Our show is currently up at the RCA! Come around or find some more documentation on pohflepp.com and hi-res images on Flickr.
Model of a Lightning Harvester
Stuart Packer as Douglas Arnd
Plus: Growth Assembly, a project in collaboration with Daisy Ginsberg
The Golden Institute
The Golden Institute for Energies is a think tank from an alternative reality where Jimmy Carter had defeated Ronald Reagan in the US election of 1981. The Institute, located in Golden, Colorado and headed by the prolific Douglas Arnd had been formed to pursue Carter’s energy policies and focussed heavily on devising alternative sources of power for the United States. Equipped with virtually unlimited funding, it quickly grew to be the earthbound equivalent of NASA. Its research and developments ranged in scale from manipulating the planet and its climate to the national economy and consumer products. Often called eccentric or megalomaniac by his contemporaries, Arnd’s grand visions and Golden’s projects have in fact extensively shaped the world of today.
Originating in research about the relationship of technology and idealism, this project takes the technique of future scenarios and attempts to turn it towards the past. In a realm which usually focusses on the future, this offers the opportunity of imagining what the present and its challenges would be like if different decisions had been made in the past and asks how a Western society could be transformed. The vast scale of some proposals echo the Cold War, but are in fact surprisingly similar to what some thinkers are demanding today in order to combat global warming. Lastly, the project reflects on the method of scenario-making itself, in fact invented by think tank RAND Corporation and Herman Kahn, and the way that designers are increasingly employing it today to forecast technological futures.
More about this project and some images.
Dream Cars
While The Golden Institute is mainly focussing on massive-scale projects, this project will look at the effects their visions had on the level of a consumerist society which has been transformed into being almost obsessed with energy. There is different approaches as which parts of life to focus on, but the most promising appears to be looking at the freeway system and the car. This is because as an object/system, it embodies many issues connected to the question of energy and modifications to it might have the potential to be turned into powerful statements. Apart from that, it is also a profoundly American artifact and scales very well from small parts to nation- sized systems. It’s important to point out that this does not mean designing electric or more efficient cars, but turning the whole system into something which fuses the idealism of saving the planet with the idea of Los Angeles. Think about drive through energy-generation, profitable (but dangerous?) detours and enthusiasts’ modifications of their vehicles to make energy. Goals:
A successful outcome will be a design of objects or a system which convincingly portrays a somewhat disturbing yet positively charged side to a familiar object which (especially in the context of European environmentalism) is the epitome of technology that is killing the planet. Furthermore it might somewhat provocatively ask whether successful action might require embracing competitiveness and capitalism as driving forces in our world. Ideally the work will be easily accessible and make the viewer somewhat insecure whether this has actually existed at some point.
Some basic visual research.
Soft things (with Daisy Ginsberg)
“Biology is a technology for manufacturing,” says Drew Endy. “Engineered genes could remake mass-production and materials.”
The economic and energy crises trigger an explosion in fuel and shipping costs, commodity production will be partially replaced by biofabrication: rapid prototyping where the material is produced by engineered bacteria. Manufacturing companies no longer produce goods, instead engineer life-forms, their cheap licensed products are grown where sold. Shops become factory farms. Large objects take time to grow and are more expensive, small ones more affordable. The rich continue to import ‘traditionally’ manufactured goods from China for status. Hackers have long broken the genetic copy protection on simple products. A thriving community of amateur designer-scientists has since evolved which experiment with the new properties of objects.
The prospect of using harnessing biology to create the world of consumer products might reverse the idea of industrial standards and introduce diversity and softness into a realm today largely dominated by heavy manufacturing. We are experimenting with the consequences and aesthetics of these living machines and materials. Objects for the poor and wealthy. Photographic processes with which to copy traditional objects, or fix broken ones. Stencils made with the remaining metal bits are exposed to media which grow into three-dimensional shapes.
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.)