Space, Place, and the Infobahn: The City of Bits. William J. Mitchell

(see my alternative reading list page for more suggestions)

This should be required reading for this class. It is fluid, well documented, concise, perhaps fewer corny one-liners wouldn’t hurt, but in general written with flourish. It is a book about the way that the Information Age will radically alter the way we interact with architecture, indeed even the material architectonics of our daily lives.

Just a few detailed points that direct to Trendspoting:

1) The re-structuring of our library systems. Before attending Konstfack, I worked in the Harvard Fine Arts library on a massive digital acquisitions project. Tens of thousands of slides and photographs got scanned and the meta-data for these images was loaded in a system-wide server that Harvard staff and students could search. But the image database was also partially public, meaning that portions of it were open to a public image search database on the net. We are talking about thousands of years of art history pumping into the cyber-sphere every year. Harvard ALREADY had a massive digital collection, but the speed at which they were converting slide material to high-quality, well-documented, and cross-searchable digital images was astounding. When Mitchell talks vaguely (in the 1990s) about the conversion of our university library system into so many information retrieval portals, we are already there. Harvard is starting a system this year to scan delicate, old books and catalogue them digitally so that patrons can request printed versions be emailed to them in PDF form instead of having to handle the books themselves except in special cases.

2) Galleries and Museums in the future. Mitchell’s view is interesting and unrealistic. This is a classic example of the difficulty of trendspoting art. Mitchell maintains that virtual representations of art objects will replace the need for them in monumental museums. He writes in 1996, and as we see more than ten years later in the proliferation of monumental glass palaces to art all over the world, he underestimates the need people have for to have limitlessly precious objects to admire.

3) Mitchell touches on the potential for humans to become cyborgs (among many, many things) with smart skins, computers that look and feel like clothes, ear and eye and nose implants, electronic circuitry that provides information on what is being perceived. This is fascinating and there are a number of extensions (some more current by Mitchell and others) on this topic in the alternative reading list I have as an addendum to this blog.

Also, it is important to note that as exciting as the picture is that is being painted for us in Mitchell’s book, he has the same failing point that many of our speakers have had in this lecture series… a lack of depth in ethical contexts related to their trendspots. Mitchell glosses over all sorts of very big philosophical and social problems resulting from the rush of technological complexity.

However, the trendspotting aspect of Wall E is far from glowing, or aesthetic.

“Wall-E,” which is set 800 years in the future, has two settings: one is a bleak post-apocalypse of garbage on an Earth devoid of any humans. And that’s the audience-friendly part. The other half of the film supposes that the human race of the future will become a flabby mass of peabrained idiots who are literally too fat to walk. Instead they zip around in flying wheelchairs surfing the Web, chatting on phone lines and stuffing their faces with food meant to be sucked down like milkshakes while unquestioningly taking orders from the master corporation that controls all aspects of their existence. I’m trying to think of a major Disney cartoon feature that was anywhere near as dark or cynical as this.

Kyle Smith (2008-06-26). “Disney’s “Wall-E”: A $170 Million Art Film”. kylesmithonline.com. Retrieved on 2008-10-04.

I walked out of the movie theatre into a dusty New England afternoon in mid summer totally shocked that Disney COULD and DID in fact get away with such strong and unambiguous negative trendspoting. I am not politically conservative myself, I do believe we will turn the earth into a massive junk heap if we do no seriously change the way that we consume plastic, but it was very close to propaganda, with many sacfices of subtly to the theatrical.

“From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind. It’s a shame, too, because the robot had promise. The story was just awful, however. Nice to see that Disney and Pixar can make mega-millions off of telling us just how greedy, lazy, and destructive we all are. There’s no hope for mankind. Hand over your wallet.”

Shannen W. Coffin (2006-06-30). “WALL-E, No Thanks”. National Review Online. Jack Fowler. Retrieved on 2008-10-04.

The director, however, had a very different view of the essential message of the film, one which I find as problematic as right-wing conservative trash talk:

WALL-E is the only one still truly living. And what is the ultimate purpose of living? To love. And WALL-E falls head over heels with a robot named EVE. Now, WALL-E’s feelings aren’t reciprocated because, well, she has no feelings. She’s a robot, cold and clinical. WALL-E is the one who has evolved over time and garnered feelings. So in the end, it’s gonna be WALL-E’s pursuit to win EVE’s heart, and his unique appreciation of life to become mankind’s last hope to rediscover its roots. In short, it’s going to take a robot’s love to help make the world go round.
-Andrew Stanton

This is utter nonsense. Wall E, the guy, the trash compactor left on earth to roll boulders up hills for all of eternity, has somehow evolved EMOTIONS which he then teaches to the girl, who is very technically advanced but is cold and clinical? What??? I respect the fact that Wall E is his movie, but 1) there is a whole lot going on in Wall E that has nothing to do with Andrew Stanton’s misguided notions of romance (for example the dying earth, for example the evil computer, for example the return of human to a sane way of living in relation to the earth, for example corporate greed, for example ad infinatum, 2) EVE is not cold and clinical at all, she’s just professional and edgy… for example, the first scene where they introduce themselves to each other and the sand storm hits, we see EVE clearly become frightened and call out to Wall E, and also clearly curious by the cave of wonders Wall E leads her into, 3) Wall E doesn’t have a unique appreciation for life, he has curious circuitry, a penchant for collecting, and a sense of loyalty to EVE who is NOT actually alive.

