happy about some positive feedback for the Institute, especially from some people I highly regard and also being on Boing Boing, Régine’s post on WMMNA, as well as on several websites.
Although Design Interactions is at heart a product design course, I have even moved a bit further towards the art side of things, creating three sculptural objects, a film and a painting-like collage. That is something I’m happy about, but it does not make it easier to position oneself as I’m neither necessarily aiming at the art-market, nor want to be a proper designer at this point in time.
So where could I go from here? My current plans for the Institute are to turn it into a platform for further research into some of the questions that the work is posing already. Mostly ones about the nature of technological visions, how they capture the public imagination and how that might relate to our own future. I’d be highly interested in having conversations with people who were instrumental in projects related to space flight, ecology, alternative energies and so on, or people who are trying to make similar things happen today, or reflect on them academically.
One question could be what the Institute’s world a few years later down the line might have been like, a United States with several mega-scale engineering projects which have significantly altered the notion of ecology and the abundance of electricity that came from it.
And there is definitely more to it, because there is a spirit in the air that is not so much unlike the one in the 1970s. However, this time it is more out of urgency and we are aware of the fact that many of the ideas that were being tested 40 years ago clearly did not work as many were hoping and yet they partly brought us things like the web, as Fred Turner has shown in his analysis of the American counterculture. In the light of the numbers that people like Saul Griffith have put forward, it is not the time for the small-scale interventions (although they obviously don’t hurt and are also ethically right) that are so fashionable again in media art. I believe it’s much more necessary to bring back that spirit of projects like the Apollo missions to address global issues with enthusiasm and also turn them into an economic opportunity rather then to portray them as the end of western civilization–something that the Golden Institute is hopefully talking about in an ironic and counterfactual, yet serious way.
Where to do that? That appears to be the best question at this moment and all I can do is follow my intuition there. My intuition says: California. I’ve had a very positive and productive time there last year, and a great deal of people who I would like to have a continued conversation with appear to be based there. It may be coincidence, but it may also be some sort of “Utopian current that is jet-packing across California” as my friend Aline recently said, and being the New World, I’d almost add the US as a whole. It might have something to do with a space that has been opened, more or less recently, and which still resonates. I would argue that there’s some of that spirit in Berlin too, which might be one of the reasons why it appears to be strangely compatible with California.
So part of September will be spent figuring out how to do that, both in terms of finding out the legal details but also what future possibilities there might be in working with people, fellowships, residencies etc. I’d be very happy about any suggestions in that area, who do you think could benefit from the thinking as sketched out above and might be up to meet?
Then in October I am going to be back in the UK, mostly because of a show at Dublin’s Science Gallery, plus to possibly do some work with a small group of exciting guys. And hopefully I will be bit smarter about where I want to take all this in the future.