It isn’t just this particular quote from the director that annoys me, however, but a pattern of not paying enough attention to detail. How does a plant photo-synthesize inside a SEALED refrigerator? Why would the computer be given an order to never go back to earth when it already had an order not to go back to earth until there was plant life, which should be sufficient in and of itself? How come all those fat and lazy humans suddenly learn how to walk again? One of the things I have learned from this course is that in order to be accurate and useful as a trendspoter, you need to do your research and be precise. Wall E does neither of these things particularly well, even if it is a beautiful and utterly disarming movie about the CUTEST robot (not) alive.

Experimental Geography, a traveling show organized by Nato Thompson, curator and producer at Creative Time in New York, touches a couple of trends in cultural imagination at the moment: the loss of frontier on the earth’s surface and the subsequent need to re-map or re-discover the world through alternative ways of seeing, the force of globalization on our daily urban lives, the migrations of minimum wage labor across continents regardless of lawful boundaries, etc.

http://www.ici-exhibitions.org/exhibitions/experimental/experimental.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

The first difference between it and Stumbling on Happiness is the declaration that this is NOT a case-study book, that case studies are limited tools and not really useful in the study of the future, but instead that the book is an extended personal essay on the ways people blind themselves to the ambiguity of life.

Again and again in this class, we are confronted with the opinions of people about how the best way to situate ones self, ones business, ones research in relation to the future. Despite the author’s arrogance, his narcissism, and his anti-intellectual mini-rants throughout the book, it is refreshing to have the subjectivity of his ideas clearly stated.

I know that Magnus charged us with opening our minds so as not only to be able to see, but also shape the course of future events. But what this book is saying is that is no reason for some of the cataclysmic things that happen to us as a society or as individuals; the author instead asks us to avoid ruling out possibilities just because we THINK we are sure they are impossible, or searching for the causes of events that may be too complex to fit cleanly inside any series of narratives.

This is a very useful point as we listen to professionals tell us about the ways the future can be used to serve economic ends, or Utopian societal ones. And it re-inforces my belief that the individuals responsibility is to observe, to seek to understand while holding simultaneously onto the knowledge that we will never truly understand.

Ok, in theory I follow that, it makes good sense. The fascinating stuff is in the details. Invariably. So why did Henrik Blomgren dismiss any discussion of the details, for example the point that I brought up about oil prices serious effecting the prices of goods from China and India and the Pacific manufacturing islands? I think he was saying that the price of oil is a blip on the mega-trend radar, but I beg to differ quite emphatically. Rising oil prices is NOT a blip, although perhaps the suddenness and its coincidence with the credit crisis in North American and Europe might constitute a Black Swan. OPEC just lowered their production rates drastically in order to counter the fall in oil prices because it has been acknowledged that market needs to respond to a global oil supply that is going in one direction – DOWN – and not in any responsible proportion to demand.

Several other points were raised throughout the discussion period and Mr. Blomgren’s answer was that he was not interested in or discussing the larger context of any of these trends. What he wanted to do was see them in  business context only, information to be used in making good business decisions about the future. In other words, Mr. Blomgren was only really talking about trends that affect the way people make money.

Now, I am going to take my liberal-biased flag out of the closet here and wave it around. I am not in this class for the sole purpose of finding out what will make money in the future, and I consider it unethical as an entrepreneur to ignore contexts that are inconvenient. But I also think that this is exactly what Nassim Nicholas Caleb is talking about when he growls about conservative bankers that lie to themselves and others about the risks they are taking and construct elaborate belief structures to avoid acknowledging the possibility of the Black Swan. Context is not simply an ideological stance of ethically involved business men and women, it is also a creative tool useful for understanding the reasons we make the decisions we do. What I mean by context is, to take the examples given in class, the WHY part of why technological evolution is unstoppable, or the WHY part of why mega-trends do not originate in Sweden, or the WHY part of why the world is moving into privatized health care systems.

Let me be very blunt. I did not find Thursday’s lecture very useful.

Americans are obsessed with cars. I do not think this will change, regardless of the price of gas or the ethical concerns beginning to bubble up in our collective subconsciousness’s.  Granted there are few functioning examples of efficient and affordable public transportation in the US, but even if we could re-wind 150 years and put in high speed trains and subway systems run on more than one track, people in the US would still be obsessed with cars. This is a long-term trend. Or, ‘Nothing new.’ as our illustrious speaker of this week so aptly put it 42 times during the course of his lecture.

What is interesting is what sub-trends this long term trend will engender. I think sub-trends, or rather the business world’s trends put into a more comprehensive cultural context, are interesting to study through the lens of the marginal populations of the world. This can mean examining the use-value of cell phones in village economies in Saharan Africa, or it can mean the different ideas communicated about the use-value of cars in the Western Deserts of the US as interpreted by artists and craftspeople and others living on the fringes of middle American society.

Cars are designed and marketed to the mainstream consumers because the power of the market lies in the NUMBER of people willing to buy a product. Whatever they come up with will then be subverted by the marginal user-groups to meet their own needs, as they are rarely taken into account when designing the newest technology: that is why they are marginal, on the outside or the periphery of events and markets. Trend spotters (as they have been defined in this course to date) do not generally consider these people when projecting their imaginations into the future.

So why do I focus on them? Because I think they are the Black Swans we ignore until we can not ignore them, like the masses of people using mobile technology in Africa today. Because artists and people who work in the arts MUST keep an open mind to non-mainstream trends in order to be able to understand the art being produced today, because artists ARE the world’s best and more efficient trend spotters. I am not an artist myself, and so I can get away with saying this.

That there are hundreds of artists at the Burning Man festival pouring money and time and energy into rethinking the use-value, mechanics, and branding of the car indicates that the obession with personal vehicles in the US is far from threatened by oil prices, despite what the newspapers tell us. It also indicates an impulse to customize the car that may have market implications in the future; as cars become more dependant on computers, it is possible that Volvo or Ford’s main product would be the computer mainframe, and that the physical parts of the computer would be interchangeable.

I am new to design. I am new to blogs. I ran across this design blog which appears to be exactly like what Daniel Gilbert is talking about in his book Stumbling on Happiness (which we are reading for class). It is a blog seemingly lock in the present. It is indulgent, irreverent, and totally focused on one moment of detail in a designer’s life after another. I am only a few hours into the audio book version of Gilbert’s book, but what he seems to be suggesting is that the ability to understand the present moment as fully as possible is the key to being able to anticipate most correctly what will make us happy in the future. This could be extended to mean, in the context of eating sandwiches, the ability to understand the present moment in design as fully as possible is the key to being able to anticipate what will be relevant, successful design in the future. Which could be applied to curatorial practice, which could be applied to medical and economic endeavors, etc.

eating sandwhiches is a beautiful blog, a pleasure to read. But so much work! In a lecture last week at the Moderna Museet, Lars Nittve its director commented on the impossibility of keeping up with everything the art world is up to in all of its corners. It used to be possible, but now with the internet and the de-centralization of the art world and the art market, no individual can hope to know about all the great art out there; there is no way to understand fully the present moment in art. The same can perhaps be said for all disciplines effected by globalization.

I invite to you to take a look at eating sandwiches and ask yourself if YOU would have time to put together such a comprehensive log of details in YOUR field. Is the injunction to be as fully present in the moment possible to fulfill? If complete understanding is impossible, how can we hope to competently Trendspot?

Through a non-disciplinary ( as opposed to inter disciplinary) phenomenological method of approaching the things that we can not understand, by trying to see what we can not see, we represent ourselves, our own agendas and interests in an attempt to meet the Other.
- from On Exhibitions of Informal Cities

www.informalcities.org

Informal Cities was a symposium and exhibition held at Dieselverkstaden in Nacka September 6-8. Its goal was to present different views on the effect of globalization on the world’s urban poor through simultaneous film screenings, lectures and discussions, and an open exhibition. Interestingly, the project was organised by post-grad students at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Interesting because artists are not typically associated with grass-roots efforts to build sustainable housing in Malawi; interesting also because this is precisely the sort of contemporary art I find most relevant both to myself as a curator and to this class interesting in ways of percieving and planning for the future.

You should follow the link to read about what the project entailed, but I will comment on one detail I found especially compelling. The students arranged the room with chairs lining the walls but cleared the center of the room. Instead of chairs, they errected several two-tier, free-standing structures strewn with pillows and grass mats. The podium was a small round table near the front but towards the center of the room. As the room began to fill with people, as it continued to fill with more and more people, everyone sat and squeezed into all the available space and onto every surface. Without chairs to cleary and structurally delineate each viewer’s personal space, we the audience created an informal arrangement that changed as people came and went, as coffee breaks were called for and then discussion resumed. Essentially we were forced to experience the discomfort AND the community of an informal city; in a very small way, certainly, but also in a significant way in a country so system-oriented, so structured, and therefore so isolated in comparison to the teeming informality the representatives from Brazil and Malawi and Kenya were speaking about